Is it behaviour or personality?

When talking about anthropomorphising a horse, we know that are horses don't have the functionality of the brain the plan out our demise and set us up for how they can best torture us for the day. However, we need to have empathy for how they are experiencing us and how their experience of us can attribute to the behaviours we are seeing. 

We know that when we call a horse stubborn we are anthropomorphising. How I tease apart anthropomorphising and empathy is when I see a particular behaviour I will research underlying neurotransmitters and hormones that would be associated. In the example of stubbornness we can't find associated biochemical activity associated with it. 

So then I go into children’s behaviour and what that has to say on the subject. With regard to stubbornness, children who are stubborn often grow into strong leaders. So it's more of a personality attribute than an internal chemical reaction to their environment. Stubborness might actually be a good thing!

But how can we support this without tearing our hair out? 

Well, a leader doesn't like to be told what to do; they like to lead. However, we need to be able to give the 500kg + furbaby we are trying to ride some form of direction. What do they need to follow our direction? Trust and confidence in the directions we give them. That is why building trust and confidence is in our second module of Holistic Horse Handling Methodology, "compassionate leadership".

Because a felt sense of safety isn't just safe from us as the threat, but also feeling safe in taking direction from us. 

It’s time to take some of that intuition, some of that anthromorphising, and understand better how we can work in a positive way with our horses.