Episode 169: Fearful horses: instinct, training, speed of learning and accidental rewards.

Episode 169_ Fearful horses_ instinct, training, speed of learning and accidental rewards..mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 169_ Fearful horses_ instinct, training, speed of learning and accidental rewards..mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
We've got two different things going on. We've got the original spook and then the ability to recover and refocus and respond.

Speaker2:
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.

Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I help riders become confident, communicate clearly and get better results with their horses. This season of the podcast is all question and answer. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, you can leave it on my voicemail hotline by visiting my website and looking for the orange button that says leave voicemail for podcast. Today I'm answering two questions about horses that are fearful. I'll discuss the dance that I see between the natural flight instinct and training, as well as a horse's speed of learning and the accidental rewards that the horse might get during these moments. Let's listen to both of the questions and then take a closer look.

Speaker3:
Hi Stacy, this is Nadia. I own a Quarter Horse. He is 11 years old. We do a lot of different stuff like groundwork, dressage. He even knows some tricks. He is a sensitive horse. He's pretty smart and he's easily distracted. All in all, I think he's pretty well educated. But 5% of the time he goes nuts. It happens when he's tired. It happens when he's in the round pen. It happens when he's at places he doesn't know. He will pull back. He will rear. He will panic. He will run. He will run. His mind goes blank And I cannot reach him anymore. It's like he shuts me out. And sometimes it's even like he protects a core of him where I cannot reach him anymore. Now my question is, do I have to accept that as part of his personality? Is it just the way he is, or is there is something that I can do to help him? Because I don't think he likes that place where he is going. He just can't change it. So thank you for your ideas and your answers. Bye.

Speaker4:
Hello beautiful Stacy. I'm Bree. A long time listener from Australia, and I'm too scared to take my horse to a dressage competition or training day in case he overpowers and accidentally hurts me out of blind fear. I have owned him for one year. He is a 17.2 hand high warmblood Thoroughbred gelding and is seven. He started classical dressage and ground work with me and my trainers when he was six, with not much training before that. When I bought him. He had shying issues with most things, especially noises behind him and crinkly rein, rugs getting put on even after weekly groundwork with a gender professional. He still has days where he reverts back and is 100% reactive of those things again. We do have great days with no shying, and I can have a group lesson or take him on new trail rides with no issues, and then days where he bucks on the lunge and under saddle and is overall reactive. As soon as I get in from the paddock, I cannot find any differences in the days and it's just a gamble. He is ridden and worked 4 to 5 times a week. He can be calm after four days off or reactive after four days of full work. His feed doesn't change and he isn't and isn't hot and he isn't buddied up with any horse. It's like his training and groundwork just kick in some days and then some days. He's the same untrained horse I got one year ago. It's really shattering my confidence, and I'm so scared that if I take him out, he will be reactive. Please help.

Speaker1:
Thank you both for leaving your questions. And I want to draw attention to two different sentences, one from each of those voicemails. One said. His mind goes blank and I cannot reach him anymore. And the other said in case he overpowers and accidentally hurts me out of blind fear. And that's what I want to talk about today, is really that dance between fear and the different levels of fear and blind fear, and offer some thoughts on this subject. First of all, I want to just remind you that any time you think you're in over your head handling something that could go dangerously bad for you or your horse, get hands on professional help. Often people will think that or say that getting help is expensive, but the cost that is associated with the potential injury to the horse or human needs to be factored in, because one of the things that professionals tend to have going for them is that they have more experience reading the horse. And this is an interesting thing, because I spend a lot of time teaching people how to read their horses, because it's a challenge for people who are learning how to read horses on a good day, it's a challenge to read them if you're not really well versed in it. And then when things escalate, it becomes even more challenging. So while I'm going to talk through a lot of my ideas around these subjects, I really want to emphasize the importance of involving someone who can be there and hands on with the horse.

Speaker1:
So as you listen to my answers and the questions when I play them again, I want to make sure that you guys imagine yourself in the situation. I think that you'll understand how challenging it can be as the human to remain neutral while handling a horse that is escalating. And that's really what you have to be able to do if you're going to be able to adjust. A horse that is escalating is you're going to have to be able to remain neutral yourself. Read the horse and also answer the questions as fast as they come at you, which a lot of times is a technical skill that you have to learn to be able to handle the tools or your body, or just answering those questions that quickly. So to get started for this conversation, let's just say that there are three different levels of fear just so that we have some kind of talking points here. So we're going to say that the first level is like a horse being concerned. And on a scale of 1 to 10, let's just for fun say that that's like 1 to 5. The horse is concerned. It can be a little bit concerned, a little bit more concerned. Then let's say that the next level from there is like a level two and the horse is afraid. And let's put that numbers like 5 to 8. So the horse is now getting afraid.

