Horse body language: Are they saying no?

Is your horse trying to say no?

We are so often hearing “why does my horse...?”, “Is my horse being naughty?”, “Does my horse hate me?”, “Why won't my horse...?”

This perception and wording of what you ask yourself when you are working your horse plays a significant role in not only how you train but also how your horse works.

If you are trying to find ways to make your horse do something you are inevitably going to come across the argument of who's the bigger bully.

But when you can think of working with your horse in a way where they have a choice to say yes or no then we can start to work together. If we can see that willingness is a yes to our ask and resistance is a no to our ask we can ask WHY is our horse giving us a no (therefore rule out pain and other issues) and ask HOW can get a yes.

One of the ways we do this is by being flexible with our goal posts. Our goal posts is basically getting the yes. And if we can set willingness and yeses as our goal posts, its impossible to come away without a win. Its when we have certain expectations of what our horse should do for us + willingness and yeses that we are setting both ourselves and our horses up to fail.

For example, consider if you are going out to work your horse with the expectation of doing a 90cm gridwork session. You go out to catch your horse and they high tail it to the back corner of the paddock (first no). Eventually you catch them and they are fidgeting and fussing around for the saddle and channeling their inner giraffe for the bridle (second and third no). Then they won’t stand still for you to mount (fourth no). They start mucking up for you in your warm up pulling through the bit, testing and fighting every aid etc. How well do you think your actually training session is going to go?

Now consider your if instead you adjusted your goal posts to have willingness and yes as the goal for the day. You go to catch your horse the go to the end of the paddock so you work on some focus, attention and connection exercises and they hook on and follow you up to the barn. They start fidgeting and fussing around for their tack so you work on getting a yes to put the saddle on and getting them to put their own bridle on. They won’t stand still for the mounting block so you work on getting them to invite you into the saddle. So you can start to see rather than it being an argument the whole way through you acknowledge the no and reshape the exercise to make the yes the goal.

How much different do you think your horse would be by the end of the training session? What about a week of training them like this? A month? A year? How could the relationship with your horse change if the focus of each training session was willingness and yeses instead of task achievement?

Will it take longer? Short term? Yes. Long term? No. If you put the work in at the beginning to set the expectations and the standards it does take a while of you showing up with consistency of your expectations to condition the horses interaction but once this is established the more difficult exercises that become big road blocks actually become relatively easy to progress through.

So rather than getting frustrated, impatient and disheartened because every training session is a battle and you constantly feel stuck, flip the script. Break it down it to small achievable goals, build the yeses and eventually the yeses come easily to the bigger asks. And the best thing is, once this is well established, when your horse does say no, you know their is a good reason and can catch it before it becomes a big problem.

Do you need help establishing focus, attention and connection? Join our free stronger bond community where we give you support for exactly that.

Why does my horse bite me?

Have you been bitten by your horse? Maybe you were doing up their girth and they whipped around and gave you a nip. Maybe you were standing outside their yard talking to your mate and they struck out and gave you a good bruise, much to your embarrassment. Maybe the are constantly at you and hassling you and its impossible to handle them without coming away covered in bruises. Even though they are herbivores that mouth can pack a punch!!

One of our philosophies at Equestrian Movement is “first do no harm”. So before you delve into the training of any behavioural issues we believe it is vital to rule out all possible physical reasons they could have for that behaviour. Working with your horse team of equine health practitioners you want to rule out any pain from:

• Ulcers

• Muscle pain (back, neck, pole etc)

• Gut pain in general maybe from fresh grass etc

• Dental issues

• Reduction in range of movement (for example a recent horse I was working with was trying to nip my when I wanted to pick his back leg up because back pain was limiting the range of movement through his hindquarters)

• Poorly fitted rug

• Poorly fitted tack

Once you have ruled out all these problems, the next thing to do is see if you can see a pattern. Is the nipping only associated with a certain ask? For example, is it only when you put the rug on or is it only when you brush them. I have experienced in my time some horses, though not the majority, I would call sensory. They are particular about the feel of things, some people have called them ticklish. These horses don’t like being groomed because they don’t like the feel of the brush, or they may not like the rug being pulled forward because they don’t like the way the hair gets pushed the wrong way.

