Meditations on Equestrian Art

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

When I Make Mistakes…

The fact is, I am human and I make mistakes. I don’t often talk about those mistakes because I am striving to move past them and focus, focus, focus, on the solutions instead the problems.

I encourage my students to do the same thing. Notice your mistake, get through it as best you can, learn from it and make a better game plan for what you do next, but whatever you do, don’t dwell on what went wrong.

You see, I believe our brain tries hard to create the things we think about. So much of what we do is subconscious, and most of the time I don’t know why I moved my left pinky finger, or wrinkled my nose or looked at the ground before I started to walk. Maybe those things don’t matter, or maybe to a horse who speaks body language fluently I just said many confusing things all at the same time.

The understanding of the subconscious mind and its tendency to try and create what we focus on, leads me to this conclusion: If I am thinking hard about all the times I have made mistakes causing my horse to lose confidence, then subconsciously my brain starts to recreate the tiny behaviors that led to those situations and then without consciously knowing it I am causing mistakes to happen all over again.

If instead I stay focused on the solutions, my subconscious will help me recreate all the small body behaviors that made me successful developing positive solutions at other times.

When speaking with a horse using body language, I feel often like I am still in kindergarten in the first levels of fluency. Regardless of my level of conscious skill the thing I CAN know is the results I get. Each set of results leads me to assess what we did to achieve that, thereby educating me for future patterns of behavior that get the kind of results I want with my horses.

Every horse is different, and every horse has slightly different likes and dislikes. Every horse teaches me slightly different things about this beautiful, complex language.

Let’s talk for a moment about the nuts and bolts of what a mistake is with horses.

A mistake is something that causes you or the horse to not want to be together.

We know we made a mistake because there was more Fight, Flight, or Freeze in the relationship than one of the partners was comfortable with.

Now, for simplicity I am going to talk only in terms of Freedom Based Training® where there are no food rewards to keep a horse with you and there are no halters, ropes, or fences to keep a horse from walking away. (Once you add the tools that hold a horse close to you the mistakes often get a lot bigger before you realize they were mistakes.)

If I make a choice that causes a Fight reaction that is my biggest kind of mistake, because that one can be quickly dangerous.

If I make a choice that causes a Flight reaction, that is not so bad because it just means we need to find harmony and make amends from a greater distance for a while. Distance is not my first choice, but there is nothing unsafe about it.

If I make a choice that causes Freeze, that is only a problem to the degree that I am impatient. Freeze is something I can do with the horse and it can be a bonding, relationship building time for us. But only if I have enough patience and wisdom to wait for that Freeze state to evolve into a better feeling of Thinking, Yielding or Playing.

Any time I make a mistake that causes Fight, Flight, or Freeze, I need to figure out what to do next.

Freeze is the easiest to solve.

Option one:

I walk around the space looking carefully in every direction for danger as I move, because making the horse feel like it has a partner looking out for it, will cause it to feel safer and will minimize the extremity of Fight or Flight that might occur after a dysfunctional Freeze. The movement of my body also has a small degree of effectiveness lowering a horse’s stress. I can come back into flow with the horse when I see they are thinking again.

Option two:

I wait in harmony with the horse because I believe the next thing to happen (no matter how long it takes) is that the horse will feel better and start to think.

Flight is a little more difficult to solve because I have a strong desire to stay in the relationship (not abandoning the horse), balanced with a strong desire to understand their request for more distance from me.

Option one:

If I think the Flight will be stronger than I can keep up with, I walk strongly in the opposite direction that the horse is moving to show them I am brave and will intercept any danger coming from that direction. (I know that seems silly if they are running from me, but it also lets the horse know I understand they would like to be farther away from me.) Once you see the horse settle you can start rebuilding the relationship from the distance the horse tells you they are comfortable with.

Option two is:

If I think the Flight will be short and might turn to yielding quickly (the horse moving in a way I can match and flow with) I can follow them and find harmony with them again as soon as possible.

Fight is the most difficult mistake result to solve for, but it does happen sometimes so I need to be prepared for that also.

Option one: If I think this Fight is only getting worse, run like hell and live to make better choices another day! (Yes, I am not proud of this, but I have done it.)