Speaker1:
You're starting to really see a lot of the different reactions that were maybe mentioned in these voicemails or other things like that. And then let's go as far as saying that there's a level three. And I debated whether to say this was just a ten or a nine and ten, and I'm going to put it nine and ten and a 9 or 10. Let's say the horse is completely blind with fear. This does exist. But what I want you to picture for that one is okay, I live in an area where there are a lot of deer, and I want you to picture what I've seen. Maybe you've seen it before, but a deer around here, you can actually be hit by a deer that is different than you hitting a deer in the road. It means you're driving down the road and a deer hits you the side of your car, the back half of your car, the deer actually plows into you and all I can guess is that this deer is just running in its blind with fear and it just expects to blast through. I don't know, like it's a line of coyotes or something. It just expects to blast through and it literally smashes into the side of your vehicle. That to me is a great illustration of blind fear. So I want to make sure that you understand that as the horses go up through these different levels, there are different levels of fear.

Speaker1:
And I'll bet that if you check with yourself that there are different levels of fear as you look at things, and that really, really blind level is, thankfully, something that doesn't occur super often. The dance, however, becomes where that line is, you know, between that's why I put numbers on it. Like where is that line between 8 and 9? Where is that line between 7 and 10? Like where is the line here? And that's what makes this a challenging conversation. So before I go any further, let's pause for just a moment and look at the Foursquare model and say the riders mind. When you're in a situation with a horse like the caller's who left these messages are you do need to stop and ask yourself how you're feeling about that situation. And the ladies did leave lots of information there. So if you're feeling doubt or fear or confusion, this is going to be I mean, it's actually sounds kind of natural if you're not equipped for this situation, but it's also maybe not going to be the most useful in that situation in that moment. Which is why often getting a professional involved can help. Because me standing here as a professional, I can say that I can get into those situations and I can actually get curious, I can get fascinated, I can get really into looking at this situation from a different angle because I'm more equipped. And let's just say that maybe some of that is the next quadrant, like the rider's body.

Speaker1:
So whether I'm riding the horse or whether I'm handling it from the ground because I have a lot of practiced skills, this helps me be able to answer the questions that can make a sticky situation like this, instead of making it feel like doubt or confusion. It is the reason why I can feel curious or fascinated and very interested in in the nuances of what's going on, where a lot of times, if you're not equipped in your body on how to handle these certain things, then what can happen is it becomes very survival motivated for you as the human, and then you don't have as much to offer the horse. So let's go through the next one of the Foursquare is I'm going to actually put the horse's body here, because I want you to make sure and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, because this is really more of a thing for a vet and other professionals like that. But I think it is a good idea to go around this Foursquare model. And when you check into the horse's body, you can, you can, you want to remember to keep checking for physical things, because sometimes things like ulcers or OCD lesions. I've put this on my list because I've had horses in the past that were for years. We trained a lot of young horses, and that's usually when you're going to discover some of these developmental things.

Speaker1:
And I've had horses that were sound and seemed fine, but had I'm just going to call it like neurotic moments or something like that. And you're like, what is going on here? This just doesn't fit. There's something out of whack. And then eventually it would be found that somewhere there was some physical thing that was either small enough that it wasn't that noticeable. I mean, most people aren't going to have the entire horse's body X-rayed. So until you start having some kind of like, oh, it took a funny step in its left rear, let's look at it. Then you go in and you look, then you find the OCD, and then you can kind of be like, oh, interesting. Like I wonder if the discomfort of working could have been causing, you know, a physical discomfort that then showed up in a mental way of, of being uptight or whatever that is. And I think there's a dance there too, with other things that that can present in nontraditional ways, like ulcers or, you know, chiropractic needs or different things. So on one hand, I want to remind you guys to continually check for physical things. That means you can check and then you might be checking for the same stuff again in another few months, because sometimes and vets will tell you sometimes those things are going to be more present. Sometimes they'll be a suspicion or a thought, but you can't diagnose it and then later on you can diagnose it.

