Leading Horses with Spatial Kindness. What?

The exercise was to halter your horse thoughtfully, asking the horse’s permission for each step of the process, and acknowledging his calming signals. A teenage girl was with her recently off-the-track thoroughbred, a tall dark gelding unsettled in new surroundings. We know how track horses are [not] taught to lead and she was using a rope halter, the kind that’s considered harsher than a leather or web halter. The gelding was engaged, the girl was listening to him, and I was cheering them on.

A woman in the crowd spoke up. Maybe she wanted to correct the girl but she posed the question to me, “Do you approve of rope halters, don’t you agree they are cruel?” and the girl flinched. I put off the question. I don’t think the woman was seeing the same calming signals in the horse that we were.

Later, the girl came to apologize and explain that she didn’t mean to be cruel. He’d always had a chain over his nose at the track. She didn’t want to handle him that way, but he wasn’t safe yet. I generally don’t use rope halters and I also know retraining takes time. She was right to transition the horse gradually to a kinder halter.

I remembered her because of a question from a reader about leading difficult horses and exceptions to rules:

“But if the horse is young mentally or physically it’s natural for them to jump into the person they trust, like they would their mom. And if their mom gets annoyed, it’s also natural for her to respond aggressively. She may not get annoyed. But I’ve seen my share of mares roundly trounce babies for real or imagined infractions. Anyway. For me, this is a safety issue. A horse better not jump onto me for any reason when other options are available. I’d like it if it were because we had mutual trust and respect, but that doesn’t happen with say, yearlings, very often. They lose their focus too quickly. When they are in danger, the human often disappears from their consciousness. Same with a lot of OTTBs right off the track. So…I guess what I’m saying is can we talk about the possibility of needing to train or retrain leading and handling skills with (ack) a bat with a whapper or if it’s a very big horse with very little knowledge, a chain (done safely and correctly) when you HAVE to walk them down from paddock for vet or farrier? Of course, there are horses I wouldn’t use either on…I’m just thinking there is some middle ground here. We have to stay alive or uninjured for our horse’s sake as well as our own. And I believe there’s a point you can back off, just as in riding, until the aids are as light as thinking them.”

Great question and so well described. We’ve all been stepped on, shoved around, tripped over, knocked down, and once I got a black eye when a horse looked at a noise. Handling horses on the ground is dangerous. The only thing more dangerous is being complacent about it.

Horses are hard-wired to spook. It’s anatomy and involuntary flight response. Can we train them out of their survival instinct? I don’t think so but a confident relaxed horse spooks less. A horse trained with fear doesn’t trust humans. The more reactive the handler is, the more reactive the horse. The fact that a horse acts differently with each handler supports the idea of our behavior impacting them. Can a horse respect/fear/love us and never hurt us on the lead? I don’t think that’s a promise they can keep any more than we can.

Consistency matters. There’s a problem when we are affirmative and then switch to aggression. It might work in an odd moment but we damage trust when we change methods. Then it’s hard to tell who’s more unreliable. Most horses hold a kernel of fear inside from harsh training in the past. It does not make them safer in an emergency.

We can’t behave like a mare, as brilliant as they are at herd discipline. Firstly, they have a few hundred pounds on us when it comes to wrestling. There is no secondly.

Let me be clear. It isn’t our space being intruded on, it’s our arrogance. The space is theirs. Some of us have been taught we own everything and we should make ourselves “big” but while we think we’re correcting them, horses read our anxiety as we flail our arms about and yell. They think we’re unpredictable because sometimes we come close to their faces and coo to them and other times, we whack and flap. We pet them or punish them; our hands are erratic and deceptive.

When we are that close horses can’t see us properly and don’t know what to expect so they become a bit like deer-in-headlights. They freeze up until they come apart. In other words, the problems we have controlling them when we are standing close are mainly caused by us standing close.

I hate that moving out of a horse’s space is a release, so I ask horses to prove it a few dozen times a day. They happily oblige.

She mentions the gentle, educated use of training aids like a whip or possibly a chain. Sometimes that might be the lesser evil. When working with an injured or unbalanced horse, if it’s an emergency situation, or if someone is in danger, you might consider their use but they do not guarantee things will go better. We might get better results breathing, keeping our heart rate low, and being consistent. If something is coming apart quickly, our hands and body are useless to stop them anyway. In an utter emergency, I might let out a loud sharp yell and hope to distract for a second, while I get safe and find a way for the horse to self-soothe, usually by moving.

I agree that we might “retrain leading and handling skills.” The goal is to work toward smaller cues, but that takes time and every horse and situation is different. A whip isn’t inherently cruel. I think we get lazy about lifting our own energy. We use whips to make things happen fast instead of giving the horse time to process. If the horse has been hurried too often, threatening the horse makes it worse. Using aids sparingly while weaning ourselves off harsher aids might work, but no guarantee. It isn’t using aids in certain situations that’s the problem, it’s developing a habit of unconscious aggression.

Her idea to “retrain leading and handling skills” is probably more needed for humans. If we listened to horses the way the herd listens to mares, we’d give more horses space. We’d step back when their eyes go still or their breathing becomes shallow. Standing that close, they literally can’t see us and their response time is seven times quicker than ours. We don’t have a chance of getting out of the way. We have to start out of the way.

If the horse is close enough to smash into you, it’s crucial to create a habit of holding more space between you. Do you pull your horse off balance with the lead to get a step? Can you train yourself to lead with an invisible rope, from a small distance yet aware in the moment?

Leading is an art. Trust your body to cue, murmur praise, but more importantly, create a consistent habit of spatial kindness. Give them room to balance, room to self-soothe, and most of all, room to breathe.

…

Anna Blake, Relaxed & Forward

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