Make Me Worthy Of My Horse

proving that there is no learning going on we are simply teaching the horse how to evade. 
Heres a hint about this technique If the horse has to raise his head that means hes uncomfortable. If you have to make the horse uncomfortable to get him to do something what youre really teaching him is just how much he needs to fear you.
When a horse is afraid he resorts to one of two alternatives flight or fight. Push a horse enough and that horse will quit trying to flee and will instead oppose the force violently purely as a matter of survival. If you have pushed a horse to that point you have long since lost any semblance of teaching or communication. If a horse is actively avoiding you in a session step back and determine what action you took to cause that horse to be afraid enough to make him feel that he needed to flee the situation. It may not be that simple the horse may have been conditioned long before by fear or painbased training that set him up for failure. Every time we use fear or pain as a modifier we mortar yet another brick into the wall that horse is building in order to feel safe from us. The longer or more ardently this continues the more intensely the horse feels at a loss. Eventually the horse is labelled as bad and the training level is increased until he either succumbs or explodes. Either scenario means the horse gets hurt sometimes more emotionally than physically. When the psychological damage becomes too great for a horse to bear frequently their emotions are switched off in an effort to cope and were left with a lifeless body that complies because theres just nothing else left to do. This is the same target for most torturebased interrogation techniques the prisoner is pushed to the point of utter surrender at which time they quite literally become mindless participants with no control over themselves whatsoever. Which would you rather stand beside a thousandpound friend whos there because he enjoys your company or a thousandpound animal standing there only because hes afraid of what youll do to him if he doesnt? Which one could you trust in a pinch?
One effect of training principles that utilise fear or pain is that the horse becomes unnecessarily reactive afraid of just about everything. A