Option two: If I think the Fight will be brief and resolve to any other possibility quickly, I will surprise the horse to break their pattern. For safety, I teach all my horses that ANY other response to my mistakes is preferable to Fight. To surprise a horse is quite dominant, it usually makes the horse so uncomfortable they immediately choose Flight instead of Fight and that is safer. My favorite methods of surprise are to jump up and down, or to throw my hands in the air dramatically as I step closer to the horse.

In this option, I have chosen to make a second less dangerous mistake (causing Flight) to break the pattern of the first mistake that caused Fight. There are a couple of problems with this option that everyone needs to be aware of before they try it.

The first problem is that an angry horse will attack more violently if you make the wrong choice and fail to cause Flight when you try to surprise them.

The second problem is if you make too many mistakes and use surprise too often, it stops being surprising and simply becomes annoying instead, which can cause a more violent attack.

The third problem is even if you succeed in surprising them into Flight, then you need to address that smaller mistake and rebuild the relationship from the bigger distance that came from the Flight behavior.

With Atlas who came to me with a history of aggression I had to be extremely careful that I didn’t make a mistake we would not be able to recover from.

The way I did this was to invest in our distance relationship. I was fully prepared to work from outside the fences for as long as I needed to and the goal was to gently and consistently teach Atlas that moving away from me was a more successful strategy for him to get comfortable than moving toward me.

When we think of the spectrum from Fight to Play, it all includes an aspect of moving closer to each other.

When we think of the spectrum from Flight to Yield, it all includes an aspect of moving away from each other.

Any horse with an aggression problem is simply a horse who has found more comfort moving closer to others than they find moving away and this needs to be balanced out the other way before the aggression can soften and the horse can be safe to be around.

I knew I needed hundreds of hours of reinforcing moving away behavior with Atlas before I ever found myself in a situation where I had to surprise him out of a fight instinct. It would only be with those hundreds of hours of foundation in teaching him yielding that I would be safe enough to surprise him without risking the instinctual violent attack that had served him so well in his past life.

I taught Atlas this gently from a safe distance without ever needing to confront him.

Every time he moved toward me I would either take one extra step toward him (this made him less comfortable because he did not want me close to him). Or, I would start walking around the paddock (on the outside of the fence if I felt I needed it for safety) and I wouldn’t stop walking and return to flow with him until he moved some part of his body away from me. The walking around the paddock worked because horses prefer harmony and flow with their herd and I only gave Atlas that harmony and flow if he moved away from me at least a little.

The other reinforcement for yielding we practiced was following Atlas. When Atlas walked to the water trough, I followed him in flow (at a distance he was comfortable with), but then I took one more step than he did. This way when we were standing at the trough and he was feeling that good feeling of drinking water it was after I had just pushed into his space, (not him pushing into mine). The same was true when he walked to his favorite outlook spot on the hill or to his favorite rolling spot or just the place in the sun he wanted to stand. Atlas got what he wanted just after I pushed into his space a little bit.

This taught Atlas that good feelings happened after I pushed a little bit closer to him. Less comfortable feelings happened after Atlas pushed closer to me.

When Atlas pulled away from me in any way that looked like he would not like to be followed I would pull away also and make the space between us bigger. This respect for his preferences is something that set him up to respect my preferences as well. My job is to set the tone for the relationship and then show Atlas that acting in this way together results in good feelings for him.

Now, I know that this early work Atlas and I did together is the reason why I still cannot touch him and all our relationship building is still being practiced at the non-touching distances. However, the safety I feel around him now is worth far more to me than any amount of touching ever could be.

This evening when I was working with Ari, I mistakenly stayed too close for too long next to Atlas who was eating from the same hay net as Ari. Atlas had a moment of anger at me pinning his ears, and while that mistake of mine might have cost dearly in the beginning of our relationship, it was not at all difficult for us to manage tonight. I simply took my hand quickly out of my pocket and threw it into the air dramatically and Atlas stepped hurriedly away in a few steps of flight, followed by a change of focus, his ears coming forward and a gentle reach out of his nose to check in with me that all was right between us again.

(This picture is from a different day and a different mistake, but it was one caught on camera so I thought I would share it with you) 

The important part though, is that I noticed what mistake I had made that caused Atlas’s anger in the first place this evening. Even if I know what to do about it when I make a mistake, I am better off working at appropriate distances with good feel and timing so I never need to fix the problem in the first place.

