Are You Causing Your Horse To Shut Down?
Horses are natural flight animals - their first instinct is to run first, think later.
The old school mentality of breaking a horse is to break the horses spirit, so that it forfeits its’ life to you. Your horse is then more scared of you than anything else and so chooses to figure out what you want from it rather than run away.
A lot of breakers will say that your horse isn’t safe until you sack them out.
What they are talking about is desensitising. I have done desensitising and sacking out with plenty of horses and here is my problem. You are giving them no other option but to let you do scary things to them and in the process WE ARE GIVING THEM NO TOOLS TO DEAL WITH THEIR FEARS AND EMOTIONS. The ones that don’t thrive with this style of training are deemed mentally unsound and untrainable.
In this environment it is very easy to shut down your horse -especially if you are also using forceful techniques as well.
When a horse shuts down it stops reacting to stimuli all together. This doesn’t mean that your horse is calm and relaxed, understands what to do and isn’t scared. It doesn’t mean that your horse is brave and confident and trying to look after you. It DOES mean your horse has learnt that if it doesn’t move when the scary thing is there, the scary thing goes away.
The second problem with this is that you have to reteach it for EVERY SCARY OBJECT.
Just because you have taught your horse to stand still to drape the tarp over it, doesn’t mean that it knows to then stand still for the flappy bag or the umbrella or the pram and then all the new things it will experience when you take it out. You have to reteach it for every scary object that it reacts to, to stand still while you move it over there body.
For some horses, once you have touched them with the object that they are scared of this process works - they are no longer scared.
But a horse that has shut down has dissociated from the experience. It is overwhelmed by fear and knows to just stand still. So it stands tense and rigid. There is only so much this horse can cope with before it hits its breaking point and loses it, leaving the handler wondering “where the hell did that come from?”. This horse hasn’t learnt not to be scared - it has just learnt not to react.
In either case, both of these horses previously mentioned horses have not been taught how to process fear and emotion. Both of these horses haven’t learnt not to react to scary things. Both of these horses haven’t developed confidence and trust.
That is why at Equestrian Movement we teach CURIOSITY instead.
Teaching curiosity works for even the most timid and sensitive horses.
It teaches them to trust us.
It teaches them how to be brave and confident.
It teaches them how to handle objects and situations that they are scared of without just trying to run away.
It teaches them how to investigate things that are scary.
Most importantly, eventually they learn how to look after their human.
Would you like to teach your horse to be curious? You can find this and so much more (including communication and leadership, critical to the building of trust in your horse) in our Holistic Horse Handling Program.