A local newspaper here in my town has picked up an article series I’m writing about the process of getting a horse and rider prepared for a 100 mile ride. I’m going to repost this (third in the series) article here and remind anyone within driving distance that we’re having our first Roving Clinic of 2025 this weekend, March 22-23, 2025. The fun bonus of this clinic is my amazing husband has been working tirelessly to create a space for us to come together right here on my own land. I had been looking around for a place to do more education events, and Matt looked around and said: let’s just get started here!
Turns out, he is right! We may be small, but we are a community of powerful horse people who are committed to changing the way we think and helping our horses change the way they think as well. We love to add to the family, and we aren’t “cliquey” – we have a wide variety of people who come to participate and to watch, observe, and learn.
Now, without further delay, here is the third article about the horse’s mind and why it meant so much to me in my endurance journey.
It’s amazing how many endurance miles Khaleesi and I have completed without her having a forward thought. I suppose that reveals how much one can force a horse through on sheer willpower and drive. Early on, as I was learning to work with horses, I learned a lot about driving horses around. No, I don’t mean in a truck! I mean the energy or force applied to make a horse move away from pressure. To ride any horse on the most basic level, you have to communicate effectively that a horse go forward, and have the horse do so in response. In my experience, most people approach this by driving the horse. The reason this is such a common approach is probably because it is so effective. Yet, I have since learned you can drive a horse forward without the horse having a forward thought, and this is actually a problem!
Horses are prey animals and come with the built in response of: run away first, ask questions later. It is pretty easy to get a horse to flee from pressure, however, we don’t actually want them to run away, so we also have to contain them. Generally we do this with a halter and rope, or a round pen. The message is: flee, move, evade, but also, you’re trapped. It’s not a stretch to imagine most horses don’t feel very good about this kind of work. I am now amazed at how many horses do become obedient and responsive to the pressure. I do not think I was alone in mistakenly thinking my horse was doing great with this system.
I flew across the country a couple winters back to watch Harry Whitney work horses in California. He says that it is good to learn what motions come with a horse’s emotions. Due to the prevalence of working horses in this driving pressure system, it has become less common to see what a horse looks like physically when they are truly relaxed and confident in their work with humans. This was true for me. I remember seeing quick, snappy, obedient responses to my requests, I was sure the horse was happy and life was good. Looking back, I understand now that my horses were moving in tension and avoidance, not soft responsiveness. Their bodies were rigid, braced, and tense.
This may seem like a tangent for an article series about an endurance team heading to a 100 mile race, but it’s one of the most important things I discovered that led to increasing success at this sport.
When driving a horse “away” from pressure, the horse’s attention is on the thing it is fleeing from. If I want my horse to run freely forward over the many miles, I need my horse to be thinking about going forward, not thinking about what is driving from behind. Using the sympathetic nervous system to propel a horse (even at a walk) adds adrenaline to the system which is supposed to be for emergency use only. To compile trouble from the driving approach, the horse is also trying to avoid punishment as he/she anticipates a tap or kick and braces against that force as well.
This means a horse driven forward is carrying some level of tension. Strength in movement comes through relaxation, flexibility, and good form. Working for extended time and intensity in tension brings diminished performance and increased injuries. These can be metabolic, like a heart rate that cannot drop for the vet check, or lameness from sustained tension in muscles and joints. This kind of lameness is difficult to diagnose because it doesn’t come from an obvious injury.
Once again, I speak from experience. For a couple years I wrestled with a mystery intermittent lameness in Khaleesi. I took an entire season off from competing after some disappointing events where we did not complete due to lameness pulls. The trouble was, no one could pinpoint the problem and how to fix it. I had professionals check her hooves and legs, and shoulders, to no avail. I had radiographs done on her feet to see if she had unusually thin soles or signs of arthritis. She had no evidence of problems in the tendons or joints. The lameness would show up both with and without saddle; it would randomly appear when asked to trot on a line or around a circle.
The reason I now believe it was a result of many miles moving in tension, is because I still find it today, though it is very rare. If I address her thought, the lameness dissolves instantly. In those early years, we were severely lacking a forward thought. I am now convinced a lot of physical problems are a product of the mind resisting the work, which creates brace in the body, leading to physical injuries that are difficult to diagnose and treat.
After spending some time with Harry Whitney and Tom Moates, I came to understand what a major factor the horse’s thought is. I am amazed at the things that will improve when the mental system comes into alignment. When I began to work with this understanding, it brought the final key that changed our endurance team to stronger finishes and eventually completing our first 100 mile event.
Modern horse training, for the most part, teaches people to drive a horse first from the ground by adding pressure to the horse’s hind end. We chase the horse with the tail of a rope or a flag. Eventually, we move into the saddle and drive either with legs to kick or a crop to tap. Anyone who is about to be kicked or tapped is going to brace in anticipation. That brace in the body acts like a brake, making it hard to move easily. You can drive using the gas and brake at the same time. It works, but is there a better way?
A better way?
I want to create a desire for my horse to move freely toward something. Helping a horse create a forward thought is more complex than chasing it to run away from pressure. Once I was able to see the difference of a horse moving in relaxation and strength, I could not “unsee” it. I knew this was the way my horse could have longevity and success in her sport.
I hear a lot of talk regarding the necessity of moving a horse’s feet. Strangely enough, we rarely put a rope on the feet to ride. We put a halter on the horse’s head and use a lead rope, or a bridle and reins. I’m pretty sure we do this because the horse’s brain is housed there. While I have seen people get a horse to move it’s feet without it’s brain engaged in the same movement, this is not a horse I want to be attached to in any way! I don’t want to crank on a horse’s head for steering, and then drive it with pressure from behind to go. With strong enough levers applied, it can create compliance, but there are some horses who never break into this obedience. These non compliant types become the “problem horses” no one wants to work with. Their future is bleak as they fight against a pressure that does not make sense to them and become dangerous, sometimes even aggressive. Yet, even for the many horses who comply with the driving pressure system, their performance doesn’t compare to the brilliance of a horse who is present and engaged mentally in their work.
Khaleesi was, thankfully, a compliant type horse, and I spent years driving her before I knew there was a better way. She was smart enough to get out of punishment by doing what I wanted, but it showed up in her body over time. When I learned how to work with her mind and change her thoughts toward something, I saw the change in her body too. We are now erasing the brace and tension she used to carry, and the flexible strength we are developing is really encouraging.
This is a process I really enjoy. I’m still collecting tools on how to get my horse to think forward on down the trail. When that slightly lame gait appears, I don’t panic that a lameness injury is imminent. I shift my approach to get her mind thinking down the road, and when her mind straightens out, so do her legs. It’s amazing!
This approach of working with horses is not only good for an endurance team, it has become a way of life, and the community around it is creative and engaging! It changes everything we do together from leading on the ground, loading in a trailer, getting better transitions, and certainly getting over a jump. If you want to join us to see it in action, we are meeting in Bath and Highland Counties the weekend of March 22-23. Contact me at Jaime@hopehorsemanship.com for schedule, location, and details. Tom Moates will be working with us and our horses, and he always has some books on hand that make great resources for further understanding on starting with a horse’s thought.
I’ve heard we all have personal algorithms that are used to feed us opportunities and advertisements that align with our interests. One might imagine I get a lot of horse related nudges anytime I’m grazing the internet. One would be right.
Something occurred to me as I read through the ad copy, target written to sell me something. I noticed a few buzz topics, words I remember having a certain weight in past years, and as I read, I pondered: I haven’t had a conversation about some of these things in quite a while. In fact, is it my imagination, or are they missing in the horse community I’ve settled into? As I read questions like: How is your ground work game? Or Does your horse respect you? It was a bit like hearing about someone I used to know well and thinking: hey, yeah, what is she up to now anyway? It’s been forever since we’ve talked.
I love words. Words matter to me. Sloppy language bothers me. Sometimes I fail at getting just the right word, but I try to express as clearly as possible what I want to communicate, and I spend time and effort to do so. It’s common for communities and industries to share language- terms that to insiders, have particularly meaning often deeper than the surface definition. I love that the current group of horsemanship enthusiasts I have found myself in community with seem to have a similar interest in using words that best express what we intend and not using words that carry a layer we don’t intend.
One such word I noticed was:
RESPECT
I was following a conversation about a horse disrespecting the handler, and realized the “respect peg” was not on my brain wall where I’d last noticed it. Do you think about having “pegs” to hand ideas and information on? I know it’s hard to take in information if there’s no “peg” for it, you have to sometimes start by creating one when learning new things. Once you have a peg, or some might imagine it more like a drawer or a file… you need somewhere to house the information and process it. I think of pegs to hang a concept on. When I read these conversations and questions regarding a horse respecting or disrespecting a human I thought it should have a peg. I have had plenty of past conversations about respect or disrespect in horses, this isn’t new to me, but as I scanned, sure enough, the respect peg was missing. Where had it gone? I hadn’t remembered pulling it out. It was now glaringly absent from my current process of working with horses. That’s odd, I thought. Is this on purpose? Or have I simply not noticed it?
I put the thought to one of my horse education mentors with the question: is it just me, or do we not talk about “respect” with our horses in this community?
No… it wasn’t just me, we don’t tend to use that word.
We don’t use the term respect because both respect and disrespect add a layer of emotion that is probably not accurate for the horses in question most of the time. Horses rarely show disrespect in the same way that humans do. In our cultural usage, to disrespect contains a sense of offense or insult. Adding that layer unnecessarily brings an emotion to the table that gets in the way of helping the horse and human find a better connection.
Horses do have emotional systems. Horses do have feelings, preferences and opinions, however horses are far less inclined to make things personal than humans. When we assign these more human attitudes, we add problems that are not real. This is why our horse community tends to move away from the words respect and disrespect. I don’t think that means it’s impossible for a horse to show disrespect, only that it’s much more rare than the horse world at large seems to believe.
I took a moment to consider what horse behaviors have been categorized as disrespect in circles from my past. It looked like a horse that invades personal space, possibly stepping on someone, or even runs them over, or ignores a handler completely when their attention is required. None of those behaviors is acceptable, but are they disrespect?
I thought about a child and a mom walking in the mall, and something takes the child’s attention (it could be a distraction like an inviting toy store, or a fear, like someone particularly scary looking) and this causes the child to lose track of mom, and run into her, maybe even trip her while walking. Most people would not berate the child for being disrespectful. Probably they would give a short lecture on paying attention and keeping better track of their surroundings- including not walking into people. Some moms would never have gotten tripped because they are prone to notice when the child is becoming distracted and are always three steps ahead. That mom might bring the child’s attention back before the wreck even happens.
