Stories we tell about horses
'He's naughty' 'Sore' 'Confused' 'Lazy' 'Frightened' 'Processing Trauma' 'Developing the self confidence to say NO' 'Expressing a boundary' 'Participating in the conversation'
A lot of horsemanship involves looking at a horse in a moment within a context and making a judgement call about how what that horse is currently experiencing, in order to decide what steps to take next.
Its been throughly proven in humans that someone cannot look at a single photograph of a strangers face outside of context and guess what they are feeling.
But we are all pretty certain we can spend time with a loved one and pickup on more or less how they are feeling. We can - because we know them, because we can see their context, because we are in that moment with them.
I have no doubt I can more or less read a horse. Most people, even total novices, can more or less read a horse. And the more time I spend with horses and in particular the more time I spend with an individual horse, the more experience I get in interpreting that horse.
FAFO - look at a horse, make a guess, act on that guess and see what happens in the horse in response.
But in order to make my next guesses and plan my next actions, I tell myself a story in my head of what my pony was thinking - a story which may or may not be reflective of her actual experiences.
And the more nuanced and detailed my guess, the more room for error. And the more time between the guess and the action and the result, the more room for error.
I noticed how I could watch my own videos of working with Una and fit it into one narrative, or another narrative, and the story I told completely changed how I AND OTHER PEOPLE viewed the situation.
Stories are necessary in order to explain situations and unavoidable when talking about horsemanship.
But I started to get concerned when asked to rely predominately on subjective interpretations of how my horse might be feeling, and discard measurable improvements or deteriorations in practical skills during our horse training.
I kept getting struck by a tension - if we aren't to judge the quality of our horsemanship by our horses progression or regression in the training, and we aren't to judge the quality of our horsemanship by our wider accomplishments in the world, and we arent to judge our horsemanship by our horses fitness, or posture, or how often they say yes, or how often they say no...
Then we end up relying predominantly on subjective interpretations of how we think a horse feels.
And any action of the horses has an infinite number of possible interpretations.
So what possible measure do I have to say, yes, this is a good direction for my horsemanship?
Record scratch, Flip side, looking at this from the other direction.
Its easy enough to make a horse do something they hate and to do it with a high degree of compliance. And the horse with their eyes white and their mouth open and their tummy tense and lame behind while jumping a clear round - thats pretty easy to spot. We've all seen this. We can all see it. Its boring.
If I see a photograph of a horse in a warmup arena, behind the vertical, tight noseband, mouth foaming, eyes wrinkled, spurs dug in, sweated up... I can probably make a really accurate guess that horse is miserable.
This is, um, actually a pretty easy situation to avoid.
Just don't.
Don't persistantly force horses to do things they obviously hate doing.
Don't ride unhappy horses.
This isn't like some secret oh no thing to be worried about doing by mistake.
Its obvious when its happening, its obvious to avoid.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Moving on.
Collalating both sides
I do think how horses feel is more important than the results they give us.
But I also think if we are attempting to train our horses, we should be seeing some objective, unambigous data that our horse is learning the skills we meant to teach as well.
Both.