How to desensitise your horse... (video).

It’s a common question, one that doesn’t always come with the full understanding of what we need for it to truly work:

“How do I desensitise my horse?”

Traditional desensitisation would say that a horse that stands still when scared is desensitised. However, freeze is a fear response. We do desensitisation a little differently at Equestrian Movement.

• We are looking to just have our horses stand still.

• We are looking for active signs of consent and relaxation.

We propose that we want to shift our horse out of the part of the brain that is responsible for fight, flight or freeze (the amygdala) and in to the part of the brain that is responsible for memory consolidation, problem solving and learning (the prefrontal cortex) and while we have no way of truly tracking what part of the brain we are firing, we can cross reference studies to our horses body languages.

So when we are doing our desensitisation process we want to see active signs and cues of relaxation, connection and releasing tension as part of the desensitisation process. These signals of relaxation show our horse is not in the fear response part of the brain because the two don't work together at the same time.

We then also remove the thing we are desensitising our horse to when we get relaxation cues to start building a positive experience in to the tool and to give the horse the power to control when the tool goes away.

This desensitisation process, in combination with our confidence through curiousity and consent based training builds emotional agility, helps the horse to know how to shift out of a fear state and into an engaged willing state when we introduce them to more advanced obstacles.

We teach them to process rather than teaching them to choose fear instead of flight.

Want the tools to do desensitisation where we train consent, relaxation and emotional agility? Check out our Holistic Horse Handling Program and register on the waitlist for our next round of enrolments.