I remember being in a round pen with Khaleesi while Harry Whitney watched us interact. She walked off from me, then paused to smell a poop pile from a previous horse. I was trying to get something done together and she completely checked out on me. She doesn’t tend to run me over, we’ve clarified that pretty well over the years, but in some circles this complete disregard could easily be interpreted as disrespect. Harry observed: Right now that poop pile is of more importance to your horse than you are… I’d probably do something about that.
That line still rings in my mind and makes me smile. It comes back to me in what appears on the surface to be very different scenarios, but at the core they are the same problem. My horse is more in tune to a poop pile has a similar root issue as another horse about to trample me because of a distraction that took her full attention leaving me of very little importance. In either scenario the problem is that the horse mentally severed our connection and made something else of higher importance. This is not offensive, it simply needs to be addressed. I do not need to add an emotional layer that my horse has just insulted me, rather do something to remind the horse that I need to be the most important thing in her world right now. If she stays mentally present- with me – she is aware of me, and she is not likely to run me over, drag me off, or step on me.
Ideally I want to find ways to keep the connection, not instill fear. For a prey animal, fear is easy to conjure and use. It takes more thought, creativity, and attention to draw into something that feels good than to drive with something that creates a threat. When we don’t give our horses a reason to stay connected, it is not surprising they are more concerned with their environment and disconnect with us in order to connect with something they think IS important. This can look like keeping tabs on a lawn mower in the next field, or eating grass as we try to walk from barn to arena, or calling to it’s buddy who brings a higher sense of security than we provide.
In that round pen, as my horse smelled the poop pile, I had some options, this time I banged my flag on the ground next to me. I did not chase her with it or direct it at her as a threat. I used the flag to make an unexpected sound in the environment to interrupt her thought about the poop and get her to ask what was that? It would be similar to yelling hey there! to someone whose attention I was looking for across the yard. I am learning what it means to be of importance to my horse, and hopefully without my horse feeling constantly threatened by me. I want to give my horse repeated experiences that connection with me is the best place to be. I want my horse to find peace, security, and confidence there. This process assumes that I exhibit those things myself (peace and confidence), and I am developing myself to be a leader sufficient for my horse’s needs. Horses are wired to seek a leader they find sufficiently competent to follow. The definition of sufficiently competent can vary widely between horses. That’s an entirely other wormhole for another day.
Is this about respect? I suppose it depends on your own sense of that word. If respect simply means to you that someone else gives you consideration and attention, and stays in connection so you can work together, then I suppose the word is not a problem. But if you find yourself singing along with Aretha about R-E-S-P-E-C-T… find out what it means to me, and with that word you have shades of offense or insult, it is likely creating a dynamic that won’t help either of you sort out the behavior issues in question.
Some may eye roll and say it’s about semantics- it’s all the same thing. Some will hold onto the term as a useful way to describe unwanted horse behaviors, but I think my work with the horses around me has become more productive without it. Today if I have an issue with a horse invading my space or checking out, I’m more likely to see it as a lack of attention and connection, and find something that works to bring back the focus and connection in as little threat language as I can.
If I’m back in the mall with the child who gets distracted, I might call their name in a regular speaking voice and when they check in with me, crisis is averted. However if the child is in the yard and gets focused on a ball across the street and I notice a truck approaching, I might have to get pretty big, yell in a firm voice, and even seem threatening in order to get their attention back. I’ve seen some horses who have become really good at tuning out humans and protecting their disconnection as if their lives depend on it. I’ve seen Harry Whitney get pretty big in his efforts to get that horse to snap into the present and consider making a better choice. The goal, however, is always to bring the horse to a safe place, a place of peace where they feel good about the connection and seek it out- not for fear, but because they feel better there.
I can see why we don’t address horses’ disrespect and I had not noticed the concept was missing. We just don’t see truly disrespectful horses very often. I may have never yet seen one in person. We see horses who have strong thoughts about things other than the work we want to do. We see horses who have left their mind with their herd, or the last place they felt safe. We see horses who are afraid, possibly in pain, or don’t believe they can be at peace when connecting with a human. These are the things we begin addressing, and we see what we can do to bring a change for the better. I suppose until I see a horse that is truly disrespectful, I’ll just keep on addressing the problems as they stand and see where it leads, and I’ll leave that respect peg off the wall until I find a need for it.
Winter is terrible and beautiful. I love the quiet, and the landscapes of snow and ice formations are stunning to look at… for a time, however when this frozen landscape drags on for “too” long it becomes the winter of my discontent!
This year our endurance activities are coming back into focus alongside the community that has been forming around horsemanship clinics and whole horse approach to having powerful partners in whatever we do. After a long winding journey to get through a single-day 100 mile ride, I took some time off and this winter finally, after a little space, have gone back to revisit the long-running blog greento100 from the beginning.
The upside is being able to recognize growth. Growth in my writing (the early blogs were hard even for me to slog through), growth in my approach to both the horses and the people around me, growth in my understanding of how to help a horse develop and prepare for a goal… the downside is looking back to the 10-year-ago me and seeing the view before the growth! I’m exhausted from spending so much time with her lately… she was hard to be around. I’m grateful for the ones who saw the potential of who I could be, and gave me the space to develop, and stuck with me through the process.
This year, as the future path comes into focus, I’m both excited and much more relaxed about the journey. I saw my desperation as an early endurance rider to find the commonly accepted riding calendars and mileage and speed goals to preparing a horse and the constant pressure I felt to do my part. I feel much less pressure now- even after almost a year between my last competition event and our first one to come, with much less riding in between. I am picking up in the most challenging time to add fitness in the mountains: Winter. To add a layer, it’s a particularly tough winter due to lingering snow that has meant a lot of ice and really hard snow crust that can irritate a horse’s lower legs if too much time is spent crunching through it. The risk versus reward equation looks different to me now than it did ten years ago.
This year I look outside when the temps are below zero and the ice layer is thickening and I add a log to the fire, go back over more old blog posts in order to understand where I’ve been, and figure we will get out there, when it’s time. I’m far less worried about miles and miles per hour today. I have learned that over training is a thing, and as I review my endurance beginnings, I see it’s a thing I once did too well!
Still, not getting any exercise is an equally poor plan, so I take a day here and there when the weather cooperates enough to make the risks less adverse and we either go for an in-hand hike up the hollow or if it’s favorable enough saddle up to get into the woods from home. I am very fortunate to have options right from my doorstep and am grateful for them because my trailer is snowed in for going on three weeks now.
While there is less happening externally, I’m focused on some internal things. I am looking for a framework over which to tell the Green to 100 story- if there is one – in a way that entertains and enlightens. It has also timely for me as I begin a new adventure to visit how the old one began, and remember the things I would not do again. I am living proof that Ronnie Moyer is right when he says: Change IS possible!
I am pretty excited about the year to come. The community around PowerfulHorse is organically beginning to form and I truly enjoy the family that is coming together around this approach to horse life. We will be sharing time this year around some horsemanship clinics as usual, but I am working on some fun bonus days to meet with other professionals such as Stephanie from Indigo Ancestral Health, Deb from Optimal Posture, Dr. Hancock (Osteopathy) from True North Equine, and USDF Dressage Bronze Medalist Mattalyn Rogers who has shifted from a very successful dressage career to exploring how to do better for the horse combining her dressage experience with the horsemanship experience that aligns with our approach based on more thought and freedom and less force and pressure.
So as January turns (a bit too) slowly toward a close, I greet you dear reader with a warm spirit, for those who have journeyed long and far with me- a thank you for your grace and patience. For those who are newer- an energetic welcome and my own expectation that this connection should require slightly less grace and patience than some of the long timers. I am also excited that our local newspaper has invited me to share our current journey to the Vermont 100 with the local community in a print series, so I’ll be doing a bit more writing than usual!
And so I am spending more time by the wood stove, with my new favorite camping blanket and my laptop, but also ramping up my gym time because I have lost fitness in the last year that I spent falling in love, getting married, and dealing with some personal health challenges along the way. It was a good year for rest and celebration! Now we have work to do and the gym seems a good place to start while the world around me is iced over.
Meanwhile I look for the few days above freezing and where the terrain is less crusty or slick or deep and get a little riding in. I’ve been posting some videos of us out in the wild on our YouTube channel so you can check those out if you’re also frozen in the house this January!
Stay tuned, and invite some friends to the party! I love the family that is coming together – everyone on their own adventure – finding a place to share the stories and learn from each other. Currently we are an in-person ragtag bunch that come together around horses, clinics and good food, but I foresee an online group will be hatched as well to help us stay connected during the “in between” times, and include some who cannot get to in person events. I will keep events updated on the PowerfulHorse.com site and we invite new friends to come, even without a horse, to enjoy the camaraderie and discussions of ideas and approaches.
Now… to get off the couch and get outside, it’s one of those above freezing days, and I have to get to work later!
I love my horse, but I’ve been asking the question recently: Does my horse love me? Followed by the related questions of do horses love anywhere near the way humans think of love? Does it matter? Can we be friends? What DO I want from my horse and what can I give her? What is best for her needs as a creature in my care?
I came across an article by Australian horseman Ross Jacobs (Why Can’t I be my Horse’s Best Friend?) where he considered if we are looking for horses to fill an unreasonable expectation of relationship, or if we expect to fill an unreasonable relational position in their world.
Today, horses rarely exist as a necessity for our daily lives. Few of us rely on them for life and livelihood. Most of us keep horses by choice for enjoyment. We might participate in an equine sport, trail ride for pleasure, or even use our horses in some chore or farm job, but rarely do we in the developed west depend on them for primary travel or farm work. Most people I know who have horses care for them as a large outdoor pet. Most people I know love their horses. Regardless of the actual statistics, I don’t think I’m alone in saying I love my horses and admitting the desire for my horses to be my friend.
With an animal so different from a human, is this possible to the extent I wish it? How would I measure this friendship? Is it a reasonable wish?
I am also a dog person. Dogs already have the nickname of “man’s best friend” and there must be a reason we gave that title to the dog and not the horse. One thing we share with the canine is the predator nature. We both work for food, and have the instinct to survive by overcoming and climbing as close to the top of the food chain as possible. Horses are not like us, in fact they are naturally a direct opposite of us in how they perceive and process their environment and how they go about their day.
My dog Samwise really is my little buddy. He regularly chooses to be close to me, he is always excited when I come home. When I sit in the mornings to read and write with my coffee, he always comes and sits as close as possible, if he isn’t touching me he isn’t close enough. If he engages in a behavior that disconnects our relationship he is quick to repent and is always seeking to reestablish connection. These are evidence for my case that Sam is a kind of animal friend to me.