I aim to teach my horses to Think, Yield, and Play so completely they believe those are their best choices of action for getting the things in life they want. If we can strengthen the good stuff enough, we theoretically never will make a mistake that results in Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Yes, I know we are all mortal and we all make mistakes that will need to be managed. Hopefully this blog post helps you to understand how you might manage those potential mistakes.

More importantly though, I hope you are inspired to invest more time in developing the Think, the Yield, and the Play in your relationships with your horses.

Join us on Patreon for more ongoing discussions about Freedom Based Training® and the filming of the movie “Taming Wild: Evolution”. Thank you to my current patrons for asking all the right questions that inspired this blog post.

https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

Ari’s Choices

This week everything has come together with the stallions as I had hoped it would and I am counseling myself to be more pleased and content with the events than impatient with the timeline.

I am finding that my experience with Myrnah during the first movie set my expectation of developmental time line at a rate that is intensely different than the one I am living currently with Ari and Atlas. Now I get to live what I preach and let the horses set the timeline for progress.

Trust the process Elsa!

Ari has been here a couple of weeks now and honestly, I thought we would be much farther along than we are currently. I adore him and his decisions make me grin, but wow does he have a lot of opinions and decisions to make! Mostly it seems like he just wants me to stay out of his way so he can do the thing he has planned. I don’t know how much of this is the fact that he is an eight-year-old stallion instead of the four-year-old mare I am comparing him to in Myrnah, or how much is just his personality shining through, in all the dynamic unique beauty I chose him for. He will teach me things, of that I am sure!

In this process of Freedom Based Training®, with any horse, I start with a meditation of being around the horse’s body in all the places and all the different distances. As I do this I study the feel and timing of when it is best for me to move from one place to the next. This is the study of Passive Leadership.

Then I start adding more movement around them with the goal of helping them feel better before I settle into the original exercise again. This is the study of Supportive Leadership.

Once I have the foundation of those two ideas in place, then I can start asking the horse to do something I have in mind. This is the study of Assertive Leadership.

If my request of the horse causes them significant discomfort between the time I ask and the time they say yes to me, we are stepping into the study of Insistent Leadership.

If my request of a horse causes them to respond with fight, flight or freeze behaviors that I need to control, manage, or force to change then we are stepping into the practice of Dominant Leadership. This is where we usually need some sort of a tool to manage the horse (a rope, a food reward, a fence or something to use that is more motivating than our simple human body).

In Freedom Based Training® and this project with the stallions filming “Taming Wild: Evolution”, the process is about developing horse and the relationship using leadership on the spectrum between Passive and Insistent simply because we choose not to use the equipment that would allow us to be Dominant effectively.

When we take away the ability to dominate, what happens is we must learn to read the horse better, and our decision-making process as trainers gets honed to a whole new level.

I found while filming the first movie with Myrnah, I learned more about being a horse trainer in that one year, than I had in my previous thirty years of life all put together. I have no doubt this current year with the stallions will have a similar impact on me. The experience of training without any means to dominate puts me in a position where I must study every tiny detail of cause and effect with a level of subtlety that all of us as trainers often fail to recognize when we are able to push for a result using dominance.

Ari is indeed honing my skill as a trainer, and where I feel the work deeply is in my patience fatigue this last couple of weeks. My brain gets tired when Ari and I seem to be slower than I think we should be from one level of understanding to the next. That is when the impatient part of me wants to gloss over the details and push toward a tangible result. That is not how Freedom Based Training® works. I must take whatever time Ari tells me he needs and notice every tiny detail of cause and effect he shows me. All the details are an opportunity to learn something more.

Ari and I established comfort in Passive and Supportive Leadership in the first couple of days, and when I started to ask him for a specific action, that was established quickly also with the caveat that he figured out immediately, he could ask me for things as well. This is where my patience was honed, and where he was distinctly different than Myrnah in the first project.

With Ari, I could ask him to reach out and touch my hand, changing his focus and asking him to connect with me. Ari was quick to learn this and quick to easily say yes to it, then he used the same action on me.

He discovered if he reached out to me, and asked to touch my hand I would make things easier for him and he liked easier. In his case, easier was for me to stand farther away than a touching distance, preferably about a horse length away.

Ari was reasonably comfortable with me close enough to touch him, but he was adamant that I would not actually touch him, and so asking me to stand farther away made him feel easier about our relationship. If I pushed the issue, he used just enough fight or flight to explain to me that he was not ready for any touching and that was absolutely to be respected.

