Reader: On a couple of occasions I have heard you say that we as riders need to speak the horse’s language and not human language. What exactly does this mean?

Charles: This question has been posed to me before and I think it is a good one. First of all, horses live in a herd and are prey animals with a strong flight instinct. This means when they are frightened their instincts tell them to flee. Because the horse is a herd animal there is always a leader. If there are two horses, one is the leader and the other is the follower. If there are 10 horses, the first horse is the leader of the band, the second is the leader of the third horse, the third horse is the leader of the fourth horse and so on. As a horse owner this means you need to understand what type of horse you are working with.
If you are working with an alpha horse you need to be very clear and adamant in your cues. But if you are working with horse number 10 and you act like horse number one, you will be too dominate for that horse; horse number 10 will not receive your message because you represent too much pressure. Instead of getting that horse to pay attention to you, accept and learn your cues, you will heighten its flight instinct.
What I have found is that horses learn through pressure and release. If you are asking your horse to move forward in a round pen or on a lunge line at a trot, you use as much pressure as necessary to get the reaction you want. If you cluck (pressure) and the horse moves off at a trot, you release the pressure then you stop clucking. If you kept clucking there would not be much value in the cue because the horse already performed the act and associated the cluck with a cue. This is called cue association.
Now if the horse did not respond to the cluck you would need to apply more pressure. You may need to slap the side of your leg or if you have a lunge whip move it on the ground towards the horse. If that doesn’t cause a forward reaction you may need to snap the whip. Each time you apply pressure you must also release it when you get the correct reaction. This way the horse learns to associate his acts to the human’s physical cue.

Consistency
So how can we speak the language of our horse? We can communicate with our horse by exercising certain human qualities--consistency, patience, persistence and follow-though. Horses come by these traits naturally, humans don’t. We have to think about each one and practice it; then it becomes a learned behavior for us.
Being consistent is important when working with your horse. Unfortunately most of us are not always consistent. Sometimes when we work with our horse we don’t have a game plan. For example one day we work on one thing, the next day we do something else, and then we go even in another training direction the following day. This style won’t work for a horse because a horse’s life is built on consistency.
In the herd horses are consistent in their relationships with one another; they never change. Humans, however, tend to be a little “flaky” in this area. One day we may come out to our horse and have really high standards but the next day, maybe we are not feeling well so we might not follow through on our cues and let little misbehaviors slide. Consistency is a huge factor in the language of the horse. If a person is consistent with their horse they can be successful.
Many times horse people get hung up with a training method. I believe it has less to do with the training method and more to do with the principles of consistency, persistence, patience and follow-through.

Patience & Persistence
The second important quality we must have when working with our horse is patience. When we are teaching someone we can’t expect the student to understand the lesson right away. Some people catch on quicker than others; horses are the same way. If you have a really good-minded horse, and stay consistent with the cues you are trying to demonstrate, it may learn them quickly. If you have a so-so minded horse, it might take you longer and you might even get a little frustrated. In a case like this there is a third quality you will need - persistence.
When we become frustrated with something we are trying to do with a horse, we may want to give up. This is when you need persistence. If you watch a group of horses out together in a pasture racing around you can see how they interact with each other. You can see persistence at work. I see this all the time with babies and their mothers. I see a baby playing and being active and having fun; while its mother is constantly correcting its behavior because it keeps invading her space or is under her feet. The baby learns the lesson right away because the mother is persistent. She gives the message “back off! Go play somewhere else. This is my space.”

Follow-Through
The last quality, which is the least used, is follow-through. What does follow-through mean? It means that we are consistent in our actions and are willing to be patient; sometimes we may also need to be persistent and tenacious. In the example I gave earlier, where you wanted your horse to trot in the round pen and you clucked and the horse did not trot, you needed to follow-through so that the horse learned what you were asking. To get the horse to trot you may have needed to move the lunge whip towards your horse’s hocks or crack the whip to motivate it to move. For a horse that has lost respect to pressure, you may have to make contact to the hind quarters; this is follow-through.
If you have a horse that has a major problem trailer loading it may take you three weeks before the horse really learns the cue to load. This is follow-through because each day you are working with the horse until it learns the lesson, has no resistance and is quiet. Follow-through can also mean if the horse steps into me and invades my space I bump its head and neck away from me. The head may bend away, but the shoulders stay in place. Follow-through means not only bumping its head and neck away, so we don’t get stepped on, but also bumping its shoulder over to get the real reaction we want. If you control the horse’s feet then you control its mind.
Praise is fine. We can tell our horse “good job.” We can also give them treats in their bucket; but the horse’s language is consistency, patience, persistency and follow-through.
As always, if you have any questions, please visit me online at www.charleswilhelm.com.

God Bless,
Charles Wilhelm

It’s Never Ever the Horse’s Fault.