The “It’s Never The Horses’ Fault” Fallacy

“It’s never the horse’s fault” and “You need to get after him, you can’t let him get away with that!” are antithetical mindsets.

By default, positive punishment is directing blame. You are adding a punishing stimulus to discourage a behaviour that you believe the horse is wrong for doing.

The mindset of it never being the horse’s fault should, in theory, involve people not assessing blame and physically punishing horses.

But, often it doesn’t.

It’s important for us to look within and see what are words actually mean, if they contradict each other and if we are excusing certain behaviours that in practice go against what we claim our belief systems to be.

Believing that the horse is “trying to get away with something” in the first place requires the assumption that they are deliberately and knowingly trying to defy you for the sake of doing so, thus, you are blaming them for their misbehaviour under the assumption that they “know better.”

Now, without going into the specifics on whether horses do or don’t know better and whether or not they’re capable of planning acts of defiance simply to upset their human, I want to ask this:

Why would your horse actively try to get out of work if they enjoy it?

Another antithetical mindset is the belief that horses deliberately do things to get out of work and “be lazy” that is often held in tandem with people claiming their horse loves their job.

A horse who loves their job isn’t going to “call in sick” by actively trying to evade the work that he supposedly “loves.”

Contradictory statements like these are important to unpack because if we refuse to acknowledge the contradictions, it can make it very easy to excuse virtually anything we do in horse training, even if it makes no sense in practice.

A lot of industry wide beliefs are actually in direct contradiction with each other.

In a world where it is never the horse’s fault and where horses love their jobs, a lot of the problems we run into and the subsequent solutions wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be need for them.

So, next time you find yourself claiming your horse is trying to get out of work, ask yourself what about the work would make him want to get out of it?

Why isn’t he enjoying it?

And before you say it’s never the horse’s fault, ask yourself why you would hit, yell at or otherwise punish him if you are recognizing that the fault is always the rider’s?