THE FUNDAMENTALS OF TRAINING A HORSE ARE SIMPLE: Train him right the first time. Build step by step on previous lessons. Start slowly, and acquaint the horse with new experiences little by little, moving ahead as the young horse gains trust and confidence.
Creating a good foundation for future training is like building a house foundation. You want it solid and strong, but if you rush through the basics, the result will be shaky and won’t hold up under pressure.
Most of the problems with horses — the spoiled horses, the ones with bad attitudes and bad habits — can be traced to their early experiences. If you take the time to start a young horse properly, you’ll encounter far less trouble later on.
Develop a strong partnership with your horse, and together you can handle any unexpected situations that might come along. Teamwork enables both of you to overcome any challenges with a strong, secure relationship built on great trust and confidence in one another. And that, in essence, is the hallmark of a well-trained horse.
A Word about “Natural Horsemanship”
In many horse-training clinics and training publications today, you’ll hear or read about “natural horsemanship.” This popular term is employed by people describing their training and horse-handling methods who feel they are part of an ever-growing natural horsemanship movement doing something new and better for horses.
In fact, “natural horsemanship” has become a catchall term for any method a person wants to assign to it. There are no specific natural-horsemanship guidelines to follow because different people will define and discuss it in different ways. They might talk about pressure and release, using a round pen, using a flag to give cues, encouraging the proper response from a horse by making the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult, among many other topics.
The closest you can come to pinpointing a definition is to say that natural horsemanship is working with a horse in the most beneficial way possible, yet that doesn’t tell you much because no two horses will respond in exactly the same way. Any specific method may have vastly different results among various horses. Thus, anyone who presents “natural horsemanship” as a certain, specific way to handle horses is missing the point. Many such trainers and riders interpret the term too narrowly.
In my understanding, natural horsemanship is a logical, sympathetic, and humane form of communication with the horse, a way to interact with a horse in a manner that’s like his own interactions with his herdmates or at least in a manner less confrontational than traditional “horse breaking.” The idea behind it is more a general, overall approach that encompasses a wide range of methods that might work for different horses. Some of those methods might even seem harsh by some standards. However, “harsh” methods might be most appropriate for a certain horse if used by the right person at the right time to gain the necessary communication with that horse, just as the “boss horse” might have to insist an aggressive subordinate get back in line when he tries to usurp the boss’ dominant role.
The biggest misunderstanding, however, is that natural horsemanship techniques are new — an innovation in horse training and handling. On the contrary, these methods have been used by a small number of astute horsemen from the time humans began interacting with the horse several thousand years ago. Today, with the growth of mass-media communication and the popularity of clinics in which various horsemen share their horse handling and training knowledge, awareness of these methods has also grown. Ideas that in the past 20 years have often been touted as “new breakthroughs” have been around for a very long time, but most horsemen are now discovering them for the first time.
The natural horse movement, as vague and indefinable as it may seem, has been good for the horse, however, since more and more people are attempting to share and learn ways of improving the horse-human relationship. One effort to utilize, improve, and define this relationship can be found in the form of an innovative college program begun in 2007 at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, that offers students a psychology degree in the human-animal bond (HAB). The program’s required courses focus on the beneficial relationship between humans and animals and as part of this program, the students learn to train service dogs and therapy horses while advancing the academic discipline of human-animal studies. Additional coursework involves observation of horse training and evaluation of these methods from a nonbiased, scientific perspective. Students discover that many proponents of certain types of training methods use unique terminology to describe those methods; there is no common language.
Dr. Anne Perkins, head of the psychology department and the professor who founded the human-animal bond courses, believes that despite the use of disparate terminology, many of the training methods have already been defined in psychological terms. Why create more and more jargon and keep trying to define these processes again and again and in different ways, she wonders. She would like to have a textbook that examines the human-animal bond and training theory, thereby moving horse training into a more academic realm that utilizes universal terms everyone can understand.
It’s not that horsemen and trainers aren’t knowledgeable or that they need to go to college to understand horses or employ successful training methods; they just aren’t speaking the same language as the people in the research labs identifying and defining these processes. In the field of psychology, horse and human interactions are already well understood and described with classical conditioning terminology that defines positive and negative reinforcement, reward and punishment, and pressure and release. If the trainer understands these methods of behavioral conditioning, he or she will be better equipped to use them, thus increasing the probability that the horse will do what is asked of him.
The horse industry — particularly the companies trying to sell horse-training supplies, instruction books, and videos, for example — is often guilty of trying to make ancient knowledge “new” again. The HAB courses are now exploring something that is fundamental to psychology but that has never been formally recognized in the horse-training field and among horse folk. As time goes on, this innovative program will undoubtedly be picked up by other colleges and universities. This will help to build a bridge between academia and horsemen, perhaps furthering our ability to communicate effectively on the many topics related to training horses.