Training The Difficult Horse

Dealing with interactions between humans who can communicate effectively whilst utilizing the same language is difficult enough, when we try to bring similar levels of communication to animals who learn, think and communicate differently from us, the potential for miscommunication and resulting frustration for both sides increases immensely. On top of this, a certain level of frustration is created by human desires conflicting with the abilities, understanding and needs of the animal who is being worked with, in this case, being the horse. Our desires as riders, may we be competitors or pleasure riders, are generally strongly correlated with goals that at their core are mainly about what WE want and virtually nothing the horse “wants”. I don’t mean this as a bad thing, it is simply an undeniable fact that horses do not have the capacity to have the same drive for improvement under saddle or results in the competition ring as their human partners do. This detail is one of the most important things that is routinely forgotten in training and in misrepresenting it, we only serve to potentially create scared and frustrated horses by our assumption that when they don’t follow the path we have outlined for them in training, they’re doing so as a slight against us or to be decidedly “bad”.

The attitude with which we approach training will ultimately define the success of said training. It is also important to acknowledge that in many cases, what humans perceive as success is viewed entirely different by the horse. It is perfectly possible to achieve the results we want at the detriment of the horse. Horses can be competitive and achieve great heights within the confines of human goals while being wildly unhappy themselves. We see this frequently within the competition world with horses who are stalled most of their days only to enter training exhibiting many frustration signals and an overall distaste for work but such athleticism that they are heavily rewarded in competition for their efforts. This issue, however, is also present outside of the competition world as it can be closely linked with personal goals of the rider who, while may be riding for pleasure, still wants to attain certain abilities within training. Generally speaking, in each of these cases, the desire to do right by the horse is there, it is just misguided and unfortunately, riddled with cognitive dissonance when personal human goals conflict with what is best for the horse. Or, in many cases, where catering to the needs of the horse may uproot the human’s ability to do things the “easy” way or demand for an overhaul of what the human has always known to be righteous.

First and foremost, the difficulties horses present us with should be actively looked at through the lens of the horse. This can be very, very hard to do. Even for behavioural inclined trainers and people who “know” better, working with horses within the confines of the demands of their owners, their connections and their management scenario can feel helpless and frustrating when you feel unable to make the changes needed or do not know the best way to navigate a situation at a specific time. So, this means that making mistakes or misreading scenarios is only human, but we need to be mindful of how often we do this. So many of the behavioural issues people run into with their horses are directly related to management. In most cases, this means that the horse is exhibiting outward frustration or “resistance” behaviours that conflict with what the rider is requesting or expecting of them. Said behaviours are often strongly correlated with the reduced ability to interact with other horses or the deprivation of autonomy and natural movement that comes with being stalled too much. These basic factors can result in a great variety of poor behaviours under saddle or inhand that make it difficult or impossible for the rider to meet their goals with the horse.

Unfortunately, in many cases, instead of meeting these needs, the humans expect the horses to be able to deal with the frustrations of training on top of the frustrations that come from poor management. This results in an awful lot of bickering between horse and rider and immense irritation on both sides. It also ends up in a lot of horses being labelled as naughty and reprimanded accordingly. The punishment serves to only silence the horse’s means of communication and outbursts that at their heart are just trying to relieve pent up frustration. This, in turn, doesn’t really solve the “why” behind said behaviours and instead pushes the horse to find a replacement behaviour to serve the same purpose as the “naughty” one, which means they may stop the “bad” behaviour temporarily but are highly likely to find a just as undesirable outlet for whatever reason the previous behaviour served for them.

Not all instances of frustration behaviours are related to management. We need to reserve understanding for the moments we see in young horses, struggling to retain focus for extended periods of time without playing or feeling more of a need to have silly moments in cold snaps. In these cases, the same thinking applies, though. The behaviour serves a purpose for the horse and reprimanding said behaviour harshly only tells them “don’t do that” without offering them a different solution. With this in mind, when my horses act out under saddle, I try to master the art of just sitting there. Riding through the moment, not reprimanding the horse and then once they’re through it, offering a replacement behaviour. For fizzy youngsters, this can be as simple as working on some lateral work basics that are more physically and mentally demanding and thereby require more focus. Or, it can be frequently changing direction or speed so that the horse is more focused on what comes next than they are about being silly. There are a great variety of solutions to offer replacement behaviours for when undesirable behaviours arise, but it requires the rider to think a little bit more and try to get to the bottom of why the negative behaviour exists in the first place. Very seldom does it ever necessitate punishment.

I think one of the most pressing issues currently in ridden training is the fact that it is far too common for people to use discomfort or pain as a means of punishing a horse or maintaining control. This very mindset entirely negates the idea of trying to get the horse to enjoy their work and instead results in the person riding them pretending that there is a greater sense of enjoyment coming from the horse than what is there in reality. Horses cannot enjoy the work if they have to worry about being hurt or frightened if they offer the wrong behaviour. In turn, they’re less likely to trial behaviours to figure out what the correct one is, because the outcome of doing the wrong thing is painful and/or frightening. Similarly, when we move to use harsher equipment to achieve control instead of doing the foundational work to develop a level of relaxation that allows us to be as soft as possible, we sacrifice enjoyment and comfort from the horse for a quick fix to muscle the horse into the cookie cutter our training program represents. A horse isn’t going to enjoy working within a program that would rather up the consequences of being “wrong” in terms of leveraging discomfort through bigger bits or gadgets that are much harder for the horse to escape. These programs don’t really give them choice since the horse is forced to progress at the often fast paced expectations of the rider that don’t account for the slow progression of muscular fitness on top of mental understanding. The lack of autonomy and lack of consideration for the physical and mental output of the horse doesn’t leave the horse with an awful lot of options.

