Horse Listeners: Insights from your Equine Training horses in your Right Mind by Peggy Gaboury I started with horses when I was about age ten. My parents gave me a yearling Shetland pony, who matured to all of nine hands. Not being a horsy family, they also gave me a book, “Your Pony Book,” and turned me loose. I outgrew the pony almost as soon as he was given to me, but I eventually taught him to drive, first to a sled in the snow, and later to a proper cart and harness. What I really learned, though, in the absence of any formal training and supervision, was to pay attention to what the horse was telling me. That unconscious learning, of which I was quite unaware, was a right brain, listening, intuitive function. Throughout my teenage years I got on and rode a number of horses, all of them rejects to some degree from owners who could not ride them. I did not have any strong preconceptions about what these horses were supposed to do, so I rode them everywhere, in all kinds of terrain and over or through anything. We got along fine! I didn’t take riding lessons until I was in college, when I had a few lessons from a hunter/jumper trainer. In graduate school, I started formal dressage lessons. In retrospect, that is when my relationship with the horses I was riding began to deteriorate, but I did not think about it that way. I labeled myself as stupid, ignorant, and ineffective; and I labeled the horses as uncooperative. But what was really happening was that I was trying to consciously, deliberately, do what the instructor was telling me. And, in doing so, I stopped listening to the horse. I made decisions in my conscious, deliberative left brain. I started to worry about doing it wrong, or not doing enough. Unbeknownst to me, the horses worried with me. I always wanted something more than they gave me. The horses sensed that I was never pleased, and did not know what I wanted or how to do it. When I thought we had it right, I latched on to it and drilled the movement. Horses don’t understand drill. If they do it right the first time, and you ask for it again, they will often try something different. Then they aren’t getting it right any more, so the rider tries harder, asks for more, and changes what she is doing. But it was right the first time! I should have recognized that and stopped then. Repetition often made things worse, not better. I thought, in training, that if a small, light aid got me almost to where I wanted to be, then a stronger aid would be better. Wrong again! The stronger aid upset the horse’s balance, mentally and physically, and the horse responded with tension. Now my left brain read that tension as threat, and I took more control of the situation, generating more tension. So I kept trying to get more control over the horses, trying to make their responses more “perfect.” I would get frustrated that I was not good enough and they were not good enough, and I would try still harder. For most people who are successful in their professional lives, primarily working out of the left brain works well. For the majority of the things that we humans do, thinking about a problem in our left brains, analyzing it, dissecting it, sorting it out is how we get through life. But for understanding and working with horses, it is the right brain, the listening, intuitive side that is more effective. Now that I am older, I am amazed and astonished daily by what horses notice. They routinely observe and react to aspects of my behavior of which I have been quite unaware. They train me in ways that I am unaware - unless I pay attention and listen to them! About ten years ago, I was working with a horse that spooked repeatedly. I could not go forward with his training, and found him totally frustrating. He was big, powerful and athletic, and the more he spooked, the more I tried to control him. Then I read two books: first, a novel by Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and then Temple Grandin’s book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Mark Haddon’s novel is about a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, and the ways in which his autism affects his experience of the world. For him, a supermarket is terribly frightening because he cannot prioritize the sensory data coming in, and cannot dismiss any parts of it as unimportant. Walking into that environment soon leads to sensory overload, and he responds with temper tantrums and violent misbehavior. He cannot understand, so all he can do is try to leave. My awakening came from my emotional reaction to that novel. I saw that my spooking horse could be understood and handled if I treated him as an autistic child. Temple Grandin’s book put that understanding on a formal, academic basis, giving me a theoretical structure for practical application. In her book, she redefines consciousness and argues that language is not a requirement for consciousness; she categorizes autism as a way-station on the road from animals to humans; and she explores how the "interpreter" in the normal human brain filters out detail, creating an unintentional blindness that animals and autistics don’t have. Now, my work with horses is much quieter and more focused. I concentrate on how and to what they are reacting. I want them to understand what I want. If the horse isn’t getting it, then I need to be clearer in my communication. If I want the horse to give one clear response to one aid, such as a lateral aid from the left leg, I need be sure that I am giving only that one aid. As I apply my leg, I must not also tighten my hold on that rein and then accidentally kick the horse with the opposite leg because I lost my balance. I have to be equally clear in communicating to the horse that an answer is wrong. Much of the poor training that I see from riders with their horses happens because the rider accidentally rewards the wrong behavior. The horse stops and backs up; the rider gives the reins, thinking to urge the horse forward. But the rider just rewarded the backing up by release of the reins. Ask yourself: is that really what I wanted the horse to do? I have known horses that were trained to rear inadvertently, because that was the only time a fearful and hanging rider ever let go of the reins. The poor horse learned that if he rears, the rider will stop pulling on his mouth. Oops! Working with horses can be enormously rewarding! But that work requires great concentration and accurate communication on the part of the human. When you start your work with horses, your concentration belongs to them, not on errands to run, getting to the barn late, or your kids in school. If a horse is doing something that we do not like, chances are that we taught it. It is up to us to figure it out how we taught it and how to undo the faulty teaching. Carefully listening to the horse helps us find the answers.