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Re: [RC] Did I Understand You Correctly? - k s swigart

From: <Trailrite@xxxxxxx>

Well, I've seen horses that will try to do exactly what your talking
about.
They loose in the end of course.  Rope them down, put war bridles on
them,
throw them on the ground, drug them, spur them, put gag bits in their
mouths,
etc., etc.  You get the picture.  Humans have the use of tools over
the horses
will power.  So I would say that horses on the norm do not have a
choice.

I have seen plenty of these horses too.  And while I will agree that
there are some horses that choose to let these methods engender some
form of compliance, the ones _I_ see are the ones on whom none of these
methods worked (for many people, I am a "last resort" trainer).  There
are some horses who would die before they complied with this kind of
request (and many of them do, since these are the ones that get sold on
until they end up at the killer, or do fatal injury to themselves in
their resistance).  I even have one that will resist drugs.  And when
people try many of these methods on horses, it makes many of them MORE
resistant rather than less.  I had one "cowboy" trainer who said that he
had about a 50% success rate with these methods (the ones that it didn't
work on, he didn't waste his time with, he just shot them and ate them).

If horses didn't have choices, none of these methods would be necessary.
In fact, if horses had no choices they wouldn't need to be trained at
all, you could just take them out of the box and wind them up and they
would operate according to the manual.  If horses didn't have choices,
there wouldn't be any such thing as a "problem" horse.  Problem horses
are those that exercise their choices in such a way as to displease
their handlers. What horse training is ALL about (whether you understand
the concept or not) is teaching the horse to make the choices that you
desire.

We, as humans, have lots of tools at our disposal to aid us in teaching
horses this (including some tools that make it really uncomfortable for
the horse not to make those choices).  But there is no getting around
it.  If you want a horse to do what you want it to, you have to make it
so it is what the horse wants too so that the horse chooses what you
want.

It is a common training mantra, "your horse has a mind of its own."  And
I know plenty of non-horsemen who are non-horsemen for this very reason.
These people FULLY understand that to clamber up on the back of a horse
is to put yourself totally at the mercy of that horse (and consequently
think that anybody who is willing to do it is insane:)).  As long as you
are on a horse's back, you are going to go exactly where that horse
goes.  And that horse is going to go where its mind tells it to...or
where it ends up accidentally.  The only way you can affect the movement
of a horse is to affect the horse's mind. I SUPPOSE you could get the
horse to go someplace other than where it chooses to go by trying to get
the horse to fall there accidentally, but I don't recommend it :).

The fact that a horse has a mind of its own and retains the ability to
make choices is, in fact, encoded in the law in many states.  Many
states have what are called "equine liability laws" which recognize that
riding/handling horses is inherently risky because horses are
unpredictable.  The reason that horses are unpredictable is that they
have the ability to make choices independent of the will of their
handlers, and as long as they are sentinent, they always will.  These
equine liability laws recognize that there is NO way to get around this.

We as humans can do all kinds of things (and some humans do some pretty
unpleasant things) in an attempt to affect the choices that horses make.
But unless we kill them, they will always retain their power to choose.
Many (most???) of them choose to comply, and most of those that don't
end up dead (or their owners call me :)).

However, if the only way that you can garner enough courage to clamber
up on your horse is to con yourself into thinking that your horse has no
say in where he is going or what he is doing, go right ahead and think
that.  Your horse (because he is good natured) will probably let you get
away with it.

Personally, I prefer to try to figure out how to affect my horses'
choices. Since I know they are gonna be making them.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



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Re: [RC] Did I Understand You Correctly?, Trailrite