Episode 23: Your Horse Has Questions

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses.

Today, I'm going to explain something to you. That was a game changer for me when I started doing it. And then when I started explaining it to people at clinics, I could instantly see a change in them and their horse. Are you ready? Your horse is always asking you questions, and it's important that you phrase it that way every time he does something you don't understand or you dislike. You need to say to yourself, my horse has questions because it's true. Your horse has lots and lots of questions. If you think about horses out in the field, out in a pasture or any kind of herd situation, it's easy to see that horses speak through body language. So when your horse is asking you questions, it's going to be with body language. A lot of times the questions might look like a break of gate beating up, diving in, pulling out, reversing directions. Any of these sound familiar? Lots and lots of questions are happening when the horses are doing different things with their body. If you relate this back to children, I did a quick search and found out that children around the age of 4. Ask around seventy three questions a day. That's a lot of questions. And when we go out and work with our horse, I find that they're asking a lot of questions. But I also find that it can feel overwhelming to people.

And maybe this thought's crossed your mind, as I've been saying this. I wish my horse wouldn't ask so many questions. Now let's go back to the study with children. It also said that parents felt bombarded by questions. The questions were a lot of tough things, like why do people die? Where did I come from? What is God? How was I made? Why do I have to go to school? Why is the sky blue? Why can't I stay up as late as you and parents were feeling bombarded? And I can also say that as a parent, I can remember times when I thought I just wish they wouldn't ask so many questions. But if you actually hit pause and think about that, you do want your kids still asking questions. And I do want my horses asking questions. I want my horses asking questions always. Does that surprise you? I think sometimes people think that if they do the training right when the horse is quote unquote finished or, you know, done training or whatever phrasing is floating around in their head, I think they think they're going to kind of have sort of a a really nice little non questioning. Maybe I'm going to use the word robot, because I don't think people think they want a robot. But I do think they have this idea that the horse isn't going to be asking questions. I always want my horse asking questions.

However, the quality of the questions change a lot between horses in elementary school and horses in college. Have you ever noticed that kids don't ask a lot of questions like this? Can I eat my vegetables now? Can I shut off the TV now? Can I exercise now? And the reason that kids don't ask those questions are those are things that more mature people ponder and consider when we're training the horse. I'd like you to keep in mind that the quality of the question will change as the horses training level changes. Here are three thoughts I want you to think about when your horse asks questions. Your horse? No one is going to ask questions about leadership. Number two, those questions are going to reveal his temperament. And number three, the questions he asks are going to reveal his training level. We recognize that when we watch horses in the herd, they are very often asking questions about leadership. When they say, can I push you away from the hey, it's a leadership question. When they say, can I move you? And they're talking to you now. That's a question about leadership. When you're leading a horse and it decides it wants to exit stage. Right. And you're planning on going straight, it's asking, can I make the decisions here? When the horse if a horse offers to bite you, it's asking a question.

What if I bite? It would ask that to another horse in the herd. They might ask the question, what if I run you over? And a really great video of that is in the very first email. If you sign up for my email that I send out weekly, the very first one, you get shows presto. And another buddy running each other over. Because what are they doing? They're very equally matched at this age when I was videotaping them and they're asking who's in charge? And these two are pushing and running each other over and biting each other. And that's what happens when horses are very equally matched and they're asking a lot of questions. Now, their questions reveal a lot about their temperament. If you have a horse that's asking a lot of questions about speeding up or or slowing down or they're asking different questions about when to be done, they're telling you things about the way that they think by the questions that they ask. But don't be confused. They're also revealing things about their training level, a horse that runs you over like presto, when he was coming out of the round pint after pushing and prodding and biting his friends and he was a yearling, it was very common for him to come out of the round pen and turn around and ask me those same exact questions. And what I had to do was I needed to answer those questions the same way that popcorn, my older horse answered them in the field because presto figured out you don't bite popcorn, you don't run over popcorn.

