A Breeder ’s Notebook:
To each his own
By Johan Dreyer
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I have to agree: “A horse is like the breath you take – every horse you see becomes a part of you” . 1
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his affliction had me intrigued until the other day when I went to check on my mares (they run free). I nearly stumbled over a steenbok lamb that lay curled up and deadly quiet in the low shrub. I could see his heart beating, he was trembling with fear but he remained still, believing I would not notice him. It was an exhilarating experience and gave me the clue to understand this thing between man and beast. In principle the horse provides, apart from the affection it reciprocates, something true and real – an anchor of simplicity affording you the tranquillity to sort your priorities. Take for instance the story of Canute (994–1034), a Dane who was King of England for some 20 years. Misled by the lavish praises of his lackeys, he had a chair sat down on the seashore and, regally crowned, he commanded the waves not to wet him. Apparently he never wore his crown again... Unlike the king’s lackeys, although a horse’s admiration may be unbridled, they do not lie. In looking at the mirror it seems the inclination to train a horse for most starts at the cradle (born with a horse addiction) and for the rest at the bank (can’t afford a trainer). But if you look through the mirror, you’ll find that to compete and win on a horse you have raised and trained yourself is a dream with roots that go much deeper. It is something removed and dissociated from our everyday hustle and bustle that tends to bind and contort our sense of purpose. To work and train your horse is a cord that keeps you in touch with long-gone origins. There is a world of difference between riding a horse somebody else has raised and trained to a championship title and plodding along, left to your own devices and eventually reaching the summit or not. If you train yourself, the reward will be mostly in the journey not in the destination, whereas competing on a trained horse the only reward is in the destination (touching the very roots of consumerism). As an amateur, you will probably not equal the training a professional can provide (if he is truly professional that is). That which he makes look so easy, implies that he has probably forgotten more about horses than you will ever learn. But what competing on a horse someone else has trained on your behalf cannot provide is the satisfaction of connecting, understanding and conquering this magnificent animal. A trained horse implies that someone else has prepared the horse for connecting with you, he will tell you what and how to control the horse because he has already conquered him on your behalf. You need to have an original thought to understand the joy of it.
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SHOWHORSE, March 2008, Of Wine and Horses - Emile Joubert.
But what competing on a horse someone else has trained on your behalf cannot provide is the satisfaction of connecting, understanding and conquering this magnificent animal.
To do justice to the professionals, if it was left to the amateurs to provide us with the know-how on training a horse, it would have been scant indeed. The knowledge on horse training available today mostly emanates from professional trainers who spent their lives learning about the snags involved in training a horse. A training manual for amateurs should start with if you think this is easy you do not know enough (in this instance ignorance isn’t bliss). Just as you need to know that heat melts ice if you want water, you need to know how to get a horse workable before you can start training. The process of training your own horse has many facets. You need to know how to be his teacher and what to teach and then you need to know what the horse needs to be and know before he can be an able scholar.
As a teacher, time determines the rate at which you sell your life, but your scholar is not conscious of time. Rushing a horse through any training is simply disastrous. To facilitate training you have to accommodate his timelessness. He cannot comprehend and have no appreciation for your effort to allow him the time he needs. There is no rule for the time it will take but there is one for patience: be prepared to be patient (there are no substitutes for time and patience). There is a definite trade-off between averting a confrontation and the time it takes to achieve results. The closest good work gets to cutting time is: if a horse learns to do everything right he will never do anything wrong and thereby diminish training time. The product determines the quality of training, not the time it took. Equally, all the time and patience in the world means nothing if you do not approach training from the horse’s point of view. The motivation to hurry up training never has the horse’s well-being in mind. It usually stems from the ants you have in your pants, or the trainer with a paying owner breathing fire down his neck. As a very conservative rule of thumb: you can easily pay twice the horse’s acquisition cost to keep and train him before he will deliver any of the goods you bargain for and that’s being optimistic. In training we try to make a horse happy to be