Samwise and Peggy Sue cuddled up by the warm fire… friends!
When I look at horses, they don’t generally want to touch each other, at least not unless there is a reason- usually being the need to correct a horse for inappropriate behavior. Occasionally there are mutual grooming sessions, but this seems more like meeting a need than the dog attribute of laying close together in a puppy snuggle pile.
I am certain horses are capable of thought and emotion. I don’t know how complex these systems get. I believe horses don’t lie, and they don’t plot and scheme together for future barn take overs. I don’t believe they think over how to complicate life for us on the next trail ride. They learn by experience what works out for them and what does not. They are fabulous at observing and learning patterns and can be incredibly smart when it comes to connecting and even chaining together patterns. I believe as prey animals, they are wired to flee problems, discomfort and imbalances in their environment in order to survive another day. I also think horses have preferences and distinct personalities.
What would it look like for a horse to love a person? I remember Iva talking about her experiences at various local schooling barns as a young teen. She has a quiet spirit and has always been keenly observant. She told me that she would look around at the horses and the horse girls and see them cooing about how much their horse loves them and to her eye it seemed clear to her that the horse was rather uncomfortable or unhappy in their time together. Horses are subtle creatures. Would a twelve year old girl who wanted to believe her horse loved her and was her friend be able to tell if this were actually true? Do we still do this as horse girls grown up? Do we really want to know?
This essay by Ross Jacobs grabbed my attention because I had been thinking about my own connection to Khaleesi and how it has developed over time. I started her from an unhandled four year old without much human baggage, but she has still had about four different owners in her fifteen years, all of them being me. She was my first horse to start as a filly and the process of growing up with her certainly impacted me, and I’ve experimented with a few different horsemanship avenues along the years that have impacted how she felt about spending time with me.
In my earliest years with owning horses as an adult, I remember considering my first horse (Faygo) my friend, therapist, confident, and adventure buddy. Today I see that was an immature starting point of understanding these majestic creatures and how we might relate in a way that is good for both them as us.
Now I cringe at the memes that claim horses are therapists. In fairness I know it is therapeutic to be in nature and it has helped me grow as a human being to understand my horse and how we relate on a more simplified relational level and truth about myself has been revealed in the process. So if you would champion those truths as a reason to call horses “therapy” then I stand with you. However I can’t get behind the practice of subjecting my horse to carrying my emotional baggage for the long term, and fix heart issues I don’t want to put the work in to resolve. I attempt to bring my honest, best self to work with my horse as I want to see her honest best as well. In nature, horses do not want other horses in their herds who have emotional instability, and I think it’s quite rare in nature. Emotional instability is inherently dangerous to survival. I think most emotional instability in horses we see comes from experiences with humans.
As I ponder the behavior of my main working horse, Khaleesi, I have been on a journey to increasing her freedom and choice within the confines of the fact that we always have limitations within our freedom, and every choice comes with consequences. Still, I have been letting go of trained pattern auto-pilot behaviors (push-buttons) in favor of as conversational real-time communication as I can get between two such different creatures and she and me. What is the impact of this between us? I will admit I do not think that horses (or dogs for that matter) have the kind of love that humans are able to engage in, however I want my animals to want to spend time with me. I am not sure if I would call this friendship today with my horse, but I certainly want a solid positive connection.
What does this look like? Maybe take a moment and ponder this yourself and consider your own answer?
Would it look like her coming right over to me in the pasture when I arrive? Seeking to be close to me when I’m in her space? Putting her head in the halter ready to go do something together? As I look at my short list, I see they are all physical signs.
What is the reality of our experience? It varies. If I don’t have a halter she is often curious because usually I have some form of food. She comes right to me when I’m carrying hay or a warm meal. Is this friendship and connection? Possibly! But it’s not about me, it’s friendship and connection with hay and feed!
When I do have a halter, sometimes she stands in place while I approach her and when she is ready she always dips her head at least slightly into the noseband. But some days she runs around like a maniac and kicks out her hind legs with clear messages of: NO! I’m not going with you right now. If I am not clearly carrying food, she almost never approaches me looking to go into the halter and see what I had in mind. I think there are times in years gone by this horse was more reliable and easier to catch in the field. That was when I had more training and conditioned responses built in. Is this good or bad? What is behind these behaviors?
I do know horses like patterns. When I had the approach of more natural horsemanship, direct pressure driving, and there’s right answer- let me increase the pressure until you give it to me, I think she was slightly more likely to be caught sooner. Maybe horses appreciate the confidence of a right answer and a conditioned response they don’t have to engage in thinking. Humans are not much different in that respect. Apparently most of us spend a vastly higher percentage of formulative conversations than generative ones. We prefer the how are you? I’m fine thanks for asking… exchanges. We get uncomfortable if someone takes what is supposed to be a formulative and quick exchange and turn it into a generative conversation that is less predictable. And yet there is almost no true connection in a formulative conversation. Connection is more time consuming and risky. I find myself drawn to generative conversations and a generative life. Maybe some horses find the formula, rules and auto-pilot way of life a bit simpler. Maybe my horse, on some days, would rather stand at peace in the sun than have to work out together how to get something done. Is that so wrong?
Maybe even that assessment is too complex. When we set up patterned behavior and horses learn that compliance is the best path, they seem to be agreeable. They don’t have much freedom of thought or choice when we enter the picture. If we have a halter, they answer is go with the person and do the things. Conditioned response learned from patterns in experience. I do think horses some horses who are trained to respond in a way an owner prefers is seen as the horse being willing or being a buddy/friend. It may or may not be true if the horse has learned this is the response that means less trauma. They can respond with the “right” answer and still not feel very good about it and still have their mind over with their buddies in the sunshine. I’ve found the horses are actually pretty good at pretending to be present where the body is, going on autopilot, but actually having their mind somewhere else. This works out ok, until it doesn’t! Easy, simple, and routine doesn’t mean bad or good. In any relationship, lack of conflict does not equal strong connection. Of course regular conflict does not equate a good or strong connection either.
On the other hand, the horse who does always approach me in the field regardless if I have food, a halter, or a rake to clean the run in, is Wyoming. For many years I could assure you this horse was NOT my friend and we did not have a good connection. I would guess she approached me because I was an invader of their space and their current life situation and she had the curiosity to find out why and possibly intervene if she could. This horse taught me that the act of approaching in the field was not an indicator that the horse wanted to be my friend. We have come a long way, she and me, toward a more positive relationship, but it’s in her nature to come greet me whenever I enter the field, where its’s still Khaleesi’s quieter nature to watch me from a distance and conserve her energy as she stands in the sun or munches on hay.
Some horses simply seem to have different personalities and different ways of reacting. I’ve known some people who are constantly looking for a different horse, sometimes they finally seem to find one that suits them. I think they have in mind what a “good horse” is like, and the horse that fits that mold in how they approach the world is the type of horse that will work for them.
What about the days when Khaleesi stands quietly as I come in with a halter and then when I approach her, hold out my hand and she touches with her nose briefly, and then waits while I step over to her neck and offers the halter- she lowers her nose and then walks with me when I lead her out? She doesn’t approach me, but is the fact that she is calm and relaxed enough to wait for me to come to her a sign that we are, if not actually friends, at least on good terms? My presence did not disturb her relaxation in peace. So far in her life I have observed she is a naturally aloof mare, maybe this response aligns with her honest nature. Maybe it’s similar to the truth that there are people who naturally greet and hug everyone and people who tend to stay in place until the new arrival makes their way over to them and then has a pleasant conversation without feeling the need to physically touch with a hug? Is one bad and one good? Or is one simply preferable to certain people and less inviting to others?
What about the days when K is downright difficult to catch and tries to evade me at least for a time? Do we have a bad connection? Or do we have a strong one? Does she know she has the freedom to express her thought about leaving the pasture? As a lead mare, she usually has reasons on these days that might have nothing to do with me. She may sense a dangerous presence nearby and doesn’t want to leave Wyoming alone. She may sense something in the environment and would prefer the safety of her yard to going for an adventure where the danger lurks. The fact that she is communicating clearly she does not want to be caught and haltered may not mean she doesn’t like me today. However I think if she ran every time I came to find her, that would seem an indication of how she feels about me, or the work she is going to be asked to do.
I don’t have confident answers to these questions. I am also not sure if they have any relevance. Is it ok that the twelve year old girl thinks her horse loves her when someone with a little more experience can see the signs that the horse is incredibly uncomfortable? I’ve known people who always carry some kind of treat for their horse when they go out in the pasture, and they will tell you their horse loves them. I’m both a little jealous because who doesn’t love their horses always coming to greet them, but I know too much to allow myself to think the horse loves me in that case, so it wouldn’t work for me anyway. From an outside perspective however, when the horse comes running to them it sure looks more convincing than my horse jogging away with two hind feet kicked up in my direction.
It might be fun and make us feel good to convince ourselves that horses feel the warm and fuzzies about us, but then what? What happens when something tests the connection? Will it survive? Does that matter?
Yes. This I do know. Our connection to the horse will be tested someday when their brain or instinct wants to do something very different from what we need them to do where our safety could be on the line. If we don’t have a strong, healthy, real, connection we can lean into, it’s likely the horse will not be able to stay engaged when things go sideways, we can end up on the ground, in the hospital or if we’re lucky just a good scare. I think a fair amount of equestrian injuries come from deep misunderstanding of what is going on between the person and the horse. In fairness, even with a good connection things can go wrong quickly leaving us injured, but there are times that connection can save our lives because we need the horse to set aside it’s instinct to stay with us and think through what we are asking. If the connection is true, it makes a big difference when the turkeys (or grouse) leave the road. If we aren’t honest about what’s really going on between us we may not know the kind of thin ice we’re actually walking- especially if we are lucky enough to not fall through the cracks very often.
Just like between people, this kind of connection and relationship has to be built through experience over time.
Ross asserts that one challenge we face in really becoming a friend to our horses, is that they do not see their days as meant for flying lead changes, trail riding for hours, having their hooves trimmed, or whatever else we want to do with them… He observes being a horse is about grazing, drinking, snoozing in the sun, chasing away a pesky new herd mate, and etc. One problem is we are generally an interruption in their day, not a true part of their lives. They might be willing to engage in our desired activity, but take care not to automatically equate obedience with willingness.
Ross asserts that it is not bad to want to be your horse’s friend, or hope your horse wants to spend time with you. I agree for sure. I suppose I wonder how much a predatory human on two legs can provide in terms of what we look at as a true companion to a horse. He found the times he went long-trekking for hundreds of miles were the closest he came to possibly becoming enough a part of his horse’s life experience that they had a bond that became almost a friendship. He was not an interruption anymore, they were doing life together 24/7 as they moved across the landscape each day. I suppose folks who actively work their horses in real life jobs have a tighter bond than I am likely to even have with my horses, even as an endurance rider who occasionally spends entire weekends together.
