Complicated Horses
- Maturity. This is not based on your horse’s age but on emotional development;
- Confidence is based partly on personality and partly on past experience; the inability to be successful will quickly shatter confidence;
- Self-esteem is the ability of the horse to believe in himself; if a horse is told he is stupid enough times, he will start to believe it;
- Attention. Many horses spend more time distracting themselves from the task at hand than trying to stay attentive to what we are asking. When they are ignoring us on purpose there can be authority and security issues;
- Authority is necessary for your horse to have a frame of mind where he is not trying to protect himself; a scared horse will not learn well. We must offer him passive leadership, not dominance. If we dominate him, he will not understand the tasks we are asking him to perform. We must allow him the opportunity to correct his own mistakes so he can learn that he did it for himself. He will not forget things he has learned, but he won’t remember things he did not understand;
- Responsibility is important so your horse can feel involved in the training process; if you do everything for him in order to be “successful” you are not letting your horse learn for himself. You can’t always give him the answer;
- Discipline is crucial to effective teaching. In the words of Buck Brannaman, “discipline will keep you from becoming an abuser and it will keep your horse from being abused.” In other words if your horse knows you are disciplined enough to correct him (not punish him) when he makes a bad decision, he will become responsible for his own actions and start to make better decisions. The key is to allow him to be wrong before you correct him, and correct him fairly every time he makes a mistake;
- Past experience is a large factor, especially if you did not raise the horse. Past emotional or physical trauma can be a very big hurdle for a horse to get over;
- Anticipation is often a result of punishment for being wrong. When your horse anticipates, he is not paying proper attention and is guessing at what you are about to ask him. He responds without waiting for the whole cue;
- Hypersensitivity can make a horse so reactive that he can’t think. If the horse is very sensitive and we are careful about how we work him, he will become more sensitive. In order to tone him down we sometimes need to be more cautiously careless;