Speaker1:
So don't give up that search also. But another one that I always like to remember is that as I'm checking for those physical things I do a lot of times also keep in my mind, and this is what mostly we're going to focus on on the podcast today is going to be the horse's mind. And the way that I visualize this is that I'm still checking all the time for these physical things. And however, like when my kids, my human children were little and I took them to the doctor, the doctor might do something uncomfortable, and my child wasn't allowed to punch the doctor in the face. And a lot of times when I'm handling the horses, I think a little bit along the same lines. Like, I understand there can be things that can be uncomfortable, but especially when they're not very obvious. You're also not allowed to punch the doctor in the face or whatever that equivalent of the horse handling the human would be. So I understand that there might be a horse that's having a physical issue that could be discomfort, and if it's not super obvious, I also do still hold them to the standard of behaving. And I think there's a dance there because sometimes people will think the horse might be uncomfortable. Maybe that's why he's misbehaving, and I will therefore allow it because he could be uncomfortable.

Speaker1:
So I do like to put it in here as a little bit of perspective, because it is important to me that the horses are able to get medical treatment. And there are times that I see horses that won't behave for the medical treatment. And that is sad to me because it will actually cost them the better diagnosis that they will get if they behave even in these slightly uncomfortable situations. So now that we've kind of checked in with the Foursquare model, I'd only want to spend just a minute on this idea, which is the very commonly talked about fight, flight or freeze reaction that horses can have. I want to mention it because it's obviously very true, and you're going to hear me talk about it very specifically in a minute. But I want to make sure it's not the main focus, because then I think if it becomes the main focus, we lose how much else the horses can do. And again, we kind of underestimate what they're capable of. So I want to make sure to bring up things like the speed of their thinking. Or maybe what I'm going to call is working intelligence, and I'm going to quote something which is going to make this more understandable in just a minute. But I love this little nugget of information that I came across when I was researching for this podcast, and I was pulling up things because I want to talk about dogs for just a minute, because there's been a lot of research in dogs.

Speaker1:
And I found an article that was talking about intelligence and measuring it and trying to figure out how you measure intelligence. And I loved this concept because basically it it just kind of twists your idea of intelligence around, or at least it did mine. Listen to this. It says, for example, was Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein intelligent? Obviously, to derive the theory of relativity required a mathematical genius. Yet Einstein was so bad at simple arithmetic that his checkbook was always out of balance. I love that because even inside of what we're going to talk about here, about intelligence, you can see that there are different types of intelligence, even when we're measuring it in, people. And there's been a lot of research on people, a lot of research on dogs. And it kind of goes down through and horses just haven't been as researched. So I love crisscrossing some of these thoughts just to stretch my brain. So this is another article that I'll link to in the show notes over on the website. And I want to read this because it was talking about the smartest dog breeds. I was looking it up because I knew there were some definitions that go on that I thought could be really useful to think about here with horses. Here's what it says. There's adaptive intelligence, for example, figuring things out, working intelligence. Example would be following orders and instinctive intelligence, which would be more innate talent, not to mention spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence and more.

Speaker1:
So when we're looking at dogs, the way that this was defined is that working intelligence. The top tier dogs are the brightest working dogs. They tend to learn a new command in less than five exposures and obey at least 95% of the time. That is a smart dog. Can we stop for just a second and think about that? The dog learns a new command in less than five exposures and obeys at least 95% of the time. This is a really cool article because it goes down through like, you know, second tier all the way down through the sixth tier. The least effective working dogs who may learn a new trick after more than 100 repetitions and obey around 30% of the time. Okay, can you see where I'm going with this? Let's just pretend for a moment that horses have something like this going on. Let's just pretend that some of them have a working intelligence, where they tend to learn a new command in five exposures and obey at least 95% of the time. That's more like Gabby, my horse, Gabby. She is smart. And that reminds me more of her. And then we have the sixth tier. Anyone who's been a long time listener might know who's going to be the example for this one, but the sixth tier, the least effective, who may learn a new trick after more than 100 repetitions and obey around 30% of the time.

Speaker1:
Presto leans a little bit more towards this side. So it's interesting to me, as we have this discussion around fear, that I think it is fair to say that this working intelligence is also going to play a factor, because I definitely see this when I'm working with horses. So if I have a horse like Presto, who's a naturally slow thinker and he goes to have a reaction and then he has to, so he has a reaction to, let's say, a loud noise, and then he needs to now then also switch gears and think about what I just told him to do. Right after that, think about the struggle he's going to have in learning that or then obeying it. Different than somebody who's a naturally quicker thinker like Gabby. So I think the speed that they learn at can also be influencing some of this conversation. So I think it's very interesting because it doesn't mean that Presto is dumb. And I think a lot of times when we hear a horse called like a slower learner, I recognize that when I talk about it, it brings up the idea that people almost want to just take a shortcut and say that the horse is dumb. Now it's really interesting about Presto is he has a different learning curve, but once he has something, he really has it. Pretty rock solid. The learning process is slow, but I think he has a really good hold on things once he has them.