For two weeks, Ari would let me come close for a few moments, and then he would politely ask me to step away again and again and again and again.

I began to fear I would never get that tag off his neck and we would be stuck at this impasse forever. It didn’t exactly feel like a plateau of progress, because I could see his confidence in me growing every day in the softness of his eyes and the rhythm of his movements, but touching was off limits and without the use of tools there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. So, we simply continued to put in the time doing the things we could do together, while watching Ari blossom in enjoying his new home.

Then one day, things changed unexpectedly and Ari was suddenly ready for me to touch him.

I was standing close to him for a long time, and he didn’t reach out to me asking me to step away. So, I reached my hand out under his nose to offer him the chance to ask me to step away and he did not. Ever so gently I let my hand drift up to his cheek to slowly stroke it, coming directly back down to his nose again to see if he wanted to touch me and ask me to step away, but he did not, Ari let me stoke him several times without any sign of fight or flight before he finally pushed his nose gently against my fingers and told me he had had enough of closeness and was ready for the easier distance between us.

In that moment, the barrier between us melted and a little at a time the touching distance became something else we could do together.

The next day Ari let me take the tag off from around his neck and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. We could do this and while Ari was going to push me to learn and grow, and be more patient than I was accustomed to, he wasn’t asking me anything unreasonable. I simply needed to trust the process and accept the time frame he chose.

That same day Ari let me take his tag off, we turned him and Atlas out together. Opening all the gates and letting them have the entire space was better than Christmas for me. Horses deserve to have friends and freedom and watching them revel in that freedom of space with their friends is simply awesome.

I believe safety comes first, so I gave the two stallions time to mirror and match each other’s movements from across the fences for their first couple of weeks here. Once I was seeing them regularly take naps side by side with the fence between them, matching feet and body postures then I knew they were ready for more freedom to push close to each other when they chose without a risk of injury.

Then easily, with very little chaos they were together full time, eating hay from the same hay net for hours at a time, drinking together, playing together and moving everywhere together.

Ari and Atlas still have some dominance games to play and can squeal and strike and rear like stallions do, but it seems within reason and something everyone is comfortable with.

Now starts a new chapter for me and the stallions, all of us together, learning from each other. I promise to keep you updated as we progress.

For more up to the minute updates and video footage from week to week, make sure you join us on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

Valuing Easy

This week Atlas touched me for the very first time. It was an incredible welling up of courage for him to reach that last couple of inches and make contact, his nose to my fingers. We had put in over a hundred hours of time BEING together at distances that were comfortable for him. We had slowly and gently increased the variety of ways and places we could share space. Some days I wondered if he would ever be brave enough to touch, perhaps this being together with a buffer of air always between us, was all we would ever be able to do.

Some days when I was particularly sad or frustrated by the lack of trust I could see in my two stallions, I stepped away to go visit Myrnah and Cleo and bury my face in their manes and feel the sweet yielding softness of their dense fur under my fingers. Reminding myself all the while that everything develops, and I need to give Atlas and Ari time, they will not stay the same forever. With gentle feel and timing from me, over time, they too will learn that people being close is a good and wonderful thing.

The day Atlas finally touched me, he had been staring for the longest time, ears pricked, nostrils softly flaring as he breathed in the scent of me. My hand was outstretched and his neck was outstretched in return toward me. This reaching toward each other was something I had been developing with him, always respecting his comfortable buffer of air between us and always retreating to an easier distance before that curiosity, bravery, and interest in me waned. In this particular moment, it was the end of the day, and almost dark, and before I could pull my hand away and return to my lookout post several horse lengths away from Atlas, he made a bold reach and touched my fingers firmly with the bridge of his soft muzzle, square between the nostrils.

As soon as Atlas felt his nose actually touch my fingers, panic took over and he leapt away from me with a dramatic explosion of limbs, scrambling for traction to propel him far away from this new sensation. I moved also, but with more steady quiet rhythm, traveling around him in a circular fashion looking for the next place of harmony we could find together.

In Atlas’ sudden burst of courage, he had tried to do too much too soon, and it had scared him.

We took some time to do things he was good at, and share space in ways he felt confident about, then before the end of the session we had returned to practicing those brief moments where I could reach toward him while he reached toward me, and then I could retreat to an easier distance with appropriate timing, while his bravery and curiosity were still strong.

