Three Questions Your Horse Asks the Most By Christa Miremadi Photos by Tina Harnett
Horses ask almost as many questions as a young child. I have a four-year-old son who could win a gold medal if asking questions was an Olympic sport, and the thirty horses I look after could give him a pretty good run for his money.
My mustang gelding Cisco meeting another horse at a clinic.
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bviously, horses don’t speak in words like Mr. Ed, but instead ask questions through their body language and the behaviours they display. Some questions are easy to recognize and other are a little tougher. Some will have little or no consequences if they go unanswered; others will lead to unwanted behavioural responses like bolting, biting or spookiness. These are the questions you’ll want to recognize and answer. Much like when we travel to a country where the language is foreign to us and we learn how to ask, “Where is the bathroom?”, “Do you have a telephone?” and “May I have a beer please?” - horses have a set of essential questions that they will ask people as well. Some of the people that they meet may recognize these questions and some may even answer them, but others will neither
10 • Saddle Up • May 2013
recognize the questions nor know how to answer them and this could be one of the leading causes of unwanted behaviours in horses. You see, without answers to these three essential questions, the horse is left feeling like a lonely traveller in a foreign land without a guide. I don’t intend to tell you how to go about answering these questions because that will depend entirely on the way the questions were asked, the horse’s history and its personality type; obviously, that’s not something I could know without meeting each horse individually. What I will do is help shed some light on the three questions I find myself answering most often when I meet a horse who is displaying unwanted behaviours - the questions that have been going unanswered and created anxiety and stress in the horse, resulting in unwanted behaviour. Question # 1: Who is in charge? This is by far the most common question I see horses ask, not just of the humans they meet but every horse they come into contact with as well. This seems to be an almost unconscious thing, like breathing or a beating heart. It is nature-driven and directly related to a horse’s number-one behaviour-shaping instinct: survival. They ask this question through posture, the use of distance and testing of boundaries and, sometimes, if they’re having a very hard time
understanding the answer or if the human’s behaviour doesn’t match up with the answer, through more obvious actions like biting or kicking. This question can look like a horse shoving, pushing through, and bumping a person with his nose or even something as subtle as slowing down or speeding up while being led. When asking other horses, it can look like squealing, striking, kicking or chasing. If you manage to convince your horse that you are in charge, you may hear the next question. If not, he will be asking himself. Question # 2: Am I safe? Again, driven by the strongest instinct possessed by a horse, this question is asked almost relentlessly. In some cases, the answer is so obviously “yes” that you may not even notice that the question was asked. If that’s the case, you will Melody and Lilly enjoying not lose any some “down time” between sessions. Clearly Lilly was ground or feeling safe. clout as the “leader” at
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