What To Do When You’ve Tried Everything

“I tried everything,” my client says. This isn’t something that I hear once in a long while. It’s a time-honored tradition, consistently stated. Sometimes, there is a time deadline but mostly it happens on an ordinary day. My client says it, so I’ll know what they have been thorough before contacting me. It’s implied, almost like a dare, if I’m a good trainer, it’s my job to calm the client, blame the horse and give a quick trick to make the horse behave. But the horse isn’t wrong.

“I tried everything!” my client repeats.

“Yes,” I say. There is a quick slide show in my brain. I am silent because I know all the crazy methods we’ve been taught to tease, maneuver, or dominate a horse into doing what we want. Besides, my client has clearly identified the problem in three words and it doesn’t matter that it was done with the best of intentions. I will fail my client because none of the things I have to say will be pleasant to hear.

My client knows it’s a horrible mess but they are desperate to fix it. Now they have named the second problem. When the anxiety about the task becomes bigger than the task, horses get nervous and inch toward their sympathetic system. That means flight, fight, or freeze and none of those are the right answer.

When we start training with kind, cooperative methods, it always seems amazing that horses do as we ask so easily. But we don’t trust it because it’s simple and if it works once, it was a fluke. Even if Affirmative Training works generally, in a real emergency, we don’t think this kind of pussy-footed, breath-counting, bliss-ninny affirmative method would work. So, we are faithless to the method and yup, it doesn’t work. When we need it the most, rather than a strong committed focus, we give it a doubtful half-hearted attempt, knowing the attempt will fail before the horse answers. And see, we were right.

The horse’s side of the conversation is that we were acting a little unfaithful (coyote-like) so they go slow, painfully slow, because they’re conflicted. They don’t see a problem but it feels like something is wrong, the very definition of a calming signal. Unfaithful is the right word when we give a horse reason to doubt us. We let ourselves be distracted by overthinking, listening to railbirds, or making up stories in our minds. We think of everything but the horse.

The horse knows how to do the thing but loses confidence because his human has changed. The horse hasn’t said no, just that he needs time to process our doubt. If we can’t tell the difference between caution and refusal, we are primed to do something foolish. The horse has given some calming signals, all of which went over the human’s head because we are too busy being unfaithful to the process to notice. The horse had already begun to take the cue but we interrupted them with conflicting cues.

This is when we remember our tattoo. It’s the one we are all born with. The tattoo says “You can’t let your horse win.”

One minute feels like ten and patience evaporates. We give up on one technique after another because that’s what it means to lose faith in our horse. Soon after, we get stiff in our shoulders and hands. Our voice gets edgy and harsh. We swing ropes, pop whips, and jerk leads. We change because it seems to not be working but the horse only appears to not be learning. When push comes to shove, we feel justified to push and shove. By then, the horse has lost trust, we’re stuck, and domination doesn’t work either.

We are mad or frustrated or incredulous because we have done everything we could think of and the horse is refusing. And the horse is refusing because everything we do contradicts everything they do. The horse has tried but can’t find the right answer. Finally the horse and human can agree: Nothing works.

Nothing works because we’ve tried it all; being nice, teasing with treats, being harsh, using fancy training aids, crying, pleading, and yelling. We have flipped personalities so often our dog wouldn’t recognize us, and it’s left us dizzy and a bit disoriented. Nothing works because we’ve tried everything.

Nothing works because the horse is frozen and confounded and distrusting. They are afraid of us when we are spooky and unpredictable. If our horse was our therapist, they’d diagnose us with bipolar disorder or maybe a split personality disorder. But horses are not therapists. They are not human. They don’t want to be.

Consistency works. But that ship has left. Sorry.

Know this for the truth: Once instinct has taken over, the horse doesn’t worry about the human, not for a second, because the horse will put their own safety first every time. It’s a life-or-death equation to them. We fail them when we don’t understand that. And today we have gone too far.

To slow down and breathe in the heat of a battle is an act of courage that goes against the tattoo. That’s on us.

What do you do when you have tried everything? Just stop.

You were right about one thing. We do need to win the fight, but that’s easy. Just stop.

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Anna Blake, Relaxed & Forward

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Affirmative training is the fine art of saying yes.

 

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