And popcorn wasn't crazy hard on him. He was just very, very fair. And what's also interesting is Popcorn will play with him from time to time. But he always has these boundaries where he sets how much pushing and biting and playing and how the quality of the interaction goes. And I needed to reflect similar qualities when I'm leading presto. But very interesting, when young horse walks out of the pasture of asking all those questions to his buddies, very likely he's going to turn around and ask those questions of me. I put presto out in the field for a whole summer with popcorn. And what was interesting is the quality of his questions changed because of the herd environment he was in. He was with older horses that made him behave more. So his questions came out and they were way more subtle. Interesting to think about. Sometimes I think when I'm talking about the horse asking questions, there is the thought that but there's so many questions and they're asking things that I really don't want to have to answer there. Can I run you over? Can I push you? Can I turn left? Can I turn right for just a moment?

Let's think about the training like a bell curve. And so if you can imagine that bell curve that on the left hand side, you know, it starts kind of low and then it comes up. Peaks in the middle. And then as it goes to the right, it drops back down again. So it's shaped like a like a classic bell. I want you to have that picture in your mind. And I want you to think about putting the elementary school on the left hand side and college level on the right hand side. And I want you to think about the training being a little bit like going from elementary school up through is a little bit like climbing this mountain and and then things change on the other side as we head towards the more advanced training. And the reason I want you to put that illustration in your mind is because if you believe that what I'm saying is true, I always want my horse asking questions. The questions in the beginning with your horse are going to be more challenging. They are going to be a lot like what they would ask in the herd about, can I run you over? What are you gonna do if I bite? And then when we start riding them, those are not signs we see in the herd, but they're gonna go. Do I really have to turn left? Do I really have to stop? Do I really have to go? There's all kinds of questions that are being asked.

But I want you to picture in your mind that somewhere along the lines, when we cross over the top of that hump and that bell curve and things start to get more advanced on the other side, when your horse is asking a lot of questions, it can be really fun. That's right. Pause and really think about that. It can be really fun when your horse is asking a lot of questions, because as the questions get higher quality and more subtle, they're no longer about these big leadership things. They still do reveal stuff about the horse, but they start to get a lot more refined. So, for example, one of my favorite feelings in my body when I'm riding a horse is when I run down to that sliding stop and I'm asking that horse to speed up. And when if you watch that video of me riding Roxy bareback and bridles and I'm building down to that sliding stop every single stride, I'm going a little faster and she's going okay, a little faster. Do we stop now? But she's not fully saying, do we stop now? And she's not fully saying, do we go faster? She's like, she's going faster because I say go faster. But she's carrying. Remember that idea of this positive tension she's carrying in her body? The idea we might be stopping now.

We might be stopping now. So she's building speed with a building thought about the opposite thing, which is the stop. And so with that in her mind, it gives her this powerful build a motion and it makes it so easy when I say, and you can stop now. And she just goes to the ground and slides. And this is a really great example of how fun it is when the horses start asking really refined questions. If I pull that back into something that's a little bit more in the middle. So it's not the. Can I bite you questions, but it's maybe not quite as advanced as what I described. One of my favorite exercises to have people do at clinics is I'll get out one of these big equine activity balls and I will say, okay, what you're going to do is you're going to lunge your horse past the ball. It's gonna be you. And then the horse is gonna go past the ball on the outside. So if for a moment, somewhere in there, it's gonna go you and then the ball and then the horse and the ball is gonna be 20 feet away from you so that the horse is passing, you know, a fair amount away from you and the horse is gonna go past the ball and then you're gonna make the horse do an inside turn on the lunge line and you're gonna send the horse back, pass the ball.

