Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Connecting Through Migration

If he isn't moving, you can't get it done. Until the legs know what to do the mind is lost. When the feet get knowing what to do, the mind understands. -Ray Hunt

A herd of wild horses will migrate somewhere between twenty and thirty miles daily. During this movement, though traveling known routes, they will encounter obstacles both known and unknown: water crossings, downed trees, deep sand, rocky passes, pouring rain, scorching sun, and predator attacks, to name just a few. In each case, the horses' best reaction is to use as much emotion as they need, tempered with as much analysis as possible. They are creatures evolved to think and solve problems while on the move in varied environments.

In contrast, consider for a moment the situation of the average captive horse. Usually, they are kept in enclosures of a few acres or smaller, on level ground with very little in the way of obstacles. Their hay is placed in piles, giving them very little reason to move even if they had the space. When they are taken out for training, it is often conducted in a single location, such as an arena, which is usually flat and also devoid of features. It seems little wonder that many domestic horses lack the emotional control and analytical ability of their wild counterparts. We have set them up in the exact right environment to make them naive. To combat this mental atrophy, I spend as much time as possible walking and playing with my horses on the trail, whether they are trained to ride, green, or too young to carry a rider.

Phelps, an off-the-track thoroughbred, provides an excellent example of how simply spending time moving on the trail can do amazing things for a horse. Phelps was from a race horse breeder who was going under and selling off a huge number of horses. He had had a typical start for a racing colt - too young, too fast, too emotional.

When I began playing with Phelps, he had been at his new home for six or eight months getting settled before having any real work done. He was friendly, and very gentle, but not in a healthy mental place. No matter how much his new owners fed and grained him, he stayed skin-and-bones thin. His breathing was always shallow and quick. Though he had had significant time away from his abusive training experiences, he was still an extremely anxious, nervous creature.

As I started to play with him on the ground, I found him to be extraordinarily willing to try, but always worried that I was going to demand something that would be past his limit. His world was very small, so there was a lot for him to be afraid of. As often happens with horses who have been started young and poorly, his time off had not yielded much decompression and general relaxation because he had no sense of how being relaxed and feeling safe could feel. In short, he was out of touch with his natural state.

Phelps needed to rediscover what it actually meant to be a horse, and the trail was a perfect place to help him do that. I began trailering him out two or three times a week for a two-hour walk.

Trailering was, of course, the first threshold we had to cross. Though Phelps would load in the trailer willingly and easily from the start, getting out was another story. He would not back out, nor did he feel like he could unload forwards after he turned around. I believe that from his experiences, he had learned that new places were very intense and not to be trusted. The first day he stood at the threshold for five hours until he finally had the confidence to unload. The time he needed reduced to an hour the second day, half an hour the third day, five minutes the fourth day, and close to immediate after that. I will never know why he was so afraid to unload when he was able to load so easily, though I suspect it had something to do with race-gate training. Regardless, I was blessed by Phelp's willingness to learn a new way.

Phelps and I spent many afternoons just walking together on the trail. I used a long lead so that he could drift if he got spooked, but generally asked him to stay just a little behind me in leading position. For a long time, that was all I asked of him. If he got stuck I would wait for him to get un-stuck, and if he got emotional and charged ahead I would simply ask him patiently to return to my side. Eventually he would settle in and become comfortable in my herd.

At first, this process took nearly the entire two hours of the walk. I tried to remain patient, not forcing anything on him, just being with him in a natural state of migration. As we continued the ritual of walking together, he began to come to a calm state of mind earlier and earlier in the walk. I was able to start phasing in simple games like weaving around the desert sage, asking him to put his front hooves on pedestal-like rocks, having him cross logs, or sidepass a fallen branch. Often Phelps would lose confidence during these tasks, so I would use repetition or returning to the walk to help him re-center.

As Phelps spent more and more time in a calm emotional state, he gained confidence in himself and my leadership. I was able to show him that I understood his fears and that if he trusted me and trusted himself, he could trust the larger world as well. Spending time together in the context of a migrating trail walk helped Phelps to reconnect to his natural state, allowing him to finally begin the process of unwinding from his extremely unnatural upbringing.