Yet this is also ok. Is it possible I might go too far in what my expectations are for a willing partner to be also a best friend (when I have time for that friendship)? Does a horse have to love me in order to be a great partner?
Maybe these answers are as unique as there are people with horses. For me, I am beginning to question if we have to be friends the way humans think of friendship. Some people might feel the need for their horse to come running every time they enter the scene or their feelings are hurt. For me, right now, I think it’s more honest that my horse doesn’t have the same response every day, and I do want her to be have integrity of thought and feeling more than a compliance mindset. There are probably people not ready to have generative conversations with their horses, and compliance and obedience is going to be the best they have in this season. When you begin to allow your horse a real voice in the conversation, like with any relationship that enters a deeper level, we may hear things we don’t really want to hear. Ignorance can be bless! Sometimes when my friend Tom Moates helps a horse come out of a shut down and compliant place the people don’t really like what had been safely buried down in there. They’d prefer the shut down, dulled out, compliant horse, in many ways that’s easier than having real conversations and figuring out that the horse needs more than we have the tools to provide yet.
One thing I am sure of, I want my horse, even if she sees me as an interruption in her day, to not find our time together painful, confusing, or anxiety creating. I do want to know what my horse thinks and feels, and I want to be able to have influence over those thoughts and feelings. I want the work I do with my horse to leave her in a better place physically, mentally and emotionally better than she was before. I fail at this from time to time, but I believe it is possible. I want our connection to be based as much as possible in truth and reality. May I honor my horse for the wonderful creature she is and not who I want to think she is, as I know I have done in years past. My understanding of this over time may shift with new experiences, but may I always be curious and open minded to see what is actually in front of me and not a projection of what I wish were so.
If you don’t have something working really well in ideal conditions, you don’t have much hope of them working out in adverse conditions…
I’ve heard Harry Whitney remind people of this as a fundamental answer to various questions they ask about trouble spots with their horses. It pairs well with another quote, which was my own take home from two days in June watching him at Mendin Fences (TN):
In my experience, most people don’t know what it looks and feels like to have a horse truly mentally centered and present with you, and so most people don’t really get there, and this is a reason many people can’t seem to get a real change come through. The horse was never really centered up and present.
It’s been a priority to address Wyoming’s mental centeredness since I’d met Tom Moates early last year. Tom has been learning from Harry for years, and attention to the horse’s mind is a central focus for him as well. This doesn’t mean I’ve been successful it. We’ve made some significant strides in helping her become more relaxed, less angry, and significantly more cooperative than the other approaches I’ve tried over years. Yet I sensed a trouble in her that I had not gotten to the other side of, even as of this summer and the clinic we hosted in July.
Harry Whitney, Wyoming & Jaime in Floyd VA, August 2024
In mid-August, during Harry’s five-day clinic in Floyd (hosted by Tom), the question came to each participant: what is it you most hope to address this week with your horse?
I had one request: show me what it looks like to get Wyoming mentally centered and present.
Harry was willing to guide us through this, and on day one, our lesson hour was spent, from the field to the work space, on learning what she looks like when she is fully present and how to require that she make that a way of life for now.
Additionally, my job was to make the times she was present and relaxed as sweet as possible. This is the place that feels good. At first, any time I asked for her attention, she would start throwing out options I might ask her for, like walking a circle. It was as if she had a hard time believing I could ask for her to be relaxed, ready, and present and then just breathe a moment and find peace in that space. Probably I don’t find as much peace with these creatures as I could, and a change here will serve us both. This was all we did.
Harry & Wyoming finding a sweet spot with her mind present.
At the end of our session that day, Harry suggested I take her all the way back to her paddock walking backward and not taking a step she wasn’t “with me.” It took a lot for me to stay that present and focused.
It took a lot of focus on day one to walk backward to the gate connected at every step to release Wyoming from class. But I was committed to the process. Harry helped me to be able to see when she was present, and bring her back when she wasn’t. The entire week I did not take a step without expecting she would come back to being mentally centered. This is not to be confused with being “hyper focused” on the human at every second for fear of punishment. There are training methods where a horse is ambushed or punished for looking around. Though I use a flag for some of this work, it is built around creating an indirect distraction or sound or movement that draws the attention back to me. The key difference is intention: the actions is not at her – not a threat toward her. I need to become more important or interesting than the other distractions. Working with Harry, we don’t use fear or force as a motivating factor. Doing this takes a shift in thinking.
Once this becomes a way of life, the horse can look around and notice the environment because they have learned to quickly make note, let it go, and return to the place of peace which is back mentally centered with the human in the work. It is part of learning to let go of a thought that doesn’t serve the horse.
Wyoming is a highly sensitive horse that has her attention split, keeping everything around her in check in order to survive each day. When she is distracted keeping tabs on everything within five miles, she can throw out autopilot training moves, but she cannot stay present in the active conversation I want to have with her. I don’t want push button autopilot. This has not served us at all. I want actual communication, in real time, addressing the present moment we are in. In order to do this she has to let go of the other things and stay with me. As Harry helped us make this a reality, secondary issues began to dissolve on their own.
During the week we addressed some different challenges I had been working on. We loaded her onto a trailer that was darker and had a step up entrance (instead of a ramp).
Borrowing a strange trailer
I worked on “knot work”- addressing the claustrophobia from early halter trauma that’s been present in some form the entire time I’ve had her. The day we explored knot work, I expected to see at least some extreme reaction to the halter, but it simply never came.
Knot work
I rode her in the round pen; I’d had trouble in the past getting a forward thought to walk on without driving her. We came up against a little drama here, but worked through it in short order, and had a nice shift in riding as well.
Finally I felt a shift that seemed a significant change and I’ve continued this work at home. If this mare is not mentally present or centered up things do not go well. She gets annoyed at having her thoughts interrupted when she’s concerned about other things. Sometimes she still gets dramatic when she shares her feelings about her own ideas being interrupted or blocked. When she is mentally centered she is like the wonder horse I’ve always wanted. She is soft, adjustable, responsive, and willing.
I’ve been riding her at home in my round pen, enjoying great sessions where we are building like one would a green colt, forward, steering, stopping and backing.
I am trying to start this journey in as ideal conditions as possible. I continued to prioritize mental connection. I can put on the halter without fuss, load her on the trailer, and ride her in the pen. Each day more positive experiences and progress. Last week, Matt and I took her on a solo adventure, loading her on the trailer for a short drive to our local recreation area. We unloaded her, took a walk, then loaded her and returned home. It was a great success.
Matt, Wyoming & Jaime have a successful adventure
My next plan was to bring her to visit my farrier for Khaleesi’s shoe visit on Friday. I want to keep building on experience a real horse can have and farrier visit seemed a great next step to me. I trim Wyoming’s feet myself, and if we were able to get some trim work done or not was not important. Simply the experience of going on the trip successfully was the goal. Keep it simple.
What I did not account for was hurricane Helene.
Adverse conditions.
First, Hurricane Helene turned tropical storm was making her way through the South and though we never had the destructive storms, we had almost 2” of rain and gusty winds. All this boils down to prey animals on high alert. The mares were spring loaded by the time to get going came.
Second, the weather was crummy enough that though I was minimally willing to do what seemed necessary to have this adventure, I was less willing to go out early enough to assess her mental state, and intervene to find a working mindset before even considering loading. I gravely underestimated the effect of these adverse conditions. I might normally have planned a few minutes to shape this up… What I really needed in these conditions (in hindsight) was an hour of focus… and still, it might not have brought success.
Third, we had a soft deadline. I highly value my farrier and drive an hour over the mountain to haul to him. He was at home, and happened to be flexible. Still, night would fall at some point, and though I had a time window, it wasn’t endless. Time restrictions always feel like pressure. Pressure brings fear of failure which often makes for poor decisions.
To make a painfully long story shorter, Matt and I did the things that were successful in the past for about an hour. Over that time I watched the stubborn mare I used to know show up stronger to the forefront and dig in her heels. The more we insisted she join us with the trailer plan the more she resisted.
I made a pretty good mess of it as I became desperate to get it done. Matt was a phenomenal help, and he never got frustrated though things were not going well. When our best efforts and closest moments dissolved into escapes off the ramp in panic, I saw I was doing more harm than good and creating problems I was going to have to fix. I knew the frustration I kept at bay was getting closer to the surface, and I knew that would only make things even worse.
I made one good decision to set aside my own stubbornness. I made the call to abort the mission, put her back in the lot, and take the horse who needed shoes before we had to abandon altogether. Wyoming did not have to make this trip.
It was hard not to consider this admitting defeat and total failure. Because that’s exactly what it felt like, and I am not one to admit defeat easily. I told myself years ago I would NOT allow work with my horses to become a win-lose scenario. I am not in this to make my horses into losers. How I want to function is a growth model, and it’s a long journey. I was recently reminded by Adam Grant in his book Hidden Potential:
though straight line growth feels faster in the short term, it’s been proven many times that growth curves and loops are the only way to get farther over the long term.
For a straight line thinker I have to remind myself of this intentionally, often.
The mare was not with me, and we were way too deep in adverse conditions to swim out- especially considering it wasn’t necessary. Hopefully this was a loop in the long term trajectory that would carry us farther than my preferred straight lines of success ever would.
My biggest miscalculation was to think I could get her out of the field after a half day of being jacked up by her environment, and then load her as if we had already mastered this because we had a few successful trips in ideal conditions. If I would have stopped to ask myself if she was mentally centered up sooner it would have been obvious that she was not. For some reason I thought I could overcome this deficiency by sheer willpower. Strangely enough eight years of trying to overcome her inattentive mind to get her to do anything never worked. Why I thought I could revert to my old ways and get a different outcome is… mostly embarrassing.
After over thirty minutes of this idiocy, I saw it clearly. I realized she was minimally mentally present and that was my biggest problem. She wasn’t running me over or creating a danger and so I accepted it as good enough- but she was still highly distracted. After starting the process and getting very poor results I took her away from the rig to address her mental connection.
This was the most challenge I’ve ever had getting big enough for her to let go of every outside distraction a stormy day could bring. She would look at me and immediately avert her eyes, head, neck or even her body, to a sound or rustle or leaf in the air. To her this was survival and self-preservation. I couldn’t keep her mind for more than two seconds at a time. I worked very hard to get very big and very loud and very active and I could get maybe five seconds. If so I would take a few steps do it again and get a few seconds and take a few steps. In this mode I got her all the way onto the trailer, but as soon as matt touched the butt bar she would explode off because even though I could get her body on, her mind had not settled there.