ridden and a pleasure to ride. A horse has no idea why you are keeping him, neither does being ridden come naturally. By preference he will want to graze free and undisturbed in a lush field surrounded by members of his herd as this encompasses his foremost priorities, food and security. To get the horse happy to be ridden you have to start training by addressing his priorities. When you remove the horse from the herd it is fundamental to let him understand that he will be fed and protected. His stall will provide for food and some security. The security he got from the herd and his leader is much more complicated: in order to relax he has to feel safe and protected from his point of view, not yours. Therefore you have to be “his leader” and his “new herd” all at once. The horse’s instinctive flight reaction accounts for their survival over millions of years and is deep-rooted, but what is a threat and what not is learnt behaviour. If he has thus far perceived you as a threat, re-educating him to the contrary will be the first obstacle. Horses communicate in principle by body language. A horse speaks no verbal language therefore he is not equipped to understand it. Words are meaningless, the attitude you adapt to utter them is his cue. Being a master of perception he will read more from your body language than you could hope to express in a hundred years. With a horse there is no pretending: you have to be what he is looking for – you cannot act like you know how he would like you to be. As his leader you need to be in control, self-assured, calm and confident at all times. He looks up to you to assure him that he is safe. It is this adherence to a leader that makes a horse trainable. His aptitude for training or the lack thereof is due to his memory. He remembers commands (aids or cues) and those responses that yield reward or punishment. In the same way that certain human behaviour is in fact a mask for fear, how a horse conducts itself is largely related to tension. Therefore in order to teach, you have to know what a tense horse looks like as you can’t teach a tense horse much, he will just learn to run scared quite quickly. Tension in a horse determines his response to cues or resistance thereof. Resistance follows tension; a horse shows
tension long before he will show any resistance. It follows logically that if you prevent or address tension you will not end up fighting resistance. This is a conscious decision, to never force the horse to do what you want (and in consequence keep fighting his resistance) but to convince the horse to want to work with you (thereby unleashing his potential). Resistance is natural and likely to develop, however your reactions are the determining factor. There will be many times when working with a horse that you feel your blood run cold. To succeed in training a horse you need to be able to control your temper and not hit the horse in anger. Losing your temper is bad, shouting at a horse is worse. He does not understand the words, but the tone and attitude will be interpreted as you being out of control, which will harm your existing or potential relationship far more than your anger intended. Whatever the circumstances, you have to remain calm and let your horse know what you do and don’t want. Xenophon (430BC) wrote, “The one best precept – the golden rule in dealing with a horse – is never to approach him angrily. Anger is so devoid of forethought that it will often drive man to do things which in a calmer mood he will regret”.
unknown. That meant, to each his own – you did what you had to do the best you could. You thought about everything and figured out the best course of action; you were constantly reasoning (with yourself mostly). The advent of mass media hasled to information overload. All of a sudden you start doubting yourself and instead of reasoning through the challenges at hand, you look for answers from someone else. The propagandist understood this, promoted it and quickly provided the answers – his answers (ie advertisements). Adverts convince somebody to buy something by connecting the product with the person’s ego, then throwing a spotlight on him and providing a mirror. We (read our egos) are very sensitive to perceived imperfections. If the product being promoted is the apparent answer to the perceived imperfections, the deal is done. Consumerism is the victory of propaganda over reason. Mostly the imperfections are nonexistent and the answer a blatant lie. The long and short of all this is that we live a life “removed”, with created challenges and provided answers for the profit of some unknown.
“The one best precept – the golden rule in dealing with a horse – is never to approach him angrily. Anger is so devoid of forethought that it will often drive man to do things which in a calmer mood he will regret”.
Once the horse is settled and calm, conditioning him mentally to want to co-operate is the next step. Sadly it is a neglected part of training. Just as fundamental as conditioning and just as important, is to teach a horse to yield to pressure. (A rule of thumb is: if a horse yields efficiently to pressure you will never be aware of his weight.) To condition a horse you have to understand his body language. Be sure of what you see and calm him when he is tense, wait if he is thinking and put more pressure on him if he is stubborn. As your horse increases in being conditioned to your wishes and is correspondingly yielding to pressure, he will be ever more perceptive. Because he is reading your body language he will increasingly need less of a cue – leaving him eager to commit to the work at hand. Before the 20th century mass communication was
We are humans living in the 21st century and whatever we do, that we will remain. But to raise and train your own horse and experience the sheer exhilaration of a horse’s honest and eager commitment to your will, provides an anchor to that which is real and true, allowing you the space to re-evaluate your premise of society – and that is priceless
References: Previous editions of SA SHOWHORSE Horsemanship by Johan Dreyer The Faber Book of Anecdotes (Johan can be reached at: dreyerjohan@yahoo.com)