Speaker1:
And what's interesting is he's a little less likely to question the things once he gets them solid, where Gabby is very quick thinking and she'll learn quickly, but she also asks a lot of other questions. So again, I'm going to put the link to that article in the show notes and you can read that. But I want you to be thinking a little bit about the speed that they learn at, as well as the fear, as I introduce yet another concept. So here's another article that I pulled up, and I want to read a couple quotes from. And I'll again, I'll, I'll link to it in the show notes, but it basically is talking about the horse's brain. So just remember that in the horse's brain we have the prefrontal cortex, which is planning rational decision making portion of the brain. It's the part of the brain that we're engaging when we're training. And then we've got the amygdala, which is like the emotional and fear center within the brain. And this is an interesting fact that I read in this article. It says that the pathway from the amygdala is a fraction of a second faster than the route through the prefrontal cortex. And I find that interesting. Now there's another quote here, another sentence. The special senses, including vision, auditory, olfactory and the sense of touch all have a shortcut and faster neural pathway, which bypasses the prefrontal cortex and is hardwired to the emotional system that is also hardwired to the muscles that move the limbs.

Speaker1:
And the reason I think this is really interesting is because if I read those little brain facts several times, I think it's interesting that depending on the angle I read it from, it can actually seem kind of defeating because it sounds on one hand, like these things are just hardwired together and it's just a fact. Horse is hardwired going to have a reaction. It's going to bypass the thinking part of the brain. It's going to go straight into the reaction. And I think when we look at it like that, if I look at it like that, I feel a little bit defeated. It just kind of makes you almost want to just keep the horse out of any situation where it could be triggered. Now, what's really interesting to me is when I go back and I look at Gabby and I go back and I look at Presto, I actually think it explains something else that is kind of fascinating. And yet gives me a little bit of hope. So in my experience, I've trained a lot of different horses and some of them have been like Gabby, and some of them have been like, presto! And they've been everything in between. Now, I find this fascinating in hundreds and hundreds of horses that I've trained, the majority of horses can be trained down to what I'm going to call a shutter.

Speaker1:
So I take a horse like Gabby, and she reached this much quicker than a horse like Presto. But I think when I read that fact about the brain, I think that shutter, that means that little bit of a reaction that I'm going to call it a one second spook. I think that reading about the brain and the way that it was hardwired, I think that explains what sometimes has been called like spooky in place, or I'm calling it like a one second spook or a shutter. I think reading about the brain explains that hard wiring that bypasses the thinking part. To me, that explains that shudder, because there's moments when something will happen and I can feel Gabby's shudder and recover so quickly that nothing really happened. But that shudder is there. And to me, what that article is describing is describing that the hard wired is just a split second faster. It's just a little bit faster than the thinking portion. But this also explains that the thinking portion can kick in. Now think about this. If Presto takes a hundred repetitions and Gabby took five, then wouldn't it make sense that during the process of training, Presto, there would just be a lot more of these exposures that he would go through where there's a possibility of something going wrong? There's a possibility of him learning something different. It's not even saying that he's incapable of getting to a one second spook.

Speaker1:
It's saying that we've got two different things going on. We've got the original spook, and then the ability to recover and refocus and respond with what I've trained him to do. And in my experience, this is what I deal with a lot with people and their horses. The truly going blind with fear to the level that causes deer to jump into the sides of cars is not the typical with the majority of horses that we see. And I'm even willing to put that out there, because if you go and you watch horses in some really remarkably high pressure situations, it's actually interesting to see how often they still make really good decisions. Did you follow that? Okay, so let's think of it like this. You take a group of wild horses being rounded up and you watch a video of it. You can watch a video of it and you can see the horses running. I think what's amazing is that how many of them go into the pen and yield to the walls of the pen, and we see horses in a lot of extreme situations where they're not going completely blind. And the reason I point this out is not because I'm trying to take away the fact that it can happen. I'm trying to say that that line between the horses being very escalated, and the opportunity for them to be learning things from the people in that situation, that is a very real situation that I see a lot that is different than the horse truly going blind.

