Developing A Bond With Your Horse
We recently hosted a free workshop in our Facebook group with exercises that helped to develop a stronger bond with our horses.
To be honest, I was surprised by the number of people that joined because they wanted a stronger bond with their horse (which I’m stoked about). I was expecting people to join the workshop wanting to fix certain problems they were having with their horses.
And it got me thinking: I have my understanding of what I want in a bond and a relationship - but what do others expect?
What is a bond?
A bond is stronger than just liking someone. But we do have to start there. We have to like our horses and they have to like us. Liking each other, enjoying each others company and wanting to spend time together fosters an environment where a bond and a relationship can be born.
A bond with another is built on social connection and nurturing the emotional needs of the individuals. These emotions include trust, affection, gratitude and love amongst others. As we build trust and feel safe that they won’t hurt us, we break down our emotional boundaries. The trust and social connection established in a bond make us feel valued, loved and cared for.
Training and developing a relationship or a bond go hand in hand whilst also being polar opposites. You can have a trained, well behaved horse without nurturing their emotional needs, and you can have a relationship without our horse being educated and responding correctly to our asks. Training, our goals and our expectations can easily damage our relationship and bond with our horses if we aren’t respectful of our horses’ emotional needs.
Asking our horse to do something that is scary or putting them in a situation that they may get hurt.
Not listening to them when they say “I’m overwhelmed”, “I’m scared”, “I need a break”.
Using force to get what we want from them even if why we are getting it is because they don’t understand or can’t do.
Expecting them to bring their ‘A’ game every ride and be better than their last even when we aren’t as riders.
All these things can damage our relationship with our horse and create undesirable behaviours in our horse or lead them to shutting us out and just performing the task asked without enjoying it.
As easy as it is to breakdown this relationship, it’s just as hard to build a strong healthy relationship and bond. A bond is created through times of difficulty or hardship. Have you ever had a horse that you have nurtured while sick or injured and noticed after they recovered that the relationship had strengthened? Being able to guide a horse through a difficult experience safely so that it becomes a positive experiences helps us to show up as leaders and our horses to learn to trust us. The other way is just spending time together and offering a company.
This is why the workshop was based on small, easy to implement exercises done consistently. This is why we harp on having the same expectations of our horse every time we handle them, no matter how time poor we are. So that when we put them in more challenging exercises or experiences they trust us and know what is expected on them. We stop feeling like we could have done more on a positive note without overfacing them. Because each interaction with our horse is first to build this trust, relationship and bond and then secondly to work towards our goals.