It seems that it is true what they say: if you keep persevering in learning how to understand a horse, eventually you start getting a clue.
One of the biggest problems I have is a lack of confidence within myself to push the boundaries with my horse and to try to learn something new, or solve some existing problem, without my teacher Marina “handholding” me through it. She keeps telling me that eventually it’ll come together for me, and I will stop getting completely stumped by any unexpected behavior that Becky is presenting to me, but will instinctively (or consciously) pick up on certain nuances of that behavior and be able to respond appropriately.
Today I went out to see Becky with a firm intention to try something new, probably get into trouble doing that, and see if I can figure my way out of it. Test these developing “instincts”, so to speak.
I chose to do some liberty work in the round yard, which we haven’t done for about 12 months now (so I figured we both forgot most of what we knew).
The idea of the exercise was for Becky to go around the round yard, being in tune to my body language as I was directing her from the middle of the arena. So as I walk a small circle in the middle of the arena, she would walk a large one – if I increase my stride, she would go from walk to trot and so on. I also had a lead rope in my hands in case I needed to make a slapping sound against my leg if she ignored my body language.
We started at the walk, and that went quite well. When I asked for a trot, things immediately went wrong. Her trot was very tight and short with her head up instead of low and relaxed, and she started speeding up immediately as if fleeing. My first idea was that she was mentally just leaving me, wanting to get out of the yard and go to her friends (whom she could see from the yard). But when I slowed my own walking in the middle of the yard, she actually came back down to a walk too. So she was still “with me”. So what was the fleeing about? No idea. There was elevator music in my head, and the nagging panic of not being able to figure things out once again.
One thing I have learned though is that trying and trying something that didn’t work the first time was only going to make things worse. If I had no idea, I had better go back to something I knew, which, for me, was putting the halter and lead back on her and doing the same exercise but on the lead (which we have done many times). As I did that, I became very much aware of how many little corrections I was asking her to do: asking her to increase her stride in places where she became short as her attention went somewhere else, or asking her to move out if she cut into the circle. I was communicating with her all the time. But when I was asking her to do that very same thing at liberty at a trot, as she went faster and faster, I stopped communicating with her. I just walked at my increased pace but did nothing else and basically left her floundering on her own, obviously panicked about the new situation she was in.
I took the halter off again, asked her to walk out at liberty and this time, when I asked for a trot, I told myself “don’t allow her to just go into a fleeing trot. She feels panicked about it and she does not need to continue feeling that way”. So as soon as Becky started getting tight and speed up, I asked her back to a walk where she was OK (and if she didn’t respond to my feet slowing down, I got in front of her shoulder, so I did not let her to just barrel past me in that panicky trotting state.) It took only 3-4 tries where we went from walk to trot to walk, and her trot became steadier, more even and more relaxed. I could even start directing her a bit more while in the trot without the fear of her panicking and rushing off again.
Recognising that her panic was not a sign of her mentally leaving me, but that it was increased as I was mentally leaving her, was the real (and still rare) lightbulb moment for me. As I realized that, the solution slipped into place quite naturally. Frankly the whole experience of being able to communicate with her on my own – to be able to relieve that panic in her mind and offer her the support that she needed in order to deal with the situation that I asked her to be in – is quite astounding to me. Though I hope that these lighbulb moments will become a more regular occurrence, I also hope that I will never quite lose that sense of wonder at being able to so easily and positively influence the feelings of a horse, who, herself, is so willing to forgive my many “blind” and “dumb” moments.
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