Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Learning is Experiencing

About the Book

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. -Benjamin Spock

When I ran the volunteer training program at the rescue, the majority of our volunteers had little to no horse experience. It was one of the first things that many of them said to me: "I'm not a horse person. I have just always been really interested in them!" I told them that of course they were a horse person and that they were most likely better off having not learned all manner of misinformation and bad habits from the "normal" horse world. That horse world had made all of these horses so wrong that they needed to be rescued. Our horses didn't need more normal, they needed more natural.

At one point we took in a group of three Arabian mares, who, we were told, were very people friendly, broke to ride, and would be easy to adopt. Instead they were skinny, swaybacked, aloof, and didn't want to have much of anything to do with people except for being handed a treat when it pleased them. As they now lived in a four-acre pasture with a dozen other horses, they managed to hold on to this pattern from their former, "normal" horse lives for quite some time.

After a number of weeks we managed to bring them up to have shots and vet work done. Afterwards we separated them temporarily into smaller enclosures and began to work on helping them learn a new way to trust people. The goal was to use as little pressure as possible, no more than stepping towards or away from the horse, leveraging psychology and body language to create connection and trust.

One of our new no-previous-horse-experience volunteers was eager to try the process. She had been coming out for three or four weeks at this point and had only spent time with a horse who was personable and easy to halter. So, working with a hard to catch, aloof horse would be a brand new challenge. I didn't have time to do an in depth explanation of the psychology, body language, or other concepts involved so I gave her a three minute demonstration and an explanation which could be boiled down into one sentence: "Circle around towards her hind end when she's not looking at you and turn and walk away from her when she is." With that, I left her and Lilly together in a round corral to discover each other.

With such brief instructions, I walked away with no expectations for what would happen while I took care of other tasks. I trusted the volunteer and knew she wouldn't push too hard, so no damage was likely to be done and it would at least get Lilly more used to being alone with a human.

When I returned an hour later, I was really pleased to see they had done a great deal more than not hurt each other. Lilly was following the volunteer as she walked in circles and weaving patterns around the corral. When the volunteer noticed me and came over to the fence, Lilly stood right by her side, licking and chewing, as if she hadn't spent the last six weeks being totally distrustful of anyone standing by her side. I asked the volunteer to try putting the halter on and we were both gratified when Lilly stood calmly and allowed her to slip it on and tie it with no fear.

When I asked her how it went and what she did, she told me most of the things I would have tried to explain to her at the start if I'd had time: moving towards Lilly made her nervous, while moving away made her curious; the more she really turned and walked away when Lilly turned to her, the sticker Lilly got; circling towards the hind end helped to get Lilly to face up, creating something to reward by turning away; that sometimes it was important to step in front of Lilly to catch her attention and interrupt her pattern; that once Lilly was curious, everything got easy.

The lesson for me was a huge one. Up to that point I had worried a great deal about making sure that each volunteer had all the details and steps I thought they might possibly need to complete a given task. Now here I was, confronted with the amazing fact that none of that worry was really necessary. With the simplest of instructions and a suitable situation, this volunteer had intuited concepts that would have taken me hours to explain. I began to understand that the most important thing that I could do as a teacher was to set things up and get out of the way. As humans, we have amazing powers of observation, intuition, and reason that work together to teach us everything we need to know, so long as we keep things simple enough that we can listen to the experience as it unfolds.