Once you’ve ruled this out you’re left with the majority of horses that are just naturally mouthy. Nippy horses are generally naturally mouthy horses. When you see them in the paddock they are biting at the other horses usually trying to antagonise them into play.

They will also usually drive you crazy by putting everything in their mouth!! Your whip, your saddle, your saddle cloth, the brush. Anything left lying around is fair game. So when you think about your nippy horse and what they are trying to say its important to realise that they are probably a very social temperament looking for connection (as long as you've ruled out all other problems such as pain, ulcers etc.) So what they are truly looking for from you when they are nipping at you is your focus, attention and to play with them.

It is important these horses know you are “with them”. They are also vocal and get easily stressed and more nippy if they think your training methods are unfair. They get almost an angsty tension about themselves if they don’t feel heard or respected. They are a little on the needy side, very demanding of your attention and love to be spoiled and fussed over. However, when the trust has been broken by you or other handlers they don’t know how to best express their neediness and can be standoffish whilst at the same time picking at you. If they’re safety really feels threatened they are more likely to become aggressive and lunge at you than run away.

Opening the lines of communication and rediscovering that connection is the best way to redirect that angsty mouthy energy to affection. I also have a little trick for turning nippers into lickers and occupying their mouth which I’m putting together into a freebie. If you don’t want to miss this mini video training make sure you’re on our email list.

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Why we don't teach desensitisation

Teaching your horse to target is one step of teaching them how to investigate scary objects

This might sound a bit controversial but…

…at Equestrian Movement, we don’t use a lot of desensitisation.

There have been plenty of times in my riding and training career that I have questioned myself because I tend not to use it. I’ve often been told I haven’t done my job properly or a horse hasn’t been properly broken in if it hasn’t been “sacked out”.

And this idea that you haven’t done your job right if you haven’t desensitised your horse had me experimenting with it to see if there truly was something I was missing. If maybe I wasn’t doing the best possible job I was capable of for the horse. After some experimentation I still didn’t like the process and didn’t think it was necessary for a “good” horse.

There are 2 big reasons why we don’t “sack out” our horses to “break them in”.

Firstly, teaching your horse not to react to something there are scared of doesn’t make them less scared.

It just teaches them not to react.

It can work for some horses but they really have to have the right temperament. The kind of horse that is already fairly confident in itself, hasn’t had too much trauma in previous experiences, isn’t particularly spooky or easily startled.

Secondly, it can teach them to shut down.

This means that the fear the horse is feeling is too much to cope with. It doesn’t know what to do with it and switches into fight, flight or freeze mode.

The part of the brain responsible for processing, reasoning and learning is switched off. The part of the brain designed for survival is switched on. The 2 cannot work at the same time.

Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself when you’ve gotten a big fright? In the moment you are just reacting and when its over you’ve had to talk it through with a friend or counsellor to process the experience.

There are plenty of reasons a horse could be struggling with its emotional stress response.

Lets face it - most horses have a tough gig. It could have:

• been weaned too young;

• had to live in isolation;

• not been able to integrate and live with a herd

• not had enough time out;

• lived in a box;

• bad experiences with trainers, handlers, being broken in;

• pain… the list goes on.

I’m not trying to make excuses for them, but I am saying that the number of ways a horse could learn how to process an environmental stimulus poorly is profound. Even if it is naturally a confident and secure horse let alone our more naturally spooky horses.

One of our core philosophies at Equestrian Movement is to first do no harm. Harm may not always be something you can see easily. Mental and emotional harm are just as important to address as physical. We want to build our horses up emotionally to be resilient, brave and confident within themselves.

Another one of our core philosophies is to set our horse up for success. I’ve always believed that we are supposed to be the “intelligent” species. We’re the ones who want to ride these horses and yet we expect them to be the ones to figure it out and even reprimand them for anticipating the right answer. So to set them up for success literally means to make the answer easy for them to find and understand.

So if we don’t use desensitisation, how do we deal with spooky horses?

• We teach them to be curious.

• We teach them how to breath through and process their emotions.

• We teach them how to deal with stress, fear, anxiety, frustration and anger so that they aren’t taking it out on us.

• We want them to build the confidence up in themselves first, and then their trust in us so that they can investigate for themselves something that has them spooked and learn from the experience that it wasn’t so bad.