Speaker1:
And to me that is a glimmer of hope, because when they are truly unplugged, that is when they are truly a danger to themselves in the same way that the deer are. So let's talk just a little bit more about that super heightened state, that one that I defined with numbers between like five and eight. And what's interesting about that state is that when the horses are in that really heightened state of fear, they're going to ask really bold questions. How those bold questions are answered. Matter a lot. And here's an example. Just to put it into some kind of thing you can try to visualize. I once met this humongous I got to be pushing close to 18 hand draft Friesian cross. And this big, big, big horse had learned some interesting things because the person that got him to train him didn't get him when he was little. They got him when he was huge. And what's interesting about a horse that big is that they might ask similar questions, but a lot of times they get different answers from the humans or even from the things. So this horse, the owner, had put the horse into your standard metal round pen. You know, there's metal round pen panels you can buy and they all hook together. And that's what a lot of people use for a round pen. And this person put the horse in the metal round pen, and this giant horse pushed it down and left, and he pushed on the panels.

Speaker1:
I wasn't there to see that happen. I saw when she came and she brought the horse and she was explaining, and the horse that I saw in front of me wasn't at all in fear. This horse just knew that the rules were I can walk out through walls because it pushed on the panels and the panel gave way, and the horse left and ate grass until they could catch it. So it's interesting to think that you can look at that situation from a whole bunch of different ways. You can say, was the horse really escalated at the time? Was the handler putting too much pressure? Did the horse just say, oh, look, green grass, I think I'm leaving. You know, however it happened, the most interesting thing to me is that once it occurred, the horse was like, oh, this is a viable option, which is interesting because it shows a few different things. It shows the round pen panel. The reason I chose this, the round pen panel didn't do anything wrong or different than it had for all the other horses that had ever been in it, but this particular horse had a different view, and I think it's interesting that this particular horse is okay with the discomfort of walking out through the panel. Now, here I'm assuming there is discomfort with walking out through a metal pan panel, but it's it's interesting because in that horse's mind, it calculated that that was okay and it was worth doing to go out and graze and get, you know, five minutes of grazing time out there.

Speaker1:
Now, after using the round pen panel as an example, I think the really common situation for horses in the early stages of learning, when they experience some level of fear, I think they very often learn that humans treat them different or make different decisions in that moment. So if we take this and we take it as simple as someone lunging a horse and let's say you get a horse, you don't know anything about it. You take it out, you go to lunge it, it's lunging around you, it's trotting or loping, and then it spooks and rolls back and runs the other direction. And what happens a lot of times in that moment is there may have been a moment of real fear. Maybe there was a noise, maybe they saw something, whatever. And that horse had a reaction somewhere on the scale of somewhere between 1 to 8. Let's just call it a five. And the horse sees it, has a reaction, stops, rolls back, runs the other way. What happens a lot of times in those moments is that the horse discovers that the human doesn't have an answer. So maybe the person drops the lunge line and the horse trots down to the other end and starts grazing and gets a few minutes break while the person tries to reorganize.

Speaker1:
Or maybe the horse rolls back, runs the other side, turns, stops, faces the person gets a little break while the person reorganizes their tools, gets everything organized. Goes to send it out. And maybe that person is feeling doubt and not quite sure what they got into. And then they go again. Sometimes it's these fractions, these little moments, and the horse is just like, oh well, there was a legitimate spook. And then there's what the horse learned from it. And this is the most common situation that I see. And it might sound like I'm splitting hairs here, but I think that there is a power in seeing that when the horse is escalating, even if we're willing to label it fear from 1 to 5 and from 6 to 8 and then nine and ten, there's different levels. There's different ways and speeds. The horse learns at. But there's also just this difference between that truly blind and the horse learning during these moments. And again, I'm going to say it one more time. Any time you find yourself in a situation above your skill level, it's important to admit it and address it. If you start seeing that the horses could be learning some things accidentally that aren't going to be useful for them in the future, because horses can get a bad reputation as they learn these different things. Now let's go back and look more specifically at one of these questions.

Speaker3:
Hi Stacy, this is Nadia. I own a quarter horse. He is 11 years old. We do a lot of different stuff like groundwork, dressage. He even knows some tricks. He's a sensitive horse. He's pretty smart and he's easily distracted. All in all, I think he's pretty well educated. But 5% of the time he goes nuts. It happens when he's tired. It happens when he's in the round pen. It happens when he's at places he doesn't know. He will pull back. He will rear. He will panic. He will run. Right. He will run. His mind goes blank and I cannot reach him anymore. It's like he shuts me out. And sometimes it's even like he protects a core of him where I cannot reach him anymore. Now, my question is, do I have to accept that as part of his personality? Is it just the way he is, or is there is something that I can do to help him? Because I don't think he likes that place where he is going. He just can't change it. So thank you for your ideas and your answers by.

