All horses have a point where they can no longer say “yes”.

Think about a time a work with your boss where they have given you a job and you say yes can do, and then they give you another 3 jobs to achieve in that same time frame and you say yes can do but in the back of your mind you think “oh that’s getting tight”. They walk back in with a few more tasks to add to the list and all of a sudden your at your tipping point, ready to walk out. Or on the flip side, an anxious mess trying to figure out how you are going to get through all your work.  

Here’s another scenario: Have you been given a task that you have finished and handed it in only to be told not good enough? So you’ve taken it back to review and thought “yeah I can tweak that”; handed it back in, and it’s still not good enough. How many times can you be told it’s not good enough, with no recommendations on how to make it good enough, before you stop trying?

These are breaking points. You are pushed to your limits.

How well you cope with this kind of pressure has a lot to do with your passion for the project, your personality and how successfully you have worked through challenges like this before. This is why, with our training, we teach our horses to learn, work through their emotions, and to try and cope with pressure first, before we start giving them tasks like doing well at competitions.

A lot of horses with behavioural problems have those problems because that is the only way they have left to communicate NO.

Ideally I would like the horses not to know that bucking, rearing, bolting, biting and kicking are an option. But often that has already been established by the time I start working with them. So at this point I want to know:

• How much pressure they can cope with before they react “negatively”

• What behaviour they choose when they hit that breaking point.

• What little behaviours and subtle signs they give before reaching that point

• What settles them down

Our Training Tools

When we ONLY use negative reinforcement (IE creating an uncomfortable stimuli to illicit a certain behaviour), we will always hit a breaking point in our horse. This becomes an even more frequent occurrence when as the handler we miss our timing for the release of pressure. Using positive reinforcement we can encourage our horse to seek the correct behaviour through incentivising that behaviour with a reward.

At Equestrian Movement we use gentle negative reinforcement through pressure release to establish boundaries for acceptable behaviour and discipline, and then combine this with positive reinforcement for cue training and aids.

This means that now and then we will push our horse for more, but ALWAYS aim to avoid their breaking point by knowing when and how to release the pressure. We most commonly do this when our horse is challenging our authority. So we MUST know what to look for when our horse is about to hit breaking point.

The breaking point

Basically the horse shows resistance, and that resistance grows in intensity.

If we have done our pressure release right and we know our horse knows to seek the release of pressure.

If we have ruled out all other reasons for resistance (ie, pain, not understanding what we want or not being able to do what we want) we have a spectrum of behaviour.

Initially, if our horse is comfortable they will choose to ignore us, or they could also be shut down (read about symptoms of a shut down horse here). There is a very fine line of responsivity before we are putting too much pressure on the horse and they are overreacting. We want to gently find that point of responsivity to find out how much pressure our horse needs to get a response from our ask, without the pressure overwhelming them and making them scared or aggressive.

Just because you’ve gotten your horse to respond to you doesn’t mean that the horse will pick the right response. But getting stronger and increasing the pressure won’t make them choose the right response either. You have to look at your other tools. Is your horse not responding correctly because:

• It’s in pain (IE teeth are sharp, saddle doesn’t fit, damaged muscles etc)

• It doesn’t understand what you want

• It can’t do what you want

• It is scared of what you are asking, getting the answer wrong and getting in trouble or what you are asking it to do will cause it pain or for it to do something it doesn’t want to do.

• You’ve asked too many times without reward or break

If any of these reasons are the reason for your horse to say no, you will push it to its breaking point and make it over react.

We have covered some simple training rules in our training trainability course to help you avoid reaching that breaking point while still getting the behaviour you want from your horse.