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.

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.

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Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com