It was a lost cause. I might have stopped after I realized she was not capable of staying present, and I should have realized that within five-ten minutes. I could have asked that question sooner and I might have realized that I was into depths we could not swim successfully. Possibly if I’d have addressed the mental state better in the first few minutes I might have had a chance. I don’t know.
As always there are the growth opportunities. I get to experience once again as a reminder what many people I care about are also experiencing when they get some momentum with their horses and then skip over – sometimes purposely and sometimes without realizing it- to the deep end and get into a bad situation. Not only is it humbling for me to hit a place I cannot overcome in one fell swoop, it’s good for me to have to experience what people around me are going through. I am willing to go through challenges in order to learn things that might be able to help others. And so as James tells us in his letter: Count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds! For you know the testing produces steadfastness, and let this have its full effect that you may be complete, lacking in nothing!
Also, it reveals to me me the dark, stubborn, frustrated part of me I hope to identify and eradicate. If I could have done so, I would have picked up that horse, hog tied her into that stall, and forced her on the journey. At some point I lost most of my compassion for her and the real sense of threat and pressure she felt.
Working in ideal conditions
In ideal conditions I have grown so much! I have tons of patience and empathy for what the horse thinks and feels. I can say I am here to help you and mean it. When the conditions squeeze me, what comes out? Eventually frustration and the desire to beat her with my flag until she complied by force, broken mind and broken will. I did not go there, but it was because I know that doesn’t work- not because of my stunning maturity and grace. It’s good to be reminded of the garbage that remains in the darkest corners that still need cleaning out. Lord help me, and thank you for exposing it without me acting on it.
Something encouraging I considered in my personal debrief: this mare has a history of going to fight mode unusually quickly. She has threatened violence when she feels treated unfairly, with punishment or force. Friday, her stubborn will engaged, refusing to be loaded on the trailer, however, she never threatened with dragon ears, rearing, or nipping. She refused, but she didn’t fight.
In the end, the conditions didn’t seem adverse enough to me to create this trial. I was wrong. Also, I had thought that our ideal conditions work was going well and it was. But I’ve learned from Harry that me, and many of us who are pursuing excellence and a higher working connection, are not aware enough yet of the subtleties in the ideal conditions that his eye would be. I can hear him say: you’d better get that working better because it won’t hold when things get adverse. The same as he has observed: most people don’t know what it looks and feels like for a horse to be fully present and truly mentally centered.
Practicing going forward and back through the gate keeping her present each step.
It seems many of us have to feel in mortal danger before we dig into what seems good enough. Apparently, for each person, there is a different threshold for working good enough. All foundations have a certain amount of weakness. Will it result in a tragic wreck or only sub-standard performance? It probably will depend in part on what kind of conditions you face. For Khaleesi, these adverse conditions were not a huge deal, for Wyoming they were a deal breaker. I want to be someone who digs deeper even when things are not downright scary and grow even when things seem good enough.
Harry… the ‘Coast Guard’ Whitney
I still having a long way to go. This means more time in the ideal to expose foundational cracks and more gradual steps into incremental adversity so the cracks are patched up before being totally overwhelmed beyond hope without a rescue effort from the coast guard. Someday I hope to see morelike Harry. Because of his experience and attention to details, time for him is shorter in the shallow end, and he has more tools and experience in the deep end- I suppose in some ways Harry is the coast guard.
Today I am grateful that horses have memories and experiences, yet they also shift quickly with their experiences. I am pretty sure I caused problems I’ll have to fix, but if I show up fresh the next day, I believe she will as well, and if I bring my A game she will respond. Nothing is beyond repair, even though repairing damage I’ve caused isn’t a good way to proceed.
Epilogue.
The following day we had a break in the rain and I spent some time with Wyoming to assess the damage. She was more difficult to halter in the field, but once I had her on line she came with willing softness and keeping her attention centered was easier in the calm sunny afternoon. I struggled to load her as easily as previous, but Matt had been watching and asked if he could try. It took some communication and patience, but he was able to load her twice fully on where she felt relaxed and calm. We did not close the bar, but took the progress and moved on.
Matt and Wyoming regroup after the storm
Matt then kept her attention and held the rope while I attended to her feet which did need a trim. She did so well we also put on her saddle and did some work in the round pen. All of this went well and Matt took the lead (literally) on much of it. He has a grace and patience for that mare I sometimes struggle with, and she responds well to it.
Yes there are some setbacks, there was a price from the poor choices and miscalculations I made, but these things will pass, the growth will continue in loops and curves. As always… Hope continues.
My eyes began to water in the heat of the afternoon as I stood in the large dirt arena watching the scene unravel. I was glad it wasn’t likely anyone would notice. My back was to the onlookers, and Mark was working with the wild mare, too involved in what he was doing to notice. I’m not so concerned about tears in public anymore, though it’s not my favorite, but I was pretty sure anyone who did notice would misunderstand the reason for the emotions gripping me in the scene.
They didn’t come from watching my mare rear violently in reaction to even feather light pressure on the halter. Particularly when she became so reactive she fell on her side in the dirt which was quite dramatic. (She wasn’t hurt).
The emotion didn’t come from worry that Mark was being unreasonable in his approach, creating unnecesary fear and stress, and watching him work with her might upset me. I knew he did not create any of what I was observing, it had been inside her as long as I’ve known her.
What grieved me as I watched Wyoming flailing on that lead rope like a fish on a line was a snapshot I had somewhere in my heart of how many of us go through life or seasons of life like this. We are fighting and we can’t seem to stop fighting. We end up getting hurt, and hurting those around us while we flail and fight against what we perceive as life threatening pressure but what is intended to be a comfort. I saw myself at times. I saw people I love at times. I saw humanity. I saw my beautiful mare react in dramatic fashion as if her life was in danger, unable to let go of her past experience, trauma, and fear to trust the guidance. It touched me in an unexpected way in that moment.
Mark Langley working with Wyoming
Mark Langley, who was instructing the four-day clinic on the last stop of his USA tour, cares deeply for the horses and this thing in her that overreacts to any pressure is a torment she does not need to carry. He was hoping he could help her get through it to the other side of this trouble. There is a physical or mental memory (maybe a combination) in her that was seared into her on day one of her mustang make over competition training.
I was told the history when I picked up the wild mare in Tennessee: the trainer put the halter on Wyoming, the mare reacted in fear and came aggressively toward the trainer, the trainer (in her own words) overreacted, putting excess pressure on the halter, and sent the mare up in the air. Her first experience of education with a human ended in a rear up, back flip, and injury to her neck that took her out of the contest and put her on a trailer to Tennessee to have a slower longer training process through the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Trainer Incentive Program (TIP).
It’s likely with the trainer’s natural horsemanship approach: round pen, energy work and driving to create draw, the mare could be successful and avoid having the feel of restriction of the halter on her head. She became an amazing energy and body language reader. She became a punishment avoiding release hunter. When we picked her up as total strangers, just walking into the small arena, she would hook on to us or whomever it was, and follow closely. It didn’t occur to me that so much draw had been created in this mare that she felt the only good place to be was next to a human in order to avoid being sent out and driven.
Since I’ve had the mare, asking her to back up and out of your space brings pinned ears and stress. It’s a huge feat years later to ask her to comfortably stay just out of your bubble. If I do get her to step back three feet and stand she gets anxious and begins to try to offer a circle or creep back in. She has the expectation that the human is going to ask something of her and she throws out possible options anticipating what might come next. She has learned if she doesn’t comply quickly enough with a request, the enforcing punishment will come via escalating pressure: a lead rope to her hind end, a flag will touch her, the bump on the halter. She lives in the future of what might be coming, and how to avoid it. If she can’t avoid it she feels trapped, gets angry and fights back.
the potential for pull back is serious in a trailer
I stopped natural horsemanship style driving about 18 months ago when I watched Harry Whitney work horses in February of 2023. I think it’s begun to help change some of Wyoming’s experience and reactions, but the deep early formative work with her is still churning away at her core, and when it gets poked it comes out in big reactive displays.
The physical feel is only one thread of the knot which is inside this horse. Many horses comply to driving pressure (I have one who did), but Wyoming was one of the horses for whom the combination created a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde monster. She is either snappy quick, spot on with her reaction to a request or super angry and violent. Additionally in layer of wound up layers, she is a mare who has a hard time letting go of anxious thoughts.
Jaime working with Wyoming during the clinic
Not only is strong drive and draw set into her, but when she is very close to me she can keep track of me physically while keeping her mind out on the larger environment. Asking her to back off three feet also means the human become part of the larger environment and she has to give mental space to keeping track me as well as everything in the next three miles in every direction. She has yet to become truly mentally centered in the way she can let go of the “other things” she holds onto for her survival.
It’s stunning how she can be in this mental, physical, emotional place and still function to the level she does. If we could ever get to the other side of trouble there’s a phenomenal mare in there.
How do we get to the other side of trouble?
If I could answer this definitively I could have helped a lot more people and horses than I have to date. Yet somehow I’m still at this mystery even when I get discouraged. I wonder if I’ll ever know something definitely enough to be of value to a horse- or maybe even some of my fellow humans who are willing to take the mysterious journey into this wilderness of trying to understand how to help a horse feel better and be a more powerful willing partner.
I do believe it is possible and so I don’t give up even when there are setbacks and it gets hard. I do believe with a horse like Wyoming it is a matter of going through to the other side of the trouble and not letting the trouble make her world smaller and smaller until she is afraid of any pressure at all.
It’s likely that Wyoming’s early training taught her that pressure meant she needed to adjust in order to get the pressure to go away. Unfortunately, anytime someone takes a rein in hand it creates a pressure or imbalance that the horse has to respond to – if done well it should bring the horse comfort through guidance, but if they have been trained to avoid pressure and seek release we have lost the ability to guide them through the reins or the lead rope. Very few people work their horses in the real world without reins or a lead rope. Nor do I recommend it as the ideal. Yet this means anytime someone picks up a rein to communicate with their horse, instead of relaxing into a guiding hand, many horses respond with anxiety to seek immediate release of pressure/imbalance which creates brace and tension through the body which works against strength, balance and grace in forward movement.
Jaime & Mark with Wyoming & Khaleesi
I have a hope that Wyoming can get through this extreme fear of pressure that was created early in her training (and solidified for a time by me) so she can trust me to guide her. I want her to feel the rein or lead rope guide her into where she will find peace and safety in my leadership. I want her to correct the imbalance she notices and in doing so find she has choices, and the freedom to choose a path of lease resistance that is fairly available to her because I am able to offer that. But I also want her to be able to stay connected at the end of the rope in appropriate balance of pressure like I would hold my dad’s hand to cross the street as a child.