This has lead to our core training principles in our course Training Trainability, where we teach our horses how to learn.

Leadership, communication and curiosity.

When we start implementing these training tools our spooky, sensitive, reactive horse starts to:

1. trust us to look after them and not put them in situations that are going to end badly for them, whether physically, mentally or emotionally.

2. be able to communicate they are having a problem, before the problem escalates out of control.

3. be curious and investigate potentially scary objects. The best part about teaching curiousity over desensitisation is that you can never desensitise a horse to every potential thing it may ever be scared of (for example the bubble machine in side show alley starting up and blowing across the show ring and bubbles popping on your horses nose). So instead you are teaching them to investigate things they are scared of rather than run away.

Desensitisation is one small piece of the training puzzle too often used incorrectly. While teaching a horse not to react to certain things and then to react to other things is an important part of their education, it is far more important that they know how to process their emotions.

Only then can the horse understand how to find the right answer and how to ask questions.

Are you curious about how we work these principles into our training?

Is Your Horse Doing Your Head In?

One of the things I tell my students is that the thing with your horse that is absolutely doing your head in is also why you love them.

That horse that spooks and shies at everything also has a good work ethic and is a people pleaser.

That horse that pushes into you and over the top of you is a perfect trail rider that is rock solid no matter what comes his way.

Knowing your horse - the good, the bad and the ugly - helps you bring out the positives of their temperament and manage those not so desired behaviours. And hopefully somewhere in the middle we find balance.
What's your horse doing that does your head in?

Need help finding the balance? Ask us more about the Training Trainability Program!

Why Does My Horse?

“Why does my horse?”

This was the very first horse book I got as a child. Mainly because my second horse was quite difficult and I always fell off him!!!

And so began a lifelong pursuit of trying to figure out why horses did a particular thing and how to fix it.

And I eventually came up with the answer…

I was asking the wrong question!

 

It is near impossible to know why our horse behaves a certain way.

We often don’t have a horse for their whole life and don’t know what has happened to them with previous owners. Even if we know their life long experiences we don’t know everything that happens to them in the paddock every fall they have, every fight they get into with another horse, every bump and bruise they take. If we send them away to a trainer, we hope they are doing the right thing by them but can never be sure exactly how they were handled. Knowing why your horse is spooking can’t ever truly, thoroughly be answered but asking “how best can I support my horse?” can.

1. Rule out any good reasons your horse has for misbehaving.

Ensure saddle and bridle is professionally fitted. Get teeth checked and kept up to date. Invest in a good farrier. Work with a body worker that has an excellent reputation but then also go with your gut whether you are happy with their work. I have had horses become worse for working with a lot of different chiropractors. If in doubt get your vet to check.

2. Make sure they understand how to process stimuli correctly.

Horses learn from the release of pressure not the application and often they don’t know what to do with pressure and can over react. Ensuring you have taught your horse how to learn from pressure cues keeps them calm throughout the learning process.

3. Be a leader, not a bully boss

Ensure that you are showing up as a good leader by setting clear boundaries and following through on your asks, ESPECIALLY in stressful and difficult situations. This is when your horse needs you the most and how you show up when they are not handling the situation well is the best way a horse will decide if you are worth being the herd leader.

4. Make your horse confident

Teach them confidence through curiosity. A horses flight instinct is self preservation and to get away from what is scary. To create a bold, confident horse we want them to be curious not scared of new things.

5. Prevent them from going sour by changing their exercises and environments.

Repeating the same task every day in the same environment will set both you and your horse up to fail by making them sour on their work. If your going to work on the same task change the environment. If you are going to work in the same environment change the task so it seems like each training session you are doing something new and fresh.

6. Prevent them from going sore by ensuring you’re conditioning them for soundness.

Riding for a certain look or skill isn’t necessarily always in the best interest of their musculoskeletal health and soundness. It is important to understand why you are doing certain exercises and how to use them so they make your horse more sound rather than to achieve a certain look or skill.

You can learn how to correctly apply training techniques (steps 2-5) by following our Training Trainability Online Course - available now! (click here to learn more)

Interested in conditioning your horse correctly? Pre-register for our Green to Self Carriage Course, due for release August 2019. Click here.