“Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible” some fella named Ben Casnocha is noted to have said.
Over and over again we have called upon Nelson to help with a problem horse. He’s got a knack for knowing what to do.
Recently I listened to him in a conversation about horse people becoming stuck at a certain point while training their horses because everything means something.
If I turn away, that means come to me, if I wiggle my finger that means back up, if I raise my arm and point that means go…you get the idea.
He said in the beginning horses need that predictability. But what he went on to say is that the horse often comes to expect that Everything must mean it needs to do something.
Add that to a horse that is really worried or unconfident and you’ve got trouble.
He pointed out how he sees people “sneak” onto a horse that isn’t yet really ready to be ridden. The person swings their leg really slowly over the horse and settles gingerly into the saddle. Sometimes this goes okay, sometimes not.
We can add to the nervous horse issues by over-teaching a nervous horse to stand still every time we desensitize them. We think because they are standing still, they are calm but that’s not the case every time. They are standing still because we taught them the scary thing stops every time they freeze up. That can be a good approach in the beginning but then they should have to also keep moving in whatever direction we tell them to, and ignore the scary things rather than have to react to it either by stopping or by running faster.
We tend to always stop doing the scary things as soon as the horse does something. So obviously they are going to try to figure out how to make it go away, rather than just ignore it and realize they don’t have to react to it.
But what we also need to understand is that this advanced technique doesn’t work if we aren’t specific about when we actually want the horse to move or stop. We have to be very specific and clear about that, while the other things, are completely random simultaneously.
The reason why this next step approach is important is because things happen with no rhyme or reason in the horse riding world. You turn a curve at a canter and your saddle slides to the outside some, a tree branch suddenly falls behind you on the trail, your friend hands you a water bottle and it crackles loudly in the transfer…stuff just happens.
I’ve watched Nelson working with people and their upset horses multiple times. He will pitch his rope in random patterns at the horse and ask it to keep going in a walk. Or to stand still. He will get one of his circus monkey friends to run beside the horse and hang, swing, touch a leg on the butt or the chest or the flank, on both sides, over and over with no rhyme or reason, making the horse stop or go when he wants it to and ignore all the chaos the “monkey” is generating..
And invariably at the end of it the horse will have lost much of the wild eyed look that it had in the beginning. Only when that has calmed down and the tail is not clamped does he deem the horse actually ready to get up on.
And then the mounted circus games begin. Lol
It’s long been stated that drunks and children create the best broke horses. Perhaps this is why
