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ne refuses to run. One can’t run. One gets hurt. One’s a nice horse you have a little bit of fun with. And one’s a really nice horse that helps you forget the first four,” said trainer Kenny McPeek with a laugh, as he categorized new Thoroughbreds coming into his barn annually. In some cases, that first one—the horse that refuses to run—really is forgotten, falling through the proverbial cracks of large stables with plenty of “really nice horses.” “There’s very few of them we can’t figure out,” he said, “but sometimes we can’t.” That’s where people like 71-year-old horseman Frank Barnett of Fieldstone Farm in Williston, Florida, (near Ocala) get involved. “I wish you could get to it by skirting the ‘issues,’ but you can’t,” he said. “That’s how they got to me.” Those issues are not loading into a trailer or starting gate, balking at workouts, throwing riders and—bottom line— acting as if they don’t want to become racehorses. The principal issue underlying all the others, according to Barnett and Dr. Stephen Peters, co-author with Martin Black of the book Evidence-
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Based Horsemanship, is forgetting that horses are prey and not predatory animals. “Your horse is constantly asking, ‘Am I safe?’” said Peters. The question supersedes everything else in a horse’s brain and, unfortunately, isn’t part of most Thoroughbred trainers’ knowledge of how psychologically a horse functions, according to Peters—a neuroscientist and horse-brain researcher. “One of our big problems is the only brain that we have to compare to the horse’s brain is our own, so we develop ideas like respect and disrespect. “Horses don’t have a big frontal lobe. They can’t abstract things. “Would you beat a child who couldn’t figure out a math problem? Of course, you wouldn’t. Punishment in a horse’s environment is a predatory threat,” Peters added. The collaboration between Peters and Black, an Idaho-based horseman who teaches horsemanship, began when the former observed Black allowing a horse to rest after a training task, waiting and watching for the horse to drop its head, and then waiting for it to lick its lips. Then he would repeat the task or move to a new one. Peters, a neuroscientist and horse brain researcher, immediately knew Black