Coloured Australian Pony Stud

Do we interact with your horse in the same way you interact with your dog?  I think much of what underlies much of "natrual" horse training methods actually relate far more to our experience of interacting with our pets than applying conspecific interactions (horse to horse) to horse/human interactions.  Here's why.

Firstly, as far as using horse-horse interactions as a model on which to base horse human interactions, most of these which involve volunatry interactions between non-related individuals, which we recognise as "play", are precisely behaviours that we don't acccept when we interact with our horses, such as rearing, kicking, biting, running away etc.  We spend considerable time training our horses not to do these things. Yet, wild or paddocked horses will choose to engage in these behaviours and especially in young horses, appear to derive pleasure and enjoyment from doing them. 

Allogrooming (wither and neck scratching) is another pleasureable and voluntary conspecific interaction that horses of all ages do with each other and which can be successfully translated to the horse/human dyad (pair) but which interestingly is rarely incorporated into natural horse training approaches, many of which use the head pat/stractch which has no analogy in conspecific interelations (horses don't allogroom each other's heads and not having hands can't pat each other...)

Onto comparisons between dogs and horses.

We call our dogs and they bound up to us.  Mostly, we catch our horses- we walk up to them. We have to specifically train our horses to come to us.   Our dogs voluntarily spend time with us, even when we aren't feeding or patting them.  Our horses don't, generally when we are done with them, they are done with us and walk away, unless we are feeding or doing something that they enjoy, like giving them a scratch.

We don't need to tie up or use leads to keep our dogs with us and to spend time with them.  Sure we, tie up our dogs to stop them straying and in our case we, put our dogs on leads to stop them chasing the roos, but when we want to spend time with them in the yard, we don't tie them up.  Generally we tie up our horses to spend time with them, and certainly we tie them up to groom, saddle and bridle them.  If we didn't tie them up they would most likely walk off and go eat somewhere.  This strongly suggests that they tolerate, rather than enjoying and looking forward to being saddled, bridled, ridden.  We have to train our horses to lead and to follow us, even the foals of extremely quiet and "friendly" horses. As anyone who has raised a littler of puppies knows, puppies will naturally follow and interact with humans from a very early age.

Most of the things we ask dogs to do exploit instrinsic behaviours that are self rewarding, such as fetching, rounding up sheep (chasing prey), hunting, solving problems (searching for drugs, flyball), and so.  Most of the things we ask horses to do are not, they don't go round in circles on their own, they run around rather than jumping over obstacles, they don't canter or trot continuously for hours on end, they avoid dark confined spaces, they don't get into floats and go places on their own and so on. 

Dogs will often choose human interactions over interactions with conspecifics and food, unsurprisingly given that humans have spent 10,000 years applying selection pressures to the genetics of wolves to turn them into dogs.  Dogs cooperatively hunt and raise their food, horses do not.  Dogs rely on relationships with other dogs to surive, horses although evolved to live in herds which rely on the benefit of many eyes to watch for predators, do not rely on other horses to catch their food or water. 

The upstart of these comparisions, because our dogs do voluntarily spend time with us, derive such obvious pleasure from being with us (choosing us over food and their doggy mates) and the relationship we have with our dogs is based on voluntary interactions that we project these attributes onto our horses and in so doing, kid outselves into believing that what our horses get out of the interaction is equal to what we do. 

For some reason we need to believe that our horses love doing what we do wtih them as much as we do and we blame them when they don't as though they are being ungrateful.  The sooner the horse world acknowledges that our horses are our much cossetted slaves, from whom we take almost all of their individual agency over just about every area of their lives, the better. 

It might mean that we come to the conclusion that some of the things for which we use horses for our enjoyment, such as high level eventing, rodeos, jumps racing and so on, are actually unacceptably harmful to those horses.   In order to train and handle our horses ethically, we need to be honest with ourselves and admit we do it because we enjoy it, our responsibility is to do it in a manner which makes it as little uncomfortable, painful, tiring, confusing, fear inducing for our horses as possible.