The illusion of safety

Safety is often the biggest justification people use for being rough and hard on horses. The idea that if we don’t square up to the horse and put them in their place they will hurt us. Any behaviour we deem undesirable on the ground is fixed by moving the horse’s feet and chasing them out of our space either backwards/sideways/forwards with a stick/rope/flag. I used to train like this, I was constantly driving horses away from me either by pushing their shoulders/quarters or sending them forward with pressure behind them.

I don’t treat horses like this anymore as I have come to realise it isn’t ethical or necessary. I now focus on getting the horse into a trainable state before we start asking questions and then setting them up to succeed so we don’t get into any dramas.

I have since realised that training for compliance and obedience like I used to can actually make horses more unsafe to be around. I’m going to tell you 3 little stories to give you some food for thought.

🐴 Years ago when I was training with strong pressure the horses I worked with would often kick back towards me when they spooked or exploded, I didn’t give it a huge amount of thought beyond “that’s just what horses do”, it didn’t occur to me their instinct was to kick back at me because I was the stressor always driving them away. I used to solve this by always disengaging the quarters and making the horse face me.

I haven’t thought about this much since I started training differently as I very rarely have horses explode like that around me anymore, however I was in the arena with Dan loose one day. I was stood halfway down the long side and he was at the far end of the arena. He spooked and came galloping down towards the gate, I winced and sort of cowered away from him as he was coming past worried he might kick back as he came past me because my brain was still thinking “that’s just what horses do naturally when they’re spooked”. To my surprise, despite him being really upset and stressed, he didn’t continue to the gate, he stopped dead right next to me and waited for me to reward him.

It seems so obvious looking back but this was a big penny drop moment for me. Why on earth would a horse want to kick back at me when they were “fresh” or stressed if they didn’t find my presence aversive?

🐴 I have a client who has a large 2yo, she was having trouble with her being pushy and hard to lead so she sought the help of a horsemanship trainer. He came out and showed her how to use a flag to make the filly “respect” her space, if she got too close she was told to flap the flag hard until she backed off and they did a lot of disengaging the quarters by flapping the flag towards them.

She did her homework diligently but the next week the filly had a spook, span away and then kicked out at her owner. She had never ever kicked at her before. Her owner expressed concerns to the trainer who told her that the filly was “testing her” and to be firmer. The next time she tried the filly got away from her and actually jumped out of the training space with the long lead rope trailing, it took her 20 minutes to be able to get near her to unclip the rope.

This filly didn’t need to learn “respect”, she was learning to navigate the world, finding everything a bit stressful and was now having a scary flag flapped at her by the person she used to feel safe around and couldn’t understand why. We have since done some work together around leading safely and learning to down-regulate before she feels the need to leave the situation and she is now leading quietly out on short walks off the property.

🐴 My last story is about a horse who came to one of my obstacle clinics, she was a large horse who came in with her eyes on stalks dragging her owner all over the place. Her owner said she had done similar obstacles before and the mare was obediently going over them by the end of the session after a lot of rearing and pulling. The horse wouldn’t even entertain standing near the tarpaulin and her owner was confused because in their other clinic the horse had been walking over it with “no issues” by the end.

What had actually happened was the horse had given up and complied but had such a horribly stressful experience they had created a really scary, negative association with the tarp. So on being presented to it again months later all the horse remembered was how scary and horrible it had been. Every time she tried to even get the horse within 10ft of the tarp she would barge very quickly and determinedly through her shoulder and leave without pausing.

I told her to stay well away from the tarp and we did some work with low value food rewards. When I felt she was calm enough I asked the owner to just walk as close to the tarp as she could without the mare trying to leave and feed her there. We finally got her to stand and wait rather than panic and leave. Eventually she took a step forward and we continued to reward until she was stood right in front of the tarp, loose rope, nice and straight and considered sniffing it. After a few more breaks she walked straight on and was happily searching for food on it, completely calm.

The previous training made this horse more reactive and dangerous because instead of thinking she would have time to assess, she assumed heavy pressure was going to be put on her straight away so she was just panicking and trying to leave.

There is a price to pay when we simply train for compliance, we are not benign to the horse in these interactions, the pressure is associated with us. I want my horses to look to me when they feel stressed or worried, not look to get away from me. If your horse is kicking back at you, running away from you or even going to the lengths of jumping out of the training area to get away from you, please re-think what you’re actually training and what kind of associations you’re creating. 🐴

Pictured is Paul getting to grips with the tarpaulin, obviously not the large horse in the story 😅