The Art Behind Horse Schooling
Categories: Barrel Racing Saddles | May 20th, 2012 | by SaddleGirl | no comments
I think all animals, two-footed and four-footed, have a kind of implicit hatred to learning something new. The easiest learning is unconscious learning, of the sort a baby picks up from its ma. Conscious learning engenders negative reactions like slackness, mental blocks, fear of failure, and fury at having to do something one would rather not. Detachment to learning worsens as one becomes older.
The memories of my child attempting to learn new skills are still fresh with me. Though the abilities would benefit her through her life, she resisted learning them. When she was a small baby incapable of oral communication and deeper reasoning, she seemed to learn new things like crawling and grasping things all the time without trying and without negative reactions. As soon as she got used to communicate orally and think for herself, the resistance set in. It appeared to take ages to coach her on how to eat without making a mess, to potty train her. She would throw temper tantrums, and show great frustration if she was slow in picking up on something.
She learnt best when she initiated something herself. At such times, her enthusiasm appeared to sharpen her abilities and bring faster success. She showed great joy at doing something for the first time, and would continue to do it as if to assure herself that she could indeed do it whenever she wanted. She took some risks that had adults fretting which didn’t appear to register on her at all, like when she started to climb the steps all by herself.
Well, then: just what does the education of my child have to do with the education of horses?
Rather a lot , actually. The perfect approaches to both children and horses don’t vary.
The first attempts at teaching a horse something new will show you its in-built aversion to leave its comfort zone and to learn new stuff. It’ll display skittishness, unwillingness and sometimes fear or anger. It will resist attempts to train it as much as it can. As a coach, you want to keep a sharpened eye on the horse’s reactions to your commands and try to maintain those reactions from becoming extremely negative as much as you can. Be patient, give the pony space to attempt to figure out exactly what it is that you are making an attempt to convey. If you are responsive to its reactions, you will be able to develop a tactic of coaching it without letting it become antagonistic to you. You’ll need both stick and carrot while training: try to make use of the stick as little as possible and use the carrot as much as your are able to. The carrot will evoke better results.
Most horses show fear at something outside their zone of comfort. That fear often manifests itself as wrath. You have got to work very hard to convince your pony that you’re not there to do it any harm. You have to earn its trust the tough way. It’s been my experience that for the experienced coach, a horse’s fear is basically quite easy to deal with. The smart trainer appreciates that fear is a natural reaction, and empathizes with the pony. It requires a shedload of patience, endurance and determination to bring a horse to some sort of mature acceptance, to break it to the saddle, to teach it gradually to walk, trot, lope, gallop or go flat out on command.
The secret’s to break the foal in slowly and give it plenty of time to get used to something new.
Fear, frustration and anger are all related emotions, and not one of those feelings is conducive to enjoyable training sessions. You need to know just how much you can push your horse and just when you want to slack off. Your pony can go from fear to frustration to anger in a flash if you aren’t receptive to its limitations. If you find your horse learns better in short sessions, reduce your session durations accordingly. Your pony signals its fear or frustration by locking up, shutting down or getting temperamental. Quite often, your horse will show positive anger if you try and force it thru some coaching. I have come across one or two horses that exploded into fast outrage, and these horses were the most hazardous to handle. Annoyance can manifest itself in tiny ways , like pinning ears, or in more demonstrative methods like biting and kicking. The trick to good training is to steer a foal from fear or mistrust to calm acknowledgment that will slowly lead straight to actual trust. You need to at any price keep the pony from crossing the line from fear to frustration and further to anger. A lot of horses seem to have their own ideas of what they’d like to do and what they don’t, but consistency will overcome all these obstacles to the extent where the horses soon really starts to look forward with expectation to their training sessions.
Horses are in contrast, like most homo sapiens. They resist most when they are pushed most. They respond most positively when they’re approached with velvet gloves. As time goes by, you. Will see that your horse starts to get over its natural doubts and becomes more trusting. I’ve seen a lot of horses that seemed to be too antagonistic to coach at first; usually, the soft approach got them into line. Soft does not mean puny, though: the experienced coach knows that there are occasions when he needs to crack the whip, generally figuratively talking.
Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about horse fencing