I talk a lot about groundwork, but the term means different things to different people. The groundwork I do now looks a lot less exciting than the groundwork I used to do. Most groundwork in horsemanship circles heavily leans toward moving the feet, disengaging the quarters, backing the horse up, changing direction and demanding swift compliance with these things. There are lots of themes around “respect” and “connection”, but what are we actually doing to the horse and their body and how might they be perceiving it?
When I am training with horses now, my main aim is to have the horse feeling relaxed in the work because only then will I be able to truly influence his movement and posture in a helpful way, then I want to do things that are going to help develop his body, not put strain on it. A horse that is braced and tense around you is not going to be able to do this, even if outwardly they look calm.
Most horses with behavioural issues will have discomfort or pain in their body, even if it is just from the bracing they do in their every day life. I have lost count of the training videos I’ve watched where I can see the horse is visibly lame behind or showing very compromised posture. So already we have a horse who is going to find movement difficult, yet we train these horses by asking them to move their bodies in taxing ways and usually at speed, as a slow response is seen as a sign of disrespect.
Disengaging the quarters is something I used to do repetitively in training, I thought it was helping the horse physically, it definitely wasn’t and is actually hard on their bodies. As is excessive backing up, especially if the horse is hollowed out while doing it because he’s having a rope smacked up into his face.
Much of this training is actually creating hyper-vigilance in the horse, they become so focussed on watching you because they’re desperately trying not to do the thing that gets you waving that flag again. That doesn’t sound very relaxing. It actually sounds quite scary. A lot of this training tries to catch the horse out, stopping or changing the ask quickly so you can get an opportunity to correct the horse sharply and make him even more hyper-vigilant to you. Instead of preparing the horse for the ask slowly and quietly and making it so easy for them to succeed.
When you do this sort of groundwork training, pretty quickly you’ll get a horse that is standing, lowering his head, licking and chewing etc, and we can think its great, we have a relaxed horse. But is it relaxation? Or is it relief? Or is it just a horse beginning to shut down? I can’t answer that, but I do see a lot of horses who have been trained in this way who just aren’t on the other end of the phone when I try to open an actual conversation with them. They’ll go through the motions and they’ll do all of the things, but they’re not really in the room with you, they’ve learned people don’t listen, they just demand, and the only way to get it to stop is to comply.
When I train now I do just as much as I need to to get the tiniest try, and then I stop asking, and we build from there. I’m not trying to send the horse into a frantic search for the right answer, I’m showing him how to get there the quietest way I can. When you train like this the horse starts to trust that he isn’t going to be asked to do anything he needs to get tense about, and then we get actual relaxation in work. There is no leaping, or flying backwards, or yanking, or rearing away. You can get a horse to look extremely relaxed and be moving with much more flow just by walking and stopping in hand with absolutely no dramas, we don’t need to be spinning in circles and moving the feet all over the place. We just need to be patient, change our expectations and meet the horse where they’re at.
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