Bozo's Carrots

The unbearable lightness of not caring

What happens when you start noticing that your horse is not very happy? What do you think when you see signs that your horse is not happy to be with you, to have you catch him, saddle him, ride him? When you see his ears go back as you lead him out of his yard or paddock, when he dances out of your reach as you try to put your foot in the stirrup to mount?

You have two choices here.

Tell yourself – and him – that he is just being a cranky tantrumy child who doesn’t want to work.

Or try to find the reason for him feeling and acting the way he does. Is he hurting somewhere? Is the saddle of a wrong fit? Is it the way you handle him? Is it the way you communicate with him? Is it the way you ride?

Be careful – you are on a very slippery slope here! The time when you could chuck a saddle on, jump on his back, ride out a pigroot or two, and then just point him towards the rosy misty hills of an early morning and just GO, just RIDE… and NOT CARE whether he wants to or not...that time may be behind you for good.

Because you started to care about his emotional wellbeing, not just physical; about how he feels, what he thinks and how he sees the world - as opposed to how you’d prefer that he saw the world and his place in it.

Once you see this – you can never un-see it. You can never again just jump on a horse -any horse – and completely not care about whether this horse is happy or not, understands what you are asking or not… and not take responsibility for it. Even when you don’t want to care. Even when all you want to do is just ride.

Sounds like a pretty good argument against this knowledge doesn’t it?

Five (or so) years after I stopped this “just jump on a horse and kick him to go” way of riding and started to explore the natural horsemanship way, I found that I still sometimes felt frustrated with it and wished that I was able to just Not Care.

I’ve been working with Becky for 3 years now. Every time I come to see her, and every time I work with Marina, I feel challenged and inspired to do more with her as I see progress every single session. We achieve more every time. This time we achieve it in harmony, where she understands what I am asking, where her belief in the consistency of my leadership increases, and where she feels safer and more willing to do as I ask.

And yet, sometimes, all I can think about is that while I was working at Uncle Nev’s trail riding farm I could DO so much more. I could ride in a group. I could gallop across the fields…

I haven’t ridden in a group for 3 years now. Actually I haven’t even properly ridden out of the property - "on a trail" - since then.

… And then I remember the gritted-teeth heart-pumping fear of not being able to stop while galloping; of knowing that Becky was in such a state of enraged panic that any attempt to stop her would result in her bucking or jumping or twisting in the middle of that gallop, and risk not only getting me killed but herself too, if she lost her footing in the grass.

And then I remember Bozo laying his ears back and looking sulky and sad as he followed me out of the paddock for more of this care free trail riding.

...

And then Marina comes, shakes me out of my funk, and tells me to “get out of that arena and onto that trail”, and to stop worrying about Becky’s every single individual step, but give her a job to do, a place to go, a pace to keep – up that hill, at a trot – and just BELIEVE that we can do it... and just go.

Because now, after 3 years of learning how to understand Becky, and understanding myself, and learning how we can be working together, all I am now lacking is the belief that our relationship is at the stage where we can … just go.

Well, maybe not at a gallop just yet, but definitely without the heart-stopping death-courting panic and fight.

Instead, there’s a good chance that both of us will be enjoying ourselves – something that has never happened on a trail before.

Would I go back to not caring if I had a choice?

No way.

The meaning of resistance – is it the horse frustrating the rider, or is it the rider frustrating the horse?

I think most horse owners and horse riders have countless of times felt frustrated with their horses when the horse refused to do what is being asked or, what’s worse, started displaying completely unwanted behavior: rearing, bucking, kicking, biting, going backwards to avoid the reins and the legs… the list of the variety of resistances that the horse can present is endless. And the temptation to lay the blame on the horse is great! “He is just stubborn! He won’t listen! He’s had too much oats and is now too “high” to listen!”

After being presented with these resistances – which I call “Becky tantrums” – countless of times, and after working through a fair few with Marina, I came to realize an undeniable fact: most of the time, the resistance is caused by me!

So, let me start with a small definition:

Becky Tantrum - a display of rearing, hopping or bucking which indicates either of these thoughts in Becky’s head:

• This person on my back is sending completely conflicting and confusing messages to me. I don’t understand. I don’t know what she wants, so would she please get off my back NOW and go find a clue about how to ride before she climbs back on… oh, and my mind is completely on other things anyway, so I don’t have time to bother with her.


• I REALLY want to think about something else/ be somewhere else other than being where I am and thinking about things that I am being asked to think about. I mean, honestly! This person on my back is just too ANNOYING for words!

Needless to say that for me – at this stage of my learning how to ride and train Becky, a) happens a hell of a lot more often than b), and represents the case where the primary problem that causes the resistance lies not with Becky but with me. The most dramatic case of this scenario happened some 3 months ago, when I first left the safety of working in the arena and decided to expand our horizons and work in an empty paddock adjacent to where Becky’s paddock-mates were grazing.

As I expected, Becky’s thoughts to be “elsewhere” (particularly, back with her buddies in the nearby paddock) were a lot stronger in these circumstances, which I figured allowed me to improve upon my own techniques of interrupting her thoughts and bringing her mind and focus back on the job that I was asking her to do – for example, to ride a circle.

What I did not realize, was the fact that I did not really know how to ride a circle with my own body.

I first started the circle at a walk and was busy trying to make sure that Becky didn’t fall in or out of the circle, as she was normally wont to do. I thought that I was being pretty successful at it. There was one point on the circle – funnily enough, it was the point which put Becky in the direct line of sight with the gate of the paddock! – where she really wanted to fall out of the circle and crab towards the gate, but I thought I was well on the way to catching this intention and fixing it.