I think this is one of the greatest gifts of Freedom Based Training®. The necessity of valuing what is easy in a partnership, more than we value the pushing forward and making progress into the new and interesting.

When we have tools, such as food rewards or halters or flags or fences to push a horse against, the horse becomes willing to spend more time in discomfort than if we do not have those things.

Because a horse wants the apple or carrot, the horse will try hard to hold themselves in the discomfort of learning to find the action necessary to earn them that food reward. Because the horse has a halter on and knows it cannot leave, it will try harder to tolerate the discomfort of learning something new to find where the pressure is relieved and life feels easier again. Horses become willing to stretch their comfort zones and tolerate the discomfort of learning and growing faster than they might naturally choose, when we use extrinsic motivators.

In Freedom Based Training® we still exist in a world where the horse feels more pressure sometimes and less pressure other times, but the only reward for tolerating discomfort is the ease of flow and harmony between horse and human that comes afterward. This allows the horse more room to think about their voluntary participation in any event.

With Freedom Based Training® we spend hundreds of hours investing in everything that is easy together so that the horse grows in confidence that being in a relationship with us is about feeling good together. Only from that basis can the horse learn to tolerate moments of learning discomfort, then over time, the horse will develop an acceptance of learning discomfort, and then with more time the horse starts to look forward to and enjoy learning because it is more interesting than all the things the horse already knows.

First though, we need to invest in easy!

With Atlas and Ari I am committed to listening to them about what they think is easy and what they think is difficult. I started by standing outside the fences and paying attention to their body language. Did they move away from me, or toward me? Did they want more space from me or less? How many different variations of together could we experience over and over and over again that Atlas and Ari considered easy?

The value of easy is not talked about enough in horse training.

We need so many repetitions of easy that the horse starts looking voluntarily for something interesting.

Hopefully horses reach for the next new piece of learning within the range of what they can tolerate. If they overstep what they are capable of doing, like Atlas did when he touched me for the first time, we have to consider easy again, and building confidence from the place of doing easy things.

In Atlas’ case, I have chosen to carefully slow him down so he doesn’t scare himself again. When he reaches for me, I make sure I have enough buffer of air between us that I have time to pull away before he makes contact.

Again and again Atlas gets to reach for me and have me pull away to an easy and comfortable distance before he makes contact.

I reach toward Atlas, Atlas reaches toward me, and then before the whiskers brush my hand, I confidently walk away to the distance I know is easy.

Will this take a hundred repetitions or a thousand before we feel the stress is low enough to actually touch in a way that doesn’t scare Atlas? I don’t know, but I know what I am looking for.

When Atlas touched me the first time, he wanted to be brave, but his ears and eyes were locked staring at me in a frozen position that let me know that his brain wasn’t fully in a thinking operative mode. I hadn’t planned for us to touch, but Atlas moved so quickly I didn’t have time to protect him from his brash decision.

Lesson learned, no real harm done, now I am more careful. Now Atlas and I practice reaching toward each other with large gaps of time spent at the easy distance between each effort to try something new. This new thing we are doing demands respect, because it isn’t easy yet.

When something becomes easy we will know because we will see the brain is more likely to start thinking instead of reacting. We will see the eyes and ears move softly, instead of held in a rigid freeze. When the brain is frozen, the reaction of fight or flight is likely to follow, when the brain is thinking it will move easily into yielding or playing.

I know the theory, but I will admit it is real work for me to practice all that I preach. Going on the fifth hour of a day with the stallions, often my brain is sluggish and I just want something interesting to happen. Easy feels boring and I don’t want to practice the same thing over again and again and again.

This is where the real work is. This is where I dig deep and I learn. How many different variations of paying attention can I practice, while the stallions get to experience easy with me?

It is an ongoing journey, but I know I will be better for it in the long run. Filming this movie is a huge motivation for me to tolerate the discomfort of learning. So, I dig in and watch and plan and practice everything that is easy, in as many variations as I can come up with. I have to believe in the process and do the work, that is how I learn.

If you are interested in more details and discussions, we have both ongoing in the Patreon Group and would love you to join us there!

https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild

These early days of the first touches with the stallions are precious in their own ways, yet I am also dreaming of all the dynamic and interesting learning ahead of us… only when Atlas and Ari are ready of course!

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com