Generalizing: It’s a Thing

“He never does this at home.”

“I have never seen him do this before.”

“I wish you could have seen him yesterday at home, he wasn’t anything like this.”

Sound familiar?

The most common place I heard these things was when I was doing clinics and lessons on the road, and all the participants were hauling their horses to a central meeting location or venue. Someone would always say that their horse was behaving totally differently than it did at home, and all I could do was take their word for it. I didn’t doubt them.

What I didn’t like, though, was that sometimes the owner found their horse embarrassing because of this. I didn’t have a problem with the fact that I wasn’t seeing their “real horse,” because, to be honest, it gave us (okay, me) some really fun and interesting things to observe, work on and think about. But a lot of times, the owner was embarrassed, and they felt bad. The horse wasn’t embarrassed, he was just struggling. The owner being embarrassed of the horse created a pretty bad feeling between them and I didn't like that.

Back in the day, when this happened, I’d give the owner an encouraging little talk about how probably, the thing we were seeing today, was present at home, just in a smaller version, and hopefully that would give them something to think about and work on at home, and away.

These days, I’d say something different, though I don’t entirely disagree with what I said then. Today, I’d simply say that likely, that horse (and person) needed to travel more.

But let me explain. Horses very much seem to attach things they learn to the environment or location they learn them in. You can see this with simple ground work tasks – if we teach it at one location, say, in our arena, when we go to another spot in the arena, it will have deteriorated some (and sometimes a lot). I’ve seen people work on their leading with their horse in the arena, say, and then have to redo it all at the barn or by their trailer.

It makes sense to me that a prey animal would attach learning to specific geographical locations. I’m guessing it would pay if a horse remembered “mountain lion” in a specific location, or “good grass” in a specific location, or that they got afraid, or were particularly comfortable, in a certain location. Anyone who’s ever had a horse have trouble on the trail knows that they might well remember that exact location next time.

So a big part of helping a horse learn is helping him learn each “thing” we teach him, in various locations. That might mean doing our ground work in different locations in our arena every few repetitions. Then we can do the same work somewhere else on the property. Then we can take him somewhere down the road and do it all again, and somewhere else and do it all again.

We can’t really expect the horse to flawlessly repeat his learnings wherever we are until he’s proven that we can change the environment and he can be “the same”, do “the same” and feel “the same” about it. In order for us to expect them to “be the same” away from home as they are AT home, they need to be given the opportunity to “generalize” their learning to any and all locations by learning and relearning and learning, each time in a different location. At some point, there’s a day, a trip, where the horse basically says, “So this is how we do it, wherever we are?”

So the term “wet saddle blankets”, that some scoff at? Travel is part of it. Not “just” wet saddle blankets, not just more of the same. Travel. Wet saddle blankets in different places. There is no substitute. Generalize those skills!