So I asked for a trot.

As we came towards that same spot at a trot, Becky put her head down and bucked! OK, I figured that I didn’t catch and interrupt in time her thought of going out to the gate. I tried again. Paid close attention to the few feet we travelled before The Spot – nope, she was travelling fine. This time she bucked three times. Tried again – maybe I missed something? This final time she alternatively bucked and reared about 6 times with the last rear going up so high that I literally had to grab her mane so as to not slide off the back of the saddle!!

What the hell? Her thought of going towards that gate must’ve been so very strong that I simply could not sit in the saddle long enough to overcome her resistance! She would’ve ended up throwing me! Bloody stubborn horse!!

Luckily for both of us, Marina was on her way to give us a lesson that day. Her first response upon hearing my mystified and worried account was to hug Becky and tell her “don’t worry Becky. I’ll sort your mum out for you”.

Marina asked me to ride the circle again – at a walk this time – and started to pick on me for not actually maintaining the bend of Becky’s body as well as I thought: Becky was straightening her body out on multiple points within my “circle”, including just before “The Spot”. However, that wasn’t the main problem.

“Do you realize that you are not actually riding the circle yourself? You are riding straight ahead!” – that’s what Marina told me. Basically, though I was looking in the direction I was going, my body was always pointing straight ahead, instead of twisting slightly in the direction of the circle. As the result, my body weight and center of balance were actually going slightly to the outside of the circle.

So Marina told me to make a conscious effort to twist towards the middle of the circle – to physically look directly across the circle instead of immediately ahead to where I was going. And then she asked me for a trot.

I said a prayer, grabbed a lock of Becky’s mane, asked for a trot and twisted towards the circle… and guess what? Becky went through The Spot just as through any other part of the circle. With not even a glance at the gate!

What the….?????

What happened was basically this: sure, Becky had a strong thought of going to the gate – a thought stronger than she normally had in the arena where we ordinarily worked – but what sent her over the edge into a bucking fit was that my request for her to put aside her thoughts and to continue on the circle, heading away from the gate, was completely unclear and contradictory to her. The rein was telling her to bend in the direction of the circle and away from the gate, while my body was telling her to go straight ahead. At The Spot this meant that my body was telling her to go towards the gate, in concurrence with her own thoughts, but in contradiction to the rein.

In effect her bucking meant this: “what the HELL do you want me to do you $&#$@^ moron!?!?! You are telling me two different things! Get off!!!”

Could you blame her?

Obviously, I couldn’t. When I finally fixed the issue with my own body positioning, and finally became consistent in my request, Becky had no problem putting aside her thoughts of the gate and following my leadership to continue along the circle.

Did I feel like an idiot? You bet!

So the lesson that I learned that day was:

Sure, sometimes a horse’s resistance to asking what you want is so strong that it is expressed in rearing or bucking, even if you are sending totally clear signals. In this case you just have to keep calm and persist through with what you are asking. In my experience, the intensity of resistance lessens very quickly as the horse realizes that you are not going to be swayed from your purpose, so you are proving to be a strong enough leader for your horse and hence worthy of being listened to.

But a lot of the time, the strong resistance indicates a lack of clarity, consistency and, hence, a lack of leadership from you as the rider! If the resistance increases as you persist, it’s probably a clear indication that you are doing something wrong.

But don’t panic – when you figure out what it is that is confusing your horse, the horse won’t hold a grudge against you. Instead he’ll probably just heave a sigh of relief and happily do as asked.

Smaller circles show up inaccuracies

It seems that the progress I made as I described in my last post was true progress indeed, as it remained with both myself and Becky in our lesson this past Sunday.

The weather turned pretty atrocious as soon as I mounted, and it pushed us to work mostly in the round yard, which is a tall enclosure and hence provided protection for Becky (though not so much for me!) from the driving wind and rain.

In this lesson we refined the circle work even more, by trying to make circles smaller whenever Becky’s attention to me and to the rein started to wander too much. Smaller circles required Becky to slow down her pace and be much more accurate with foot placement (and, hence, more focused on the job at hand, rather than at what was going on around her) and allowed me to be more aware of her inaccuracies. A little crabbing sideways on a big circle, which requires only a small bend in her body can easily be missed by an inexperienced rider (like me), but the same crabbing on a smaller circle – and it becomes very obvious, and hence can be caught and corrected that much easier.

This is where the improvements with rein responsiveness really showed up. I could now correct her shoulder from falling in or out of the circle, by slight and periodic pressure on the rein, which didn’t interfere with her forward movement. Previously, when she was still leaning and resisting the rein, any correction would’ve resulted in a rein-tugging contest between us which would’ve encouraged her to stop, straighten up her body and lose her place in the circle; and hence the consistency of what I was asking her to do, which was to walk a circle as accurately as possible, would’ve also been lost.

The overall improvement in her responsiveness to the rein after working on the smaller circle was dramatic. By the end of the lesson she almost did not fall in with her shoulder at all going to the left, which, as I described in previous post, was one of the main symptoms of her not fully responding to the left rain and resisting the left bend.

Another sign of success was Becky offering to relax and lower her head even while on rein contact, which indicated that listening and responding to the rein to the degree that I was requiring of her, and to maintain the bend in her body was actually OK in her world. She was getting more and more happy with the idea, which is really the best result one could have when asking a horse to do something – that the horse feels happy and comfortable doing it.