Speaker1:
Thank you for your question, Nadya. And I love the observation that you made when you said, I don't think he likes the place where he's going. He just can't change it. I love that description because I totally agree that the horses are not necessarily enjoying it. If you see them in a high state of fear. And to me, whether that is a seven and eight. A nine or a ten. I actually don't believe the horses are enjoying that. I think that when you have, as you have said, that more sensitive, hotter, more reactive horse, I put in hot reactive. I think that when you can educate a hot, reactive, more sensitive horse, when you can educate them on how to think differently in those moments, it is actually amazing how freeing it can be for them, because I think they come with this natural default to go to some of these a little bit quicker. So you take a horse that's hot and sensitive and more likely to do some kind of big physical move, and then let's just say that it got hardwired a little bit when that answer gets a little bit hardwired. I agree with you. I don't think they enjoy it. And when you can teach them to have a different reaction, they can actually when they fully absorb that, there can actually be a deeper release that can take you to the next level with your horse. The biggest challenge that people typically have in this situation is that a lot of times, they see the training that's needed as a contradiction.

Speaker1:
So this idea why would I teach a sensitive horse to be dull, only to then again teach the horse to be sensitive again? So a lot of times sensitive smart horses don't learn how to handle pressure. And one of the ways that this happens is the handler releases. The rider releases immediately when the horse gets something right, and the horse expects an immediate release. And in that scenario, the horse becomes more and more hardwired. Whether it's positive or negative, to have a immediate release from a queue when it's happening with the trainer or an immediate release from a situation. If it's a situation that feels like pressure to the horse. So one of the things I'll just illustrate it so you can picture it. If we start teaching the horse that we can whip around it, that we can whip the ground hard around it, a lot of times that's something that's unnatural to the horse, and the horse will want to run away from that. And then we can teach that horse. A lot of times in this low level situation, like at home in a controlled environment, we can teach when we whip around it, that's okay. You actually get a reward for standing there under this kind of pressure. The magic becomes when that smart, sensitive horse can start to actually see that pressure of the ground being whipped around them as a cue to stand and face despite the pressure of something else even bigger happening.

Speaker1:
So let's just say gunfire is happening, which is very loud and startling. But the handler is standing there, whipping the ground around. When the horse can start to understand that there is a relaxation. We'll put it that way. There is a release that can come from focusing on the handler who's doing that whipping, and that is a better place to be emotionally and physically. They see that reward there as valuable, and that can actually override that horse's desire to have that reaction to the gunfire. It is an interest. That is when the dance gets really interesting. And I'm not going to go fully into the how of training that. I just want you to see that from the horse's perspective, that very sensitive, smart horse. The day that they look at you and they they have the experience of the big, faraway thing, like the gunfire in this situation happening. And they see you giving a clear, concise and yet big or almost intense, this whipping the ground around them, which is in my training, it's a cue to stand and focus and look at me when they start to see that and they're like, I know what to do here. And they focus on me. That's when they start to really see the benefit of focusing on me, and they actually get less fearful of the bigger things around them.

Speaker1:
This is how we train horses to be okay with all the big, crazy things that we don't get a chance to actually expose them to. Like 5000 people clapping in a stands or something like that. So one of the things that you said also in here was smart, sensitive and easily distracted. That is my biggest red flag in your message. Easily distracted is actually where I think the heart of your problem lies, and teaching a horse to focus is something that is very possible. It is also very time consuming. It is an odd combination of very boring and creative and boring. Yeah, you can do all that. I mean, imagine teaching a horse to focus is a little bit like yourself learning how to meditate, or teaching a child to sit at a desk or teaching you know yourself to do something hard, like signing up to run a marathon. There is an element of boring, and there's an element of time consuming, and there's an element of creativity and dedication and a lot more boring than you would think. And so when you conquer, and I would highly encourage you to look for how you can conquer easily distracted. And there is a dance there with the easily distracted and the pressure I was talking about earlier, because that is where I think you're going to find the answers, because you mentioned, you know, his mind goes blank and I cannot reach him anymore.

