What is Your Horse Working On?

So what do I mean when I ask, “What is your horse working on?” What I mean by that is mostly “What is your horse thinking about?” while you’re working with him. What the horse is thinking about while we do our work with him is crucial. It has everything to do with the quality of the work he does, how good our relationship will grow to be and whether the lessons we are teaching will stick at all. Sometimes we barely know what WE’RE thinking about while we’re with our horse, much less keeping track of what HE’S thinking about. The horse knows exactly what he’s thinking about while we’re with him, and he knows whether we know or not.

For example, let’s use a herd-bound horse. Say we take our horse out of the field and tie him up to groom him. He’s dancing around, looking back over his shoulder and calling incessantly to his buddies. Obviously, in this example, it’s easy to tell that this horse is thinking about his friends and not about us and our attempt to groom him. In this example, our horse is working on keeping track of his friends and trying to get back to them, while we are working on grooming him. We are working on two different things.

Another example is the horse who is trying to eat, both on the ground or under saddle. The horse who is constantly trying to eat is thinking about the food and how to get to it. He is not thinking about us and the job at hand.

There are more subtle layers to this as well. Our horse can be thinking a LITTLE bit about something, or several things. For instance, he can be keeping track of where the gate is in the arena, the fact that his saddle hurts a little bit, and the fact that someone over across the way is feeding a horse grain. So maybe this horse is just a tiny bit distracted by each of these little things, and maybe it doesn’t really affect his performance in a mechanical or obvious way, but each of those thoughts bleeds just a little bit of his attention away from the task at hand (and us).

Our horse can be mentally and physically working on one thing and we can be working on another thing completely. A session spent like this will end one of three ways: either it will end with both of us still working on two different things, or it will end with both of us working on the horse’s idea, or it’ll end with both of us working on our idea. We have three choices, and how this session ends dictates how the next one will begin.

This is one of the biggest things that holds people back with their horses. People can spend a lot of time working with a horse who is working on something else. Then they wonder why the horse is not moving forward. Well, he is, he’s just moving forward on different things than the human would like. For every session that we finish with the horse working on something different than us, we guarantee that that’s where he’ll start the next one.

It can be easy to tell what a horse is working on, and it can be hard to tell what a horse is working on. The easiest thing to see is his eyes and his ears. Wherever his eyes and ears are pointed, that’s most likely what he’s thinking about. An interesting example of this is when we’re riding a horse and say, bending to the right, but his eyes are rolled around to the left. This horse won’t feel truly “soft” because his mind/thoughts/eyes are not in agreement with his bend. A horse bent to the right should be thinking to the right, so they should be looking to the right.

It can be hard to tell what a horse is working on when it’s very small and subtle, or fleeting, where he does it so quickly, you can’t hardly tell. It might be how the horse is standing, or a change in the feel he’s offering, or a tiny, tiny brace, or maybe a little lateness in his timing. There’s a lifetime in developing one’s awareness for this stuff.

Then you’ll see horses who have learned (from the humans) how to kind of multi-task. They will be working on our thing and working on their thing at the same time. I think this can happen when a person rewards the horse for doing just that, kind of thinking JUST enough about what we’re thinking about to get the job done, but no more. He’s kind of getting by, if you see what I mean.

I think a lot of what people call “disrespectful” behavior or “horsey ADD” is actually the horse working on something different than the human is working on. And he learned that from humans. He wasn’t born wanting to do that. He was born with a desire for peace and harmony and energy conservation. But if, when people started working with him, they allowed him or even rewarded him for working on something different than the human was working on, he’d become that way pretty quickly. If a horse hasn’t learned this, it’s pretty easy for him to offer to work on the same things we are.

So for me, this is something that I’m assessing the whole time I’m with my horse. “What is he working on?” “What is he thinking about?” Who is following who? Who do I want following who? There are going to be times when my horse is working on something else than I am, and I might do something about it. There are other times when my horse might be working on something else than I am, and I might just note it, but not do anything about it. But I’m always assessing that, and even if I choose not to change what my horse was working on, I still note it and recognize it. My horse can feel all those things. He can feel me recognize his thought, and then he can feel me choose to change it or not. He will know. He will know if I don’t know.

To say that this is about “getting a horse’s attention” is not quite it. That’s a small part of what I’m talking about here, but only a small part. What I’m talking about, is in small moments, and over our lifetime with our horse, what is he working on, and how much does it match up with what we’re working on?

And I guess that there’s a lot to this. Because we don’t want the horse to be “vapid” or kind of “empty”. We don’t want his thoughts to be missing, and we don’t want the only thoughts in there to be ones we put in there. He has his own thoughts and he has his own things to work on. But I guess for me, I’d like to feel a desire for him to “be with me” and an ability to yield his thoughts when I ask. Now, of course, a lot of that is on me, because this whole thing was my idea in the first place. But I do need my horse to do his part of our work together, or it’s just me pushing and pulling an unwilling beast around out there. It’s a lot better, in my opinion, if we’re partners who are working together on a project or a movement, or a feel or a moment.

Ray Hunt said a lot of things about this kind of stuff, about us feeling out to the horse and then being aware of what the horse was sending back. He used the word “reach” too, and I’ve always loved that word and the feel of it to me. So I practice, whenever I’m around the horses, I’ll reach for them mentally, then I’ll reach for them physically and see if I can get that working with them. I’ll see how connected we can get and have the horse be okay with that. I don’t think there’s anything that feels better than reaching for a horse and having him reach for me at the same time.

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