And then when the horse goes past the ball, you're gonna turn it back around another inside turn. So if you can imagine, the horse is going always on the outside of the ball, as in relationship to you. And as it goes past the ball and you do an inside turn and the horse comes back facing the ball, and then you as the handler, every time the horse turns to the inside and is facing the ball, you lower your energy level and the horse goes past the ball and you turn the horse back around. And that's gonna take some energy. You're going to pull on the lead rope or lunge line in this case and pull the lunge line and you're going to, you know, hold up your stick and string and you get to send the horse back and the horse is going to turn. And it's gonna go past the ball. But you're going to lower your energy. And what's going to happen is eventually, if you do this over and over again and this happens within one work session, when people are here in front of me, the horse is going to start to notice that your energy level changes every time the horse is facing the ball.

So they're going to start to focus more attention on the ball and they're going to start to be like, there's something that changes with my human. Every time I look at this thing and they're gonna start to say there's some kind of relation. I wonder what that is. So in their mind, they're asking this question. And in their body, you're gonna see that reflected as they're going to start to slow down a little bit more right there. They're going to start to look back and forth between you and the ball. If they look at the ball, I'm always coaching from the outside going really lower your energy level now, like you really you're trying to make this so that this horse cause the goal. And I haven't told the horse the goal because how am I going to communicate that other than body language? But the goal is to get that horse to focus on the ball and then eventually roll the ball. Well, we're gonna do this through this game of what I call or colder. But this requires that you and the horse are having a conversation and that requires that the horse is being moved with this body and that you're lowering your energy level. And the horse goes, what does that mean? And so that's the horse asking question. And you're going to just keep answering these questions by simply if the horse goes past it, you're going to turn the horse around.

And that's going to be answering the question. The horse goes past it. That was actually a question. He goes past it. Any in any in. He's going past and you go, no, I'm going to how about we go back to the left and he goes, OK, we go back to the left. He goes and then he goes, how about we go past the ball and you go. How will we come back to the ball? And he goes, he's not even thinking about the ball. He's like, okay, we're going the other direction. So he goes the other direction and he goes past the ball. And you go, how about we come back to the ball? And then let's just say he goes past it. You can see we can keep doing this until eventually he's like, I don't know, but we're passing back and forth past this blue thing. And eventually he'll bomb or glance or something. And every time you lower your energy level, that ball will start to have a little bit of a magnetic field like it's going to. He's going to be like. She changes every time I'm near this thing. And it's the coolest thing because I'm actually in that moment. It looks like we're just manipulating the body back and forth.

But over and over and over again, as I'm doing this, I'm going. You're having a conversation with the horse. And as the horse starts to participate in this conversation, the coolest things happen because the the horse is like, oh, my gosh, they're not just dictating to me that I have to do blah, blah, blah. They're inviting me into this flowing conversation where I don't get in trouble when I go past the ball. I just get redirected back and then the person starts to relax because they're not like, oh, no, I did it wrong. My horse did it wrong. We're all wrong. The rider starts to be like, well, they go past and I go, Oh, what's. How about back to the ball? And this is why it's a game changer, because instead of everybody feeling like it's right or wrong or good or bad, it's just a conversation. So if I sat down with you over coffee and we were having a conversation and you didn't understand something I was explaining to you, I could just rephrase it another way and I could rephrase it in another way and I could rephrase it in another way. And it's part of the conversation that friends have. And when you have that kind of a feeling in your body and that kind of awareness of what you're doing with the horses, mind and body, oh, boy, things get so fun.

Never blame your horse for asking a question, but do realize that in the beginning they might ask a lot of those big questions like little kids do that you're going to have to have big answers, too, you know? Can I bite you? I don't know. The happens horse and human, right. Can I get you more? What? What are you gonna do if I do this? How you gonna answer that? And it's OK that they're asking the questions. You need to keep yourself safe. And then you need to look at your horse like, boy, he has a lot of questions. Looks like I need to come up with a lot of answers. And any area you don't have answers for, that's going to be the area.

He asks the most questions about never fails. Guys, thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you again next week. As always, if you have questions, you can go to the Web site and leave them there. I'll work them in. Thank you for joining me. By.

If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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