Beware of any horse trainer who tells you that they can teach your horse a thing or two.
The key word here is “teach.” The irony in both english and western horsemanship, at the race track, and inevitably, everywhere we see people together with horses, is that so many people are trying to teach concepts to a horse whose mind is not ready, willing or able to learn.
To try and “school” a horse for a specific purpose such as a dressage test, a reining pattern, to jump or navigate trail obstacles while the horse is demonstrating any issue of resistance to maintaining consistent respect, trust and focus for the rider, is to truly put the cart before the horse. A willing horse is a curious student with poised readiness, keen willingness and a refined ability to learn. A trainer trying to teach an unwilling horse is like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It’s the tail trying to wag the dog.
When it comes to developing a willing mind from a horse there is a critical difference between training and schooling. In training we align our bodies and our “I’m going to show you a thing or two” agenda to the physical movement and psychological needs of the horse. On the other hand, in schooling, we expect the body and the mind of the horse to align to us. In some regards you could say that horsemanship is always a dance; and in order for the horses to be willing partners then we must allow the horses to lead during the initial phases of training so that we can earn enough respect, trust, focus and willingness from our horses that they will then allow us to lead during the finishing education of schooling.
Enough Philosophy – What Do These Metaphors Really Mean?
Well, in terms of the ultimate performance horse it means that before a horse can be calm and collected it would need to be calm without being collected. Collection in a performance horse is to contract, expand, coil up and amplify the energy of the horse. If we collect calm horses we usually get more athletic ability and more calm. However, if we attempt to collect a stressed horse – a horse showing any signs of fear, anger, distraction or defiance – then we defeat our purpose in the long run because we inevitably find all that athletic ability working against us as it is fueled by the increased adrenaline created when compressing fear, anger, distraction or defiance.
Another example is the concept of “straightness” in a horse. First of all there is never such a literal thing as a horse on a perfectly straight line, because a horse does not move its legs or its body in a straight manner. A straight line in a horse is actually a very narrowly focused serpentine because the horse moves forward diagonally by driving from its right hind leg out forward “through” its front left leg, and vice-versa. A horse moves somewhat like a fish out of water, and we all have ridden horses that feel pretty “slippery” when we try to straighten them. To begin to define straightness in a horse perhaps it is best to visualize a skater moving straightforward on ice, zigzagging from the inside edge of one skate to the next in diagonal strokes that are pushing away from each other, in a left to right motion, while the center of the skater is actually focused on a straight line. Horses skate diagonally from hind to front.
Transitioning from Training to Schooling
Here’s a simple exercise – that’s not very easy – which involves the transition from training a horse into schooling. Try to ride your horse at a trot in a straight line from one end of an arena to the other end. Now, theoretically, there is no correct or incorrect diagonal to post up and down with while riding at rising trot on a horse truly on a straight track. However, once the horse deviates off the straight track to either the right side or the left, then the horse has also created a degree of bend and flexion in his/her body. Now there is indeed a “correct” diagonal to post with in order to align the weight and balance of the rider to the bend in the spine of the horse.
Ride even one step on the wrong diagonal for the bend and the horse will become off balance and adrenaline will start flaring into his mind, and then “behavior issues” soon kick in as a result. In other words, a horse out of physical balance in the body will very soon develop “problems” that almost always make it impossible to school the horse with specific requests for exactly what we want, when we want it and how we want it from a mind that is working against us.
However, if the rider can read and feel the bend and flexion of the horse and always be on the correct diagonal for the bend in the horse – realizing that the correct diagonal for balancing the horse has nothing to do with going to the right or left, but everything to do with how your horse has shaped his or her body within a bend – then the horse will feel in sync with the rider; and a balanced horse will relax enough to cooperate and allow the rider to ride the bend back into straightness.
This training concept of aligning to the bend of the horse, and then straightening a relaxed horse, is very different from schooling, where, if the horse is straight to begin with, but it starts to leave straightness due to environmental distractions, then the rider tries to keep it straight with blocking energy between the legs and reins; like being in a chute, and not let the horse bend in one direction or the other. If the horse chooses on its own to stay straight and relaxed when the rider says “no, I want you to stay straight” then the horse is ready for “schooling.”
Staying in the Endorphin Zone
Sooner or later each horse can reach a critical mass in its training where it has realized where the “sweet spot” of perfect balance with a rider is – as long as a trainer keeps adjusting to the balance and movement needs of the horse. Once a trainer has aligned to a horse enough to show it the difference between the endorphin zone of being together in balance, and the adrenaline zone of being out of balance, then the horse begins to willingly stay with the trainer in the balanced zone and not need to leave the sweet spot of balance because it chooses willingly not to feel the stress of being out of balance.
Focused schooling for specific tasks as to exactly when, where and how the rider wants the horse to perform should only begin when the horse consistently chooses not to fuss and look for a way out from between the legs and reins of the rider. Once a horse chooses to stay aligned to the rider then he or she is choosing to stay balanced for the sake of, as Ray Hunt so famously said it, “making the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult.” Once the horse has had enough training to choose the easy path of staying balanced with a rider then the student is ready, willing and able to go to school and learn a thing or two about dressage, reining, jumping, trail classes or whatever the teacher wants to show the student next.
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