She has to stop fighting first. If she would stop fighting she could follow that feel and see it would not bring her danger or pain, but comfort and safety. I asked myself if this deep sadness that came over me momentarily was indicative that this scene was playing out in my own life, or was a memory now. I’d like to say I’ve learned not to fight against the hand that guides me with strength, kindness and love. I know that my own journey through the wilderness is far from over, and sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m fighting the guidance that feels like pressure and imbalance and sometimes downright life threatening to me.
I’m sure Wyoming doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do in the bigger picture just as I really don’t always understand the big picture of what is going on in my own life while I’m in the middle of it all.
We were not able to get Wyoming to the other side of trouble in the four days of the clinic, but I learned some things that I hope will help me continue to guide her through. As with most worthwhile journeys, I feel like we’re deep into the wilderness, but in recent years I’ve learned something about the wilderness. I’ve learned it’s the place we least want to go, yet it’s the place where the transformation takes place. If we are going to get to the other side of trouble, chances are we have to be willing to be led into the wilderness.
Last year I spent some time with Harry Whitney, read some books by Tom Moates– and invited him to come visit with us here in the mountains, and listened to a fair amount of Mark Langley‘s podcast. I was steeping myself in this way of considering the horse that was a fundamental shift in my approach as much as possible.
I had some nice changes with Khaleesi over the year that I’m loving watching take root into an early harvest this Spring. As we prepare for some events this year, I can feel her new levels of relaxation and adjustability in movement! However Wyoming and I had a rougher go of the changes and trying to sort out how to understand each other in a better way. Last summer there were a fair amount of death threats (probably from each of us) as the lines of muddled communication began to untangle, and sometimes things get looking worse before they begin to smooth out.
Regardless, I knew there was something important in the process so I kept at it.
Then the horses moved home in November which has been a big change for all of us that is settling in nicely now six months into it… and I’ve begun to spend some time working with them again.
The initial work with Wyoming this year has been promising, and in the subsequent sessions, I’ve seen continued progress toward more partnership. Certainly the difference rests mostly in me. Change is possible, but it has to begin with “me” because usually the horse is a perfectly good horse doing what horses are created to do, and usually what the exhibit is in response to the way their environment (mostly human caused) has shaped in them. So regardless of who that human (or humans) were and what it was that did the shaping- that’s not nearly as important as where to go next. The change has been happening in me as I continue to seek and grow and take an honest assessment of my flaws and weaknesses in order to commit to address them.
I’m encouraged by the start of this year, and it gives me hope that there really is change possible for the two of us. I have a sliver of excitement that maybe this could be “the year” for Wyoming and me to begin to function together in a positive way!
Change is possible, but it has to begin with “me”
People have mentioned lately that staying with this dysfunctional situation for over six years must mean I have a whole lot of patience and determination. I suppose in some respects that is a little true. However… I remind them that she had more patience and determination to help me, because she is the one who refused to get on a trailer for that long- and I live in the end of nowhere… which meant I couldn’t move her on if I wanted to and pass her education on to someone else! Unless I was willing to shoot a perfectly healthy horse (which I did consider once or twice, but never seriously!) I wasn’t left with many options but to keep slogging onward. Considering in all those years of lots of sound and fury and threatening, she only once gave me a bruise from trying to bite the halter and grazing my arm, I think she’s been the one to praise. Apparently she never gave up on me.
I won’t get ahead of myself yet. We have a long journey ahead of us, but I think we’ve begun to sort out a better path, and maybe you’ll begin to see some exciting changes in our story this season… stay tuned and see!
Meanwhile, here are two videos that will show more than my words are able how the progress is coming for now.
I scrolled through a video recently where Mark Langley was leading a distracted horse around an arena at a clinic, and whenever the horse attempted to blow past him instead of correcting the horse, he simply changed direction and the horse found himself right back slightly behind Mark (where he preferred the horse positioned). He did this with such grace and softness that it didn’t feel as though the horse was being tricked or punished. Mark played to the onlookers as if he had possibly forgotten something the other direction, or maybe dropped a coin and needed to step back to find it, or was otherwise distracted himself. This mental state was meaningful because the scene playing out didn’t carry any weight of correction. It was a human and a horse navigating around an arena where the horse kept finding himself in exactly the place the human wanted him to be — without judgement.
The horse began to take interest in what was happening with the human at the end of the lead rope, this began to become more engaging than the worry about his environment, and eventually the horse stayed in the zone Mark wanted him. It was as if he had figured out the puzzle instead of being trained or corrected into place. I heard Mark say (this is a paraphrase):
This horse came in here distracted and fearful of this new environment. In this case, with this particular horse who tends toward fear reactions, if I were to harshly correct or punish him for his distracted pushy behavior, I would be increasing his fear reaction by making him more afraid of me than the environment.
The kind of horsemanship I’m interested in is not formulaic, and when posing a question to anyone worth their salt content, the most likely answer will probably sound like a variation on: it depends. The sticky wicket is that a real solution means understanding the root cause and usually a good horseman needs to see what’s going on with their own eyes to notice things that many of us don’t see unless pointed out. They then interpret it with a best guess, and usually after that comes trying something to see if the guess on the right track, and then how the horse responds will determine the way forward for that particular creature in that scenario. Anyone who claims can fix problem X, Y or Z with a three-step, five-step, or any set rubric is selling snake oil, and oddly enough, even snake oil works for a percentage of things….
Mark does a pretty decent job of explaining what his approach is and allowing for the “it depends but you might consider trying….” Which considering we can’t all get to Australia (or Virginia!! We have spaces still available for his USA tour 4-day clinic in Greenville, VA, July 4-7, 2024) can give some ideas to people with fewer resources close to home. So, to clarify, the scenario I watched was not the one and only best answer to a horse who blows past a handler in leading. It was a unique scenario where this response from Mark taking into account the circumstance and the horse’s personality and what Mark had to offer helped to support a struggling horse and bring peace and a present mental state.
This is probably not what my go-to with Khaleesi would be if she was not leading well. However, as I watched, I connected some dots to Wyoming, who is also a fear-reaction-type horse that is on hypervigillance most of the time. I am certain my past training in correcting behaviors I did not want to continue, created in her more fear and anxiety than supporting her confidence and certainly did not bring her peace and a present state of mind. Considering this is what I think about moving forward with her I made a mental note and thought I might play around with that idea when we had some time.
Then Monday came, and I had some time.
My goal was somewhat nebulous: Work together in a way that gave her the least amount of ill feeling possible.
Wyoming packs around some baggage and isn’t entirely cooperative to my plans most days. I was toying with what it might look like to not “correct” her when we begin to diverge in plans.
Could I work with Wyoming in a way where she doesn’t feel wrong, but can I renegotiate to make things work out together better for us both? Can I adjust to keep us at least loosely on my plan for the day and… somehow set it up so that she simply lines up with what I’m doing almost naturally?
In the past, I’ve corrected Wyoming in ways that have been, in her opinion, overly harsh and unfair. Can I help Wyoming make choices that work out better for us without her having ill feelings about the work? How can I shape her behavior patterns without her feeling negatively about our relationship and disconnect us (and not descend into complete positive reinforcement either– we’ve gone there for a time and it’s is missing some components we need for a strong connection)? Can I find ways for us to cooperate and her to become increasingly willing to work together? Can I change her mind about what to expect from me? What would that look like?
I took the halter out to the yard and she eyed me suspiciously. I am sure they know what color halter has their name on it! Also, I probably don’t hide very well who I’m most focused on. That’s ok, I also have given up trying to manipulate my way too intelligent mares by tricking them. That erodes trust. None of my horses were born yesterday.
She knows what I’m doing there with the halter, and so I offered it to her. I’ve never had a mare who comes running to me and dips her nose in the noseband begging me for a work session or a ride… That being said, considering in seasons past she has occasionally all but threatened my life when I offer the halter, she showed pretty mild levels of disinterest instead of dragon ears and nipping at me, and though she had the entire yard to walk away, and she did not. She stayed with me as we negotiated the terms of our connection for the day. Eventually her nose went in the band with minimal fuss and I was able to tie a good knot as she tentatively decided to give me a chance today.
Upon walking out the first gate, through the “front yard” I played the make direction changes against my straight line nature and we made arcs and loops around the yard in the general direction of the second gate. I liked this exercise for the moment. Not only did it stop her from getting ahead of me and cutting me off (don’t take me away from my herd please) but I didn’t have to correct her with a flag swish or rope bump- I simply changed direction and she found herself always positioned just in the right place to follow my lead. She didn’t get frustrated or worried, instead, she seemed curious and she kept herself within a certain boundary to me (I never had to adjust my lead rope) and figured out the game which was emotionally neutral.
When we made it to, then through, the second gate, I rewarded her with some fresh spring grass and hand grazed her a minute or so.
So far so good!
Next, I decided to open the trailer and see where we were since November. The divider is currently out which means its a more open feeling box. I walked on and didn’t do much more than that. Again, as Tom reminds me, she knows what’s going on here. We’ve been playing with trailer loading in this very trailer since she came her years ago. She considered, took a moment at the end of the ramp, and I paused to wait. She came right in, then backed out, came back in, backed out calmly, asked me a few questions, and without ever having to make it “uncomfortable” with the flag, she found the relaxed space in the box with me and never became worried or agitated. I walked her off to hand graze and then went back about four times and each time she was less concerned being in the adventure box.
Loading practice
That was a great first day back in the trailer!
Next I walked her up the driveway to the front of the house where the saddle was set out. I also have some grass in my front yard as a bonus! I groomed her minimally for mud and a layer of shedding fur, and tacked her one step at a time, taking a little circle walk or hand grazing in between and found she never had that ill feeling surface. Only in tightening the girth did she turn her head with a hard eye… I kindly asked her if she might just keep her head straight and “look over that way” if she’s going to give me the stink eye, while I do this, and she relented without much fuss. I also tightened in increments and gave her a little walk circle or a moment to graze in between that as well.
I had not believed I could get to riding before things would fall apart on this day one back in work, but here I found myself. How might I ride her around the yard without bringing up the ill feeling she had gotten in riding previously? I thought it over and decided I would set up a little game… In front of my house was the patch of grass she’d been enjoying off and on, what if I got on her a ways down the driveway and encouraged her to walk toward the house and grass patch? Motivation and purpose can be incredibly helpful.