Speaker1:
I think it's interesting to think his mind goes blank and you can't reach him is actually different than him necessarily being at a level three. And the way that I mean, that is sometimes when the horse starts to get worked up. Let's go back to the gunfire example. Gunfire starts to happen if the horse hasn't been educated to the cue that I'm just going to use as an example. The whipping around means standstill and face me. If that horse doesn't know that really, really well at its core, then it's going to choose between the two and it's going to go with the reaction if it doesn't already know, like it's not hardwired in. So I need to hardwire that in that standing and facing me is that answer. And you'll notice that it's not standing and facing me with nothing happening. It's standing and facing me. And there is an element of emotional pressure when I'm whipping around the horse. There's an element of pressure that's not physically touching the horse, but there's an element of pressure that that horse is choosing. Because we did all the training at a level one, it actually is what unlocks that key to be able to handle that horse when it escalates, as it escalates. And there is a difference between he's not reachable and you can't currently reach him. And I just want you to entertain that idea for a moment. And one of your main questions was, do I have to accept that this is part of his personality? Now, to me, the interesting thing about this is I think the personality traits you gave me sensitive and smart.

Speaker1:
I think those are the hard wired ones, the mind going blank, the pulling back, the rearing, the panic. Those are reactions where your horse doesn't know how to respond. And I would become intensely curious at these moments to figure out how you're handling them, how you're showing up, and what your thoughts about horses in those situations Ah, and I chose the word intensely curious, because I want to make sure you remember there is something with teaching a sensitive horse to be okay with intensity, and to be able to do that requires almost a dulling of the horse. This is definitely what I did to Willow. To tone down her intensity. I had to teach her to be duller and then turn around and teach her to be more sensitive. You can see from a time perspective where a lot of times it's easier appears to be easier to skip the part where you take the sensitive horse, dull them out, and then make them sensitive again. But to me, that is where the emotional training is happening. Even though it looks like you're kind of going against the sensitivity and then reinstalling it. But that is the way that I see the possibility of teaching them to understand pressure. Let's listen to the second question again.

Speaker4:
Hello, beautiful Stacy I'm Bree. A long time listener from Australia, and I'm too scared to take my horse to a dressage competition or training day in case he overpowers and accidentally hurts me out of blind fear. I have owned him for one year. He is a 17.2 hand high warmblood Thoroughbred gelding and is seven. He started classical dressage and ground work with me and my trainers when he was six, with not much training before that. When I bought him he had shying issues with most things, especially noises behind him and crinkly rein, rugs getting put on even after weekly groundwork with a gender professional. He still has days where he reverts back and is 100% reactive of those things again. We do have great days with no shying, and I can have a group lesson or take him on new trail rides with no issues, and then days where he bucks on the lunge and under saddle and is overall reactive. As soon as I get in from the paddock. I cannot find any differences in the days and it's just a gamble. He is ridden and worked 4 to 5 times a week. He can be calm after four days off or reactive after four days of full work. His feed doesn't change and he isn't and isn't hot and he isn't buddied up with any horse. It's like his training and groundwork just kick in some days and then some days. He's the same untrained horse I got one year ago. It's really shattering my confidence, and I'm so scared that if I take him out, he will be reactive. Please help.

Speaker1:
Thank you for your question, Bree. The three things I want to address with yours specifically are confidence, the ability to predict, and physical training versus emotional training. When I listen to your question, you said that you could predict a bad day when you go to get him out of the paddock, so you're not able to predict it. You know, the day before whether tomorrow is going to be the next, the next day is going to be a bad day, but you can predict it when you go get him from the paddock. And what's interesting to me is that when you said it's shattering your confidence, I think the dance here is that you could look at it like there is something wrong with the fact that he keeps going back to this, that you've had him for a year, and there are days it feels like there's no training advancing at all, that he's right back to where you started. You could look at it like a failure or interestingly, you could also look at it like you are very confident this is probably going to show up. And I wonder if you looked at it as you are pretty confident this is going to show up in the next fill in the blank. So let's just pretend it happens once a month. What if you pretended it was going to happen twice a month? Then you'd be pleasantly surprised that it was only happening once a month. Right now, the confidence is interesting because you sound like you're actually Equipped to predict it when you go get him out of the paddock, which is actually huge.