To master working with the difficult horse, we need to do our best not to be bullies. Training, even at its best, is not without stress for the animal. Exercise is stressful, even if just on the body. In order to achieve greater fitness in our horses (and ourselves, for that matter), stress must be inflicted on the body. BUT- the level to which we demand such stress is what matters. As humans with autonomy, we are unlikely to continue seeing personal trainers who work us with such high expectations that we leave the session with physical or mental injury. Horses should be viewed as no different. We cannot expect them to perform well without any opinion while we demand far too much from them mentally and/or physically or try to force them to work through painful conditions. Said painful conditions include bits or gadgets that either inflict pain simply from their mechanics or due to how the rider uses them but also are strongly related to saddle fit, fitness, lameness and many other factors. Riders, at least, get to pick and choose what level of discomfort or pain within themselves is acceptable to work through. Horses do not, so as their advocates, it is our job to, you know, advocate for them.

So, how do we fix the difficult or “naughty” horse? We fix them by trying to look at the why behind the behaviours we don’t want to see and try to address whatever is necessitating the behaviour. This can be done by improving management, enriching the horse’s lift within training and/or outside of it or offering a positive replacement behaviour for the negative one. It should never be done through heavy, consistent punishment of the “bad” behaviour with no example set for what the correct one is. Rewarding the good behaviours will elicit greater change than punishing the bad will. Heavy punishment has been shown to come with a great variety of negative psychological repercussions, not just within horses but also dogs, cats and humans. This is a non-negotiable fact as it is something that is heavily studied, however, it is far too often disregarded as an untruth in equine training. Horse people without the tools to understand alternatives to punishment when it comes to handling bad behaviour simply lack the understanding to do so and whether they’re your trainer or someone you highly respect doesn’t matter, they simply cannot deny science. They can’t.

This isn’t to say that positive punishment should never ever be used in any setting. I think it is foolish for anyone to claim that there is never an appropriate scenario to ever use it just because it doesn’t look at life realistically. You’re not always going to be able to set up the appropriate times to train someone’s horse in every setting. You could end up pinned against a wall by an aggressive horse with no means to counter condition or have a horse charge you in the field and in these scenarios, it is warranted to do whatever the heck you need to do to get out of there and be safe. But the important thing to remember in these types of emergent situations is that they do not represent a regular training situation. Repeated punishment has been shown to actually increase risk of agonistic behaviour in animals, which is what makes it problematic as a training tactic regularly used in a program. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done things like lip chaining horses, using twitches, or other highly aversive things. I don’t use them in replacement for training, though. I use them in situations where it isn’t safe to “train” the correct behaviour such as vet procedures, when taking horses out for the first time after being stalled or handling horses who are known to be dangerous but need to be moved to a different property or area immediately. In situations like this, you aren’t in an environment where you can enact longstanding behavioural change and you may need to muscle yourself out of a situation but this is not representative of the situation the vast majority of equestrians find themselves in within daily work and these cases represent a “bandaid” fix in terms of being a lazy, short term way to get to the end goal without actually addressing the cause of the problem. Also, the infrequent use of such things is a lot less likely to cause the neurotic behaviour correlated with repeated use of positive punishment.

In training, it is important to remain realistic. I recognize the fact that many riders may lack the necessary tools, support and management style to help them achieve the best possible way to enact change for their horse. However, it is also important to realize the power of an education. Educating equestrians on the repercussions of some of the more mainstream ways of handling “bad manners” only serves to push those who are willing to look further into handling things differently. It also helps reduce the frequency at which we see shutdown horses who go through the motions of their work and appear otherwise well trained but had to go through hell to get there. Similarly, it will hopefully reduce the wastage that we see in horses who instead of shutting down and going into learned helplessness, became so unpredictable and dangerously neurotic that they could no longer be used as a riding horse. Such horses typically end up getting euthanized or dumped at auctions unless they’re lucky enough to find a home willing to retire them or a trainer willing to try to save them from the damage their previous program imposed on them.

At the end of the day, the best way to handle the difficult horse is to refute the training ideas that only “work” on horses who passive copers and the most likely to shut down rather than fight and get continuously more anxious and frightened. A lot of the force based methods we see commonly used in traditional training practice have far too much wastage and a training approach that fails on an abundance of horses or immensely increases neurosis or aggression isn’t something that needs to be promoted. The difficult horse very often the misunderstood horse and as a trainer, it is so sad to see the sheer number of horses who are failed and fall through the cracks at the hands of what horse people view to be “right”. The level of anger that stems from humans when they’re unable to make an animal bend their will within the confines of a very rigid training approach is one of the biggest downfall we see from people who work with animals.

We all have the capacity to do better and we will all continue to make mistakes as we journey down the path of enlightenment. It is not an easy feat to effect change on a creature who not only does not speak the same language as us but also thinks entirely differently from us. This sets us up to make mistakes, even ones we may recognize as such within the same day but more often, mistakes we will come to regret years down the road. Making mistakes is not the issue so much as how we react to new information given that conflicts with what we have known to be true in the past. All of us only serve to improve in our ability to train horses within the confines of our sport once we learn to better understand the hows and the whys behind their learning style.