And so I took the mounting block down the driveway and stood on it. I reminded myself as I’d done the whole session, just like the halter, the trailer, she knew what we were doing here. In the past, when I asked her to line up with me to mount, she nipped and showed concern, but today I waited a moment while she walked in an arc trying to negotiate her position. I simply stood still and let her sort herself out. She eventually put herself in the perfect position. I put a foot in the stirrup, said a little prayer for grace, let my breath out, and sat in the seat. She stood calmly while I rubbed her and waited a while….
I made the intention not to be in a hurry. I rubbed her and relaxed, thought about where I wanted us to go, then sat up, opened my arm out with the lead rope and tried gently to bring up some energy. Wyoming is incredibly sensitive and if I bring up my energy sharply she feels it like a rude slap in the system. So I dialed up the volume of “walk” in me until I felt her begin to shift. She only took a couple steps but it was a start and she did it without ear pinning or offense. I continued to ask her to take a few steps at a time toward the grassy patch and when we finally made it I dismounted and offered her a moment of grass. We repeated this cycle a few times.
The second time I saw a remnant of that past bad attitude and as I gently tried to direct her (probably at this point erring on the side of not enough clarity which is also super annoying to a horse like Wyoming) she reached toward the stirrup and made an attempt to bite my toe. Thankfully I have metal wrapped western monels for her to make contact with and I didn’t have to do a whole lot to redirect her (not even horses like making teeth contact with metal). A few more circles than last time and we made it back the grass. This time she did not try to eat. I think she was more engaged with our activity which is not a bad thing.
We did a third time toward the house and it was a mixed bag of wandering, but it was complete success if one is looking for absence of ill feelings from either of us, and I decided three times was enough for a Monday afternoon and I took off the tack.
On the way back to the herd I stopped at the trailer and we diverted back inside the box for a moment and it was relaxed and easy. Then we wandered slightly circuitous toward the inner gate to the herd. After entering I walked a few steps and removed the halter from a very quiet mare.
After setting her loose she stood there with me in no rush to disconnect. This is a good sign. We must have done something of value for her to decide to stay close once she’s turned loose.
Looking back, I was pleased with this session. One reason I’ve waited so long to take time to work her outside the yards was because I haven’t felt ready to take on the battle the work with her can become. This approach put a check in the positive column and considering we have some baggage and negative past experiences, that is not a bad thing.
And yet…. as I processed the session with Tom, he reminded me that this mare still gets offended at being asked to do anything not in her play book at the moment. When she’s asked to “let go” of her own thought and “come along with me” she chooses to fight about it and has learned to hang on to those thoughts with much more force than is reasonable for an equine companion.
This is true.
Sometimes one has to get big enough to break loose that hard thought and come out the other side feeling better about it, and yet I’ve gotten into those situations with her where I try to get bigger and actually, I can get pretty big, but even though I can prevail, I’m not certain she feels any better for having complied in the end. Our relationship has not improved for that experience. I don’t believe this is because the work Tom is referring to isn’t important and necessary, it’s more that I don’t always have the ability to bring it to positive on the backside. We just end up in a fight, that I kind of win (if you can call it that) and that’s not what he means when he talks about getting big enough to make a change for the better. And without more experience actually doing that work, I am not likely to magically get better at it either.
This is where I sit in the journey, where things are murky and less clear than I like. This is where a formula would be fantastic and I understand why people prefer that kind of horsemanship. The kind that gives an answer.
I was glad to have a day where the relationship was on a positive feel between us and I still got done what I had hoped for. It is never a bad thing to have a good feeling day with your horse. In fact, I think I might could use to rack up some good feeling times together where we both feel successful and neither of us had to deal with fear. In truth, I do have to sometimes deal with fear with the dragon mare (though I try not to allow it to rule me), and I believe that she also faces fear when I take her out of her comfort zone and take away her ability to self-determine her reactions to anything that might come our way.
This is why we can’t go together into the real world yet because I can’t promise a perfect conditions bubble out there, and we don’t have the tools to come together if things go sideways without a bit of a wreck. The positive feeling day did little to seek out the hard resistant places inside her and help heal and release them either or work on tools to get through a mess without it being a wreck. This stuff still lurks down there and will show up again no matter how good I get at helping her “feel” good about our work.
A good relationship is not one that thrives as long it is always kept in happy, predictable, safe places. That is actually a very weak relationship. A good relationship is one that can withstand challenges and unhappy feeling, that can stand firm in fear and stress even if it’s not pretty. A good relationship won’t disconnect in the messy unpredictability of real world circumstances.
Wyoming having a session with me where she was never directly confronted or corrected I believe had value for us. But the short of it is, it won’t be the way we work every day. We have some things to expose that will demand some confrontation of what’s going on deeper down. We don’t have to tackle all of it in a day though.
Looking forward, I get to consider how to approach our work, and thankfully my friend, author and horseman Tom Moates visits semi-regularly (contact me if you want to come on board and join us on our 2-day roving clinics!) and it’s nice to have someone farther along the trail to help poke the places that will bring about the fight to help us move through them without getting stuck there or disconnected. I still need some help with her gaining the tools to keep the connection even when things go sideways.
The beautiful thing about this all, is I believe we can continue to improve. We can open up some of those old places that have gotten scar tissue and some infection, created disconnection, and we can, in time, get better. This solid relationship doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through working out challenges together and coming out the other side still able to trust each other. The only way it can get stronger is to be tested.
I am grateful for the people who have gone before me on this road to “better” who help me see things I wouldn’t otherwise see, and help me to grow. In life as well as horses, we should all consider who is it that we are looking up to? Who are we following behind and learning from intentionally? What do they look like and would I be honored to think someday I might resemble them? And who is coming up behind us that we are investing in with what we have to offer?
That, more than anything else, is what this whole thing is all about. That is the stuff that will last.
I took some clips of the work from the day this blog was composed and spliced them into a short highlight video. Watch below:
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver revolutionized agriculture in the South after the Civil War. Working with children of ex-slaves in a land exhausted by cotton and a painful history, his hope was to “improve the lot of the man farthest down.” He made it his purpose to find ways to renew the land and teach farmers about self-sufficiency and conservation. An article from Tuskegee University revealed that: Dr. Carver took a holistic approach to knowledge, which embraced faith and inquiry in a unified quest for truth, believing that commitment to a Larger Reality than ourselves is necessary if science and technology is to serve human needs rather than the egos of the powerful. His belief in service was a direct outgrowth and expression of this.
This resonated with me. I also am on a unified quest for truth in each part of my life with a commitment to a Larger Reality (a creator God) who gave us an orderly world to be studied and deep truths uncovered that hold true in many different applications. I also believe if we seek in honest humility and the heart to love and serve other instead of self we will have more clear vision and understanding.
In other words, in the language of Dr. Carver:
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.
This quote came at a time when I had begun to see what appeared to be positive changes in my progress with Wyoming, and I had been considering what was bringing about the change after so many years… It is always likely the change is more in me than she (my wild mare is already just about perfect at being herself) but what was the change in me? I knew it was a deeper level of serving her needs above my own, which coincides to a deeper love for her than I’d been walking out previously.
I am also a violinist and I’ve played more weddings than I could count. There was a local Catholic priest who always had the same wedding homily. He would talk about love. I remember him saying we throw the word around for too many things— we love chocolate or coffee or wine or soccer or traveling or staying home… we love people to death (what does that even mean?) in English we have one word and we use it to speak of our favorite sports team in one minute and our “till death do we part” spouse in the next. I don’t think I completely followed him to what this meant about marriage, but the point that our language falls dreadfully short in expressing more accurately what we feel-choose-carry in the way of affection.
I have always said, and believed, I love my horses. More than chocolate (anyone else humming along to that lyrics your love is better than chocolate… better than anything I think I’ve tried….) But what did it really mean to say I loved my horses, and was it true? Could it be truer?
What I propose in this meandering ponderance of truth, love, and deep secrets, is that a shift came in me that brought new levels of improvement between Wyoming and myself. I really do like her- even as she has been unable to cooperate with me in any way that could be seen as successful from any angle for about seven years (that’s a long time to have and try to work with an uncooperative horse I think for most people…) and regardless of her performance I have been dedicated to staying in the process with her. Yet though I’d say I love her, I realize how I saw her was a problem/project to conquer. This summer, gradually, I began to see her less as a complicated mystery to untangle, less a representation of my current failure to work with an equine I’ve had in my care for many years… and I began to see her.
As I was able to release more of my ego, to let go of my need to fix things and solve problems, I began to have a more authentic compassion for her, how she feels, and what her experience was in all of this. The filter I’d been seeing her through which created some minor distortions was disintegrating, and the more I truly loved her (instead of what I might be able to do with her, or how she could perform for me, or even what she could teach me) the more I had clear vision of what was happening in the moment between us.
Wyoming has been challenging, but I often related to her strong willed, fiery spirit and refusal to go along with a program that was not working for her. The mare in all these years has never given up on me, and I haven’t given up on her. We’ve gotten in a few near wrecks, and yet she has always come back to reconnect with me and try again. For a mare that occasionally threatens my life, she actually has a lot of grace.
But did I love the horse? I wanted to. I thought I did, and maybe I did in part, but not the way I have come to recently.
I didn’t understand: what was it that kept her from walking in the compliance I could extricate from Khaleesi? What on earth did this horse have to fret about? She didn’t want for any necessity, including pasture, a stable herd to depend on, shelter, non-invasive but attentive health and nutrition care… I’ve never been able to ask much of her- so her life is pretty ideal it seems from my human point of view. I could not wrap my head around why on earth she could be so snarky and grumpy at every interaction that wasn’t custom fit to her short sighted equine demands. I’ve had her checked out physically on just about every level. This inability to understand what could possibly be so bad that she’d threaten to take me out when I try to work with her has been mystifying.
This is not happy to see me…
Then I began to work with Tom Moates, who has been a Godsend for getting an outside pair of eyes on us and guiding me to work with her within the truths he has picked up from years of close work with Harry Whitney. His regular visits to help us sort out a better path have been a game changer to chipping away at the trouble we seem to get into.
That doesn’t mean it’s been roses and sunshine. Honestly, it has looked on the surface like everything was getting worse, yet I sensed something was different this time. I felt that deep tuning fork reverberate, telling me that we were going deeper in, digging out some wounds, some history, some infection, some sewage, but if we could face these things together and try to release them without fear, maybe this time we might get to a new place. So I kept trying.
Over the summer, armed with guidance from Tom in person and via email/video, I spent many hours a week trying to find common ground. Wyoming’s stall (aka the shark tank) has been my classroom this year.
