Spooking is a completely natural equine behaviour, their survival depended on being quick to flee from danger. What we may perceive as silly, they may perceive as a real threat. Horses don’t spook and gallop away and then think “gosh that was silly of me”, they think “thank goodness I decided to run, that was really scary and running kept me safe”.
“Spook-busting” type training is very popular, introducing your horse to all manner of weird and wonderful objects within the safety of the arena. These can be great confidence-building experiences for your horse if approached sympathetically, but there are often several other factors contributing to frequent spooky behaviour than just a lack of exposure to new things.
Horses that are in pain or discomfort will be more on edge and less likely able to cope with things. Horses that don’t feel safe in their environment and aren’t having their needs met in their daily life will also be less likely to cope with things. Sometimes when we address these issues the excessively spooky behaviour goes away. But often we need to address those things and rethink the way we are training with our horses.
Spooky horses make tense riders and tense riders make spooky horses.
I have a client with a horse they ride to a fairly significant level in dressage. As the horse moved up the levels, no matter how hard they trained at home it would all fall apart in the ring as he would spook at the boards/decorations to the point he started grinding to a halt. This man is a very accomplished rider and skeptically asked for my help on a recommendation. He was adamant he was so spooky you couldn’t hack him at all and was quite concerned around the idea of exposing him to potentially scary objects.
I did a bit of work with his horse on the ground, tried to emulate a dressage board situation, he seemed fine. I built up to riding him and doing all sorts of weird stuff including trotting along on the buckle while scraping a dressage whip loudly against the wall, brushing my legs through plastic bags on jump wings, weaving through random stuff on the floor. And while he was a normal level of “looky” you’d expect a horse to be, I did not feel any particular tension and he was very quick to feel like he was saying “yeh okay I can do that, that’s fine.”
At one point when we moved some pots on the floor, he came back to walk and dropped his head to look at them, the owner said “aha that’s what he does”. So I sat on him, did nothing, we bobbled past the pots, came round again in a walk, he seemed fine, so I asked him to trot and he trotted through no issue. The owner was baffled and said normally once he’s stopped that’s it he drops off his leg for the rest of the test and is really stuffy.
I got the owner to swap with me and they rode around the objects fine, so I asked to see them walk the horse up the lane. The horse hesitated going out of the gate and immediately the rider clamped their legs on strongly, while not letting up on the contact and started growling at the horse. And there was the issue. As soon as the horse hesitated or wanted to look at something, he was met with so much pressure to go forward that he just got really tense and shut down. Yet when he was allowed to explore and investigate the things he was unsure about without pressure, he very quickly relaxed and was able to work normally.
The owner was logically concerned that they couldn’t have a very successful dressage career if they had to let their horse stop and sniff the boards in the middle of every test. But when we take the pressure off and let horses assess things in a safe environment, amazing things can happen with their confidence. The more good experiences they have, the less likely they are to react as dramatically in the future, but if we never let them look and learn and immediately demand they go where we’ve asked, we create our own problems of tension and anxiety.
This pair are now happily hacking out together every week and no longer have any issues with spooking and backing off in the ring, all by doing less and changing their attitude towards training. How quickly a horse can be labelled as something just through a lack of understanding and communication, we would now label this horse as quiet and far from spooky.🐴
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