Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

They're All Good Horses

I never yet met a man that I didn't like. When you meet people, no matter what opinion you might have formed about them beforehand, why, after you meet them and see their angle and their personality, why, you can see a lot of good in all of them. -Will Rogers

Over the years I have worked with horses who come from a vast range of different backgrounds. Some were rescued from situations where they were malnourished and uncared for. Some were barely-handled colts. Some were experienced show horses who had fallen out of favor. Some had been physically beaten, cut, or otherwise abused, usually in the name of "training." Sometimes when I am introduced to a horse, the owner has only good things to say about them. More often I am met with a laundry list of complaints that run the gamut from, "she is scared of everything," to "he's bratty and doesn't listen."

The factor that seems to determine the level of complaint is whether the horse has had any training or not. Usually, the greater the number or severity of complaints, the more training a horse has had. The expectations for the horse seem to rise dramatically when there is even a faint whiff of "professional training" in their history.

There seems to be very little differentiation between modalities of educating the horse. It is common to hear phrases like "he's had 30 days of training," or "she's been in full training for two years." These descriptions are commonly accepted as benchmarks for performance. These benchmarks are very misleading. Training experiences vary to a huge degree, just like human educational experiences. Different people learn in different ways and different teachers are more or less skilled at imparting information to students. Saying "he's had 30 days" tells us little more than that a horse was at someone's barn for a month. We don't know anything about how much time was spent with him, how material was presented, whether he was treated well or punished unfairly… We don't know anything about the trainer's desire or ability to teach in a way that would help the horse to grow and develop as an individual soul.

I think that generalizing in terms of training benchmarks does a disservice to everyone involved, horse and human alike. Learning happens in relationship. It is a non-linear process that is totally dependent on the individual natures of the learner and the teacher and how they interact with each other. Most professional training barns operate just as our public education institutions do: they try to cram each individual into the same narrow mold, carelessly cutting off any eccentricity that falls outside the set boundaries of the system. The focus is on goals and outcomes, not on process, and the perceived ends are sadly used to justify the means.

Sometimes people come to me saying that their horse just needs a few things smoothed out. "He's had extensive training and just needs a ‘tune up.'" I am never sure if the owner doesn't want to admit the extent of the problems, or if they are living in some form of denial. Often, the "tune up" horses prove to have significant challenge areas once we begin to play with them.

It is my belief that these challenge areas are created when some part of the horse's character, learning style, or physical ability did not fit into the tight confines of a trainer's methods. The tragedy is that the parts of the horse that extend beyond the training system are often the places where the horse is most honestly expressing his or her authentic self. Deep wounds develop as the horse is punished for being too expressive.

These wounds worsen over time, becoming festering psychological sores that lead to increasingly poor behavior as the horse continues to live with them. Often these sores don't even become apparent until the horse has come home and decompressed from the experience of living under the trainer's control. Thus, the horse is blamed because the link between the bad behavior and the training experience is not obvious.

Horse training dogmas, recipes, formulas, and other factory-style systems create "problem horses." What we have to realize is that the horses themselves are not the problem. The real problem is that we have not allowed the horses to be themselves. They have been made wrong for expressing their opinions. They have been silenced with force when they have tried to open a dialog. They have been forced to live by decisions made unilaterally by someone seeking to maintain their reputation and get a paycheck.

The miracle of the situation is that the means of saving these horses from being thrown away to slaughter or a life of pity and sorrow in a rescue is extremely simple. All we have to do is give thems the opportunity to express themselves freely. By empowering horses to be the unique, communicative individuals they are, they can regain connection with the parts of themselves that they shunted away to avoid punishment. Their authentic selves are not gone, they are simple hidden under a protective shell, awaiting a chance to blossom into the sunlight again.

Sometimes these changes take a lot of time. I have been fortunate enough to work with a beautiful Kiger Mustang who was three times rescued: twice from neglect and once from horrible abuse by a "professional" trainer. When I first began seeing him he was extremely skittish, wary of people, and had a bolting streak a mile wide. Luckily for him, his current owner understood the depth of his psychological pain and saw the strong, beautiful soul that lay beneath those wounds. It has taken over three years, but through a consistent attitude of openness and encouragement, he has finally come into his own. He has shed his layers of fear and emerged confident, athletic, and creative - the kind of horse we all dream about playing with.

Sometimes, the change to authentic openness and self-confidence happens much more quickly. This past summer, we were asked to "tune up" a twelve hand Welsh pony who had been trained as a hunter/jumper kid's mount. At first, he was all attitude and fear, oscillating between throwing his head and throwing bucking fits. It quickly became apparent that he felt extraordinarily unbalanced, especially with a rider on his back, and this frightened him. He didn't feel like anyone would listen to his fears, so he had learned to resort to extreme measures to get his point across. We were able to resolve the issue by showing him that we would listen to him, as long as he tried to communicate, rather than resorting to throwing a fit. Once he realized that he could communicate without having to fly off the handle, the change was nearly immediate. Within about three months, he transformed from a nervous and unstable problem case to a happy, totally mellow, kid-friendly companion.

For me, the key to working with a horse, or any being, is to get out of the mode of needing to "fix," and instead do everything possible to open up respectful, two-way communication. When a horse understands that he can express himself and that his opinions will be taken fairly into consideration, he immediately begins to shed the layers of displaced behavior that developed as psychological armor.

As we begin working from this new perspective, it becomes apparent that there is no need to fix anything, but rather an opportunity to connect deeply with a beautifully unique individual. Through the power of that connection, wounds heal themselves organically.

Over the years I have been introduced to many "problem" horses, and in each case I have found myself saying, "this horse is really a good horse!" I find myself in the same boat as Mr. Will Rogers. I have never met a horse I didn't like once I shed my preconceptions and met them as the individual they truly are: another soul who just wants to be heard, doing the best they can in the face of the pain and wonderment of this life. When it comes down to it, they're all good horses.