The halter has always been sticky to some extent. Though for years I have been able to get her head in the rope halter (and she will comply), I have always sensed that it was not ok. My gut tells me this is a key: the halter is a basic loss of her freedom, and it takes a lot of trust to volunteer to submit to anyone in that way. I am still not on her list of trustworthy enough to relinquish that level of control.
It is worth considering that putting a halter on a horse- a very small piece of equipment- takes away almost entirely their ability to self govern. There are limits, horses can jerk a lead rope out of a human’s hands, or I’ve had Tom tell me I looked a bit like a kite as she pulled me right off the ground in retreat, but once we have the ability to control the somewhat delicate head with all those nerve endings and the soft tissue places around the nose, we have a powerful level of force over them, especially if tied secure to a post with a strong rope.
Over the years I have tried to find better ways to use the halter than force, and last year when I heard Mark Langley talk about guiding horses instead of driving them it impacted me as kernels of truth tend to do when I hear them. Being prey animals, horses can be driven into things especially if we have a halter/lead rope that prevents real escape. I have driven her over the years to do a lot of activities, but she has never felt good about it, and no matter how pretty and snappy she looks trotting or cantering around me, she is not relaxed or happy.
I didn’t not love her. I wanted what was best for us both, which is a cooperative relationship with her humans. She lives in a human world now. The wild life is not all it’s cracked up to be so I do not agree that she would be better off left on the range. There’s starvation, drought, predators, and extreme weather there. I doubt she would be less fearful than she is here when she goes into high alert when the deer roam through at night.
Still, I didn’t know how to help her or me, and I flailed around with various levels of success and unsuccess and the mysteries remained out of reach.
As I continued to regress this summer to the most basic fundamentals, I once again asked: can you be ok with me putting the halter on you? I found myself summoning the courage (thank you Tom for being the guinea pig and flag man) to open the stall gate and stand in the gap, vulnerable to attack,and offer the halter to her knowing she could choose to take me out. But oddly enough, if I came in with too much self-protection, she felt the fear brace in me, she would brace right back against me, and we could not breach the impasse. I had to make the choice to risk being hurt and show up with a white flag (actually no flag) instead of a weapon. With some basic safety in mind, I would hold out the halter from one knot away from my body so the noseband draped open and allowed her to make the choice to put her nose in on her own.
I did not encourage her to bite at the halter. It’s not good manners at the minimum, and I don’t want her nipping at my tools to “work out for her” but the other problem is, her reaction to that piece of equipment is actually that strong so I also had to acknowledge that without punishing her. I don’t want her to spend her life thinking it’s ok to bite at my equipment- or at me, and I don’t want to send the message that I don’t want to know what she’s thinking or feeling. It was a very fine line, how to express ones thoughts and feelings in an appropriate way! I’m sure I did not always successfully navigate this delicate balance and it takes impeccable timing. She must think it’s her action of nipping at the halter that creates the reaction that might be a poke from my finger at her cheek, but that she has control of not being poked (try not nipping at the halter!). The right instant timing is action-reaction; just a moment too soon in anticipation is picking a fight; enough delay becomes punishment (which we NEVER want). However, as I began to care more about how she felt and helping her, than getting my task done without being injured, something shifted.
It seems that letting go of what I really wanted was the path toward actually receiving what I really wanted.
Harry and Tom both talk about creating an imbalance that the horse will work to correct. Take for example how a bit works. When the human takes “hold” of the bit in some way, it creates an imbalance that the horse will move its entire body around to fix, which is how we can control so many things along a huge animal’s body with a small piece of metal carried in the mouth.
I had come to see that just my presence creates a strong imbalance for very sensitive Wyoming. I can stand in Hope’s stall doorway a very long time before she bothers to find out why I’m there. I might need to make some noise to get her to care at all. With Wyoming it’s different. Even without the halter, just standing at her stall gate, it did not take long before she stopped munching on hay and began to move. She looked out her window… but she was not unaware of me, she was trying to find peace, and if she could send her mind out the window it might help, but, as I waited I saw it did not work for her. My presence was still too disruptive even if I did nothing but stand there.
I added the halter and this was even more disruptive without making a sound. The same looking out the window was her first try to make things right, then she would look at me, then look back out the window, then look at me again. Then she would take a step in a circle toward me, and pin her ears giving me threatening dragon face. Maybe she could scare me away. Nope. I just stood there with the halter held out. She would step toward me and nip toward the halter, I would do various things to discourage that without picking a fight. Then she would stand with her nose over the half wall/gate to khaleesi’s stall, a position that would be very hard for me to force the noseband on her. And I would still wait. Someday, I hoped she might choose to allow the halter. If she would choose, it would change everything.
In the process of this I could see the depth of how disturbing this was for her. It didn’t make sense in my human brain, but I could not disregard what was in front of me. I began to be intensely curious toward this dynamic. She did not go back to eating hay. She would occasionally cycle back to the window, but never for long. For most of the time she would stand very close to me, I could touch her with the halter on the neck, or other parts of her body, but she did not want that noseband to capture her. In all this I did nothing to force her to participate, and yet participate she did, in the all the ways she could.
I had begun paying more attention to what the truth was for her, as strange as her truth seemed to me, than what I was trying to do or get done.
Gradually I was able to halter her with increasing relaxation. This process wasn’t a dramatic moment where she chose as I hoped to put her nose in the halter voluntarily. It started with a shift in position where she seemed to suggest: I cannot bridge this gap yet, it’s too much for me, but if I stand here quietly you can put the noseband up my nose and I will try not to fight you.
The reason I believe this is accurate, is because when she did begin to position herself allowing room where I could put on the noseband, she had minimal nippy reactions, and once the halter was on and tied she began to relax there in the stall with me. This is a time when I would stand there in the stall with the halter on, rub on her, scratch her, breath deep, and make it a really nice place to be together. It was here I began to notice just how much tension she carries in her neck. She has such a level of self-protection about her it’s no wonder she feels terrible.
Some of the work this summer staying in tune to how she is feeling in the work
As summer melted away to fall, I had a shift in routine that meant I had to bring the horses in and out of the barn across the yard to a remote pasture which meant I had to halter them. I knew this would come and it concerned me- having to take my life in my hands to manage the wild thing did not sound fun (in the summer I could get the halter on or walk away and it didn’t really matter, now I had to get this job done in order to move her). However the foundation we built through the summer set us up for success.
At first I’d move the herd one at a time. I liked spending the time and attention on Hope solo, who is slow, as we did the walk together. Khaleesi is pretty manageable at whatever pace or need, but Wyoming benefits from focus and clarity in everything we do, so walking her alone was preferable. This meant some days I would start in the barn and take Khaleesi into the remote field. When I returned Wyoming was already becoming stressed because of the imbalance in her environment (herd separation). She is smart enough to realize that it was the halter that was her pathway to rebalancing in rejoining her lead mare. Instead of a mess or violence I would step into the stall and she would come to me and dip her head at the noseband (very willing) and I had to ask her to slow down and not revert to autopilot with her brain already in the other field and her body stuck with me (this the the condition where a horse has lost her mind). In this way she began to invite the haltering process because it had meaning attached to it she wanted to engage in. Similarly in the large field where I worried I might never catch Wyoming again, she was usually the first one who came to me and agreed to the halter to go back into the barn for breakfast and a break. This new routine I worried might get one of us killed actually helped us establish some good patterns.
One of the days I moved them all at once for necessary efficiency…
Looking back however, it was one of the days I was rubbing and scratching the mare in her stall trying to help her see she could let go and relax and trust me even with the halter on, that the rock hard muscles in her neck simply would not relax. Even as her eyes began to soften and she was reveling in the butt and underbelly scratches she was getting, the tension was rooted deep, and it was here that something broke loose inside me.
Harry Whitney says it would really help horse people if they could learn to recognize the motions that go with good emotions, and the motions that go with negative emotions. As I stood next to this wild creature who has lived with us for seven years, I realized looking back how much tension and brace this horse carries all the time. Tears stung my eyes as I considered the depth of the worry she carries around, and I felt overwhelming compassion for her.
I have not loved her like this before.
I didn’t want to fix her issues. I didn’t want her to have safer “manners” for all the human interactions that would be required of a normal horse. I didn’t want to know I could get her on the trailer… I didn’t want to solve the problem of why I’ve had this horse seven years and can’t ride her still. I didn’t even want to know I could halter her without her nipping at me. (Although I did want those things, they became highly insignificant)
I wanted to know how on earth I could intervene in her world in a way that could help her let go of some of what she was packing around, and that she would feel better about her life. I found myself begging for the insight that would help her to feel good for maybe the first time in her equine life since being rounded up on the range all those years back.
This is when something began shifting anew.
What changed?
Me.
I have always loved this horse, I thought.
But not like this.
George Washington Carver was knows for his humility and service. He cared so much for the people that were struggling, forgotten, rejected, or oppressed, that he went into his lab with the peanut and love poured out of him. A kind of love that opened up the secrets of the soil, the peanuts themselves, and in that place revelation came and revolutionized agriculture forever. Crazy and unscientific as it might seem, it was in his posture of love and not ego or fame or self-interest, the secrets were revealed.
I had a glimpse that day in the barn with Wyoming, when my heart broke for the years I’ve seen her gallop across the field with tension through her body brought on by stress, neck raised and stiff, instead of that beautiful fluid movement that comes with relaxation and a stretching out of the muscles and joints, and I grieved that I hadn’t yet figured out how to help her. Not for my ego. For her.
Hope Horsemanship carries a verse instead of a tagline or motto. It is Jeremiah 33:3 Call to me, and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known. I then pondered another truth in the same big book of wisdom: If I had a profound understanding of God’s hidden secrets… but have not learned to love, then I am nothing.
We are not worthy of the deep secrets, we are not trustworthy of them, if we don’t love first and foremost.
Wyoming, and most people around us- know the difference between saying we love and having that love authentically pouring out of us. You cannot fake what is in the heart. Not to a horse at least. Until she knew that love coming through me authentically, her secrets were kept under a tough braced up shell. She couldn’t trust me with vulnerability. This is a road. I have not arrived. Still, I can see progress.
Wyoming trusts enough to willingly ride in the trailer for the first time.
I wanted to say she didn’t have much choice, as a horse she couldn’t choose another owner. But the truth struck me that I also didn’t have much choice! Considering she wouldn’t get on a trailer to save her life, I didn’t have much opportunity to sell or give her away either! We have been bound together for some greater purpose. Now she appears to be at least somewhat loadable, but it’s too late to go back now. I am hers and she is mine. Hopefully the mystery will continue to reveal and it will be a good story when it’s all told.
Hope Horsemanship 