Speaker1:
You're way ahead of predicting it mid spook like so. This is very, very good information. The other thing that could be happening though is that if we do drop you out of like judgment of it shouldn't be happening anymore. And accepting the idea that it could be happening twice as frequently, that you could just be planning for it to come up when we do all of that. What's interesting, what comes up next for me is are you equipped? How are you going to handle it on those days? What is your game plan on those days? Because the temptation that I often see is that people will kind of hope they survive that day. Or sometimes people will say, I could tell he was going to have a bad day, and I just put him back and I'll just get him out another day and hope it's better. The curiosity. After you get past the idea that this is coming up, this is likely to come up in the next month. This is likely to come up x number of times in the next month. When it happens, how are you handling it? How equipped do you feel on that day if you accept going as far back as the horse needs? What that means is yes, you might not be able to predict on Thursday that Friday is going to be a good or bad day, but when you go get him out of the pasture on Friday and you had planned, let's just say you had planned to go on a group trail ride or something, and you go get him and you're like, oh, we're having a bad day.

Speaker1:
How confident are you in the routine you are now going to go execute? Do you have a groundwork plan? Do you know how to mentally switch him into focused and mentally switch him into at least, even though that might not focus him enough that you want to get on and go on that group trail ride. Can you get him back to a base level on that day? And then if you do that, let's just say that you do that on Friday. Can you go out there and do that same routine again on Saturday and again on Sunday and see him improve? So let's just say that you completely ditched the idea of riding. You go to groundwork, but you take the groundwork and you are doing more and more and asking him for more and more because he's getting better and better. Do you have a routine like that in place? Because if you are able to predict it from the gate of the paddock and you know, as you're leaving there, then the next step is to actually have a plan on how you're going to handle that, to keep both of you safe and move you in that direction.

Speaker1:
That's what I'd be curious about. Because the other thing that I wanted to mention, you talked about him being in training, you know, 4 or 5 days a week. And I think it's very interesting because the physical training of the horse is not always directly related to the emotional training of a horse. And I don't know that everybody thinks about it like that. And what that means to me is that you can go out and ride a horse through a routine, and if that routine is super predictable, it's not that different than you going and doing something that is super predictable and your mind can wander and different thoughts come up and you're not really that engaged. And a lot of times the horses will be physically worked, but if they're not mentally engaged, then what we'll see is that the horses aren't necessarily getting more and more equipped to handle pressure situations or unusual situations. They're just getting more fit and more comfortable in that one routine. And oftentimes when riders run into an issue and they go back to groundwork, if I start showing them groundwork and whipping around the horse and sending them over tarps and teaching them how to ground tie and all these different things, there's a lot of different things in there that are much more mentally engaging. Now you can do mentally engaging things from their back. My question to you is, are these things mentally engaging? Is there a level of engagement where the horse is working things out and learning how to handle different things? And a lot of times I send people back to groundwork to be able to either do this or to test this, because you can see in some of the different work the separation between the horse and rider a little bit more when you're on the ground.

Speaker1:
Not to mention if your horse is a little bit escalated. I go back to groundwork all the time because I want to know if I can shift that horse's mind before I get up on the horse's back. So you could go as far as recording every training session for a week straight, and then being able to watch that and seeing and looking. Is this horse engaging in this process? Is this horse seeing choices inside of here? Is this horse feeling like a piece of the training? Like, is this horse engaged in this, or is this horse sort of going through the motions? And I'll grant you, this is something that you have to work on doing and that a lot of trainers just expect the horses to go out there and, and go through it. And they just assume it's mentally, mentally engaging to the horse. But a lot of times I'll see horses that start spooking because they're bored. And I'm not saying this is what your horse is doing, but what I'm saying is that the horse is actually asking for engagement mentally, because they're actually kind of bored with the physical work.

Speaker1:
So it's a lot of different questions because these, again, today were big questions that a lot of times if you guys are in situations like this, you might need professional help. And if you have a professional come out and help you videotape that too, so that you can watch and try to see what is going on there, what the what that handler is doing different, how that handler is handling the spooking or whatever is happening, and see if you can close that gap just a little bit. And if nothing else, after listening to this podcast, I hope you just look at the situations a little bit differently, because there are a number of ways to look at it. Presto could have easily gotten labeled as a problem horse early on, because he's just not a quick thinker and so I like to say his first reactions are bad reactions. He's missing a front tooth from running into a building in his pasture. So his first reactions aren't always a thoughtful reaction. He is. He can be the deer that runs into the car, but that doesn't mean he has to be, because as he's gotten more and more trained, he is understanding. After that split second, he his recovery is getting better and better. That's what I have for you today. I hope you guys found this useful, and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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