Coloured Australian Pony Stud

Firstly, welcome to the new members to the site, thanks for joining, I hope we can continue to provide relvent and thought-provoking information.

This latest post is one which I put up on a horse forum last year, been doing a lot of thinking about this issue lately so have reproduced the original post and of my repsonses to some of other posts it generated.  Very interested in getting feedback from others about this issue.

These two terms, respect and leader have been much used by natural horsemanship practitioners in the past twenty years, so much so that they are now commonplace and we use them to describe our horses and their interactions with us on a daily basis. So a horse that won't load onto a float is either not showing you enough respect and is usurping your rightul role as the leader in the relationship, or doesn't have enough faith to trust you as a leader.

But do horses really see us as leaders in their lives and do they even have a concept of respect or leadership towards humans anyway? Just because they may follow the dominant mare to water, does that mean they can translate that to their interactions with us and the myriad of things we expect them to do.

Can we really be sure that a horse can apply the body language, sights, smells etc of horse to horse relationships (which they are evolved to understand and respond to), to two legged humans who routinely expose them to situations that no other horse would ever expect of another horse (having a predator sit calmly on their backs).

By using such terms, are we in effect, in the name of being more "natural" or more humane, actually loading up our horses with anthropomorphic judgements that can still blame the horse when it doesn't do what we want.

The term respect implies a choice, that the horse is choosing to do or not do what we ask because it has a belief about our worthiness to make decisions for it. Respect also implies that the horse has the mental abilities to hold such a belief by a careful consideration of the options, and that horses which are not respectful have arrogantly chosen not to submit to our (obviously) resonable demands.

Similarly, in the human world, leaders are those who we consciously choose; through the ballot box (or sometimes coercion), usually consensus (eg our boss) to make decisions on our behalf. We make determinations on a whole host of factors as to whether we will follow the decisions made by our leaders or not. We can predict likely outomces by applying our knowledge of what happened in the past, we can analyse the positive and negative outcomes of past experiences and we can modify our thoughts and to an extent our emotions to take into account that information. In some contexts we will trust a leader even when it appears their decision will lead us into harm.

But is this what is going on in a horse's head when it follows you into a horse float even though it is obviously anxious about it? Or have you successfully trained the horse to move forward from poll pressure from the leadrope so completely that the horse continues to respond to that stimulus despite the evironment (the scary float) providing quite a strong counter pressure? Is the horse respectful or simply well trained? (What about the new horse you've just bought that obviously doesn't have any past experience of you personally, is obviously anxious about your float which it has never been on, yet still walks forward from lead pressure and onto the float?)

Response 1

You've made some interesting points X and I am in complete agreement about not using force or coercion to get a horse to do what we want it to. That said however, there is very little horse training, whether NHS, the Jeffery method, Parelli, Monty Roberts etc, that does not utilise a form of negative reinforcement (pressure release) as the basis of the training. Is that what is meant by the horse's language?

The obvious exception to negavtive reinforcement methods is clicker training which uses positive reinforcement (food rewards) to induce the desired behaviour.

Being animals which do find pressure on their bodies aversive does allow us humans to condition them to do amazing things in response to what can be incredibly light and subtle pressures and which in a really well trained horse are not in themselves aversive in the way they will be in a naive or young horse who usually trials a lot of responses before giving us the one we want.

My take on why my horses (whether reactive or plodders) lead well, keep a certain distance from me, walk quietly on and off the float and are (normally, though not always!) light and soft in hand, is not that they respect me, see me as their leader, or that I even speak their "language" in any meaningful sense.

I think its because I have hijacked their aversion to pressures on certain parts of their bodies and by reliably releasing those light pressures when they give a desired response they continue to behave in ways that are (mostly) predictable for them and me, which results in calmness and lightness. They have learned through trial and error what response makes the pressure go away. I am not in any way an intuitive or gifted trainer. All I know about training horses I have learnt from people far more talented and experienced than me and I still encounter behaviour problems that I find a puzzle.

In regards to speaking the horse's language I would appreciate more clarity about what is really meant by that. I don't have ears that can signal my intentions or opinions about my horses, I can't snake my head at them, and when I lower it it doesn't go very far, I can bare my teeth but I have no hinquarter to turn at them, nor tail to swish or hold high in play or fear. I can stamp my feet and rush agressively at them, and I can scratch them on places their herd mates do but I certainly can't whinny, rear or double barrel! My horses don't signal to me that they want me to move forward by putting pressure on the top of my head or my sides or that they want me to slow down by pressuring my mouth.

While I think the concept of using the horses' language is broadly useful in getting riders and trainers to consider things from the horse's point of view, rather than viewing them as performing robots and blaming them for everything that goes wrong, I think terms such as respect and leadership end up being a moral and value judgement that imply that horses have insights into their own behaviour and make concious choices not to do what is asked which can very often lead to us believing that it is the horse that is at fault anyway. The fact that the opposite of respectful is disrespectful, which implies a choice and deliberation to the horse's behaviour, rather than a failure of the trainer to install and reinforce the desired responses in the horse is a case in point.

Is a horse which constantly barges into the handler while being led arrogantly disrespecting their personal space, or has it been allowed to do so in the past and has never been taught to lead differently?

How would a horse know what distance constitutes personal space when being led, unless we teach it to them, given we get in very close to them when catching, grooming, saddling and bridling them.