SWS027 V2.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy 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. In this episode, I'm going to talk about how horses can learn how to learn and why it matters. Horses are really interesting to me because they're excellent at detecting patterns. And I think this is because they look for patterns when they're naturally speaking their first language, which is horse to horse. And if you ever have the opportunity to observe horses together in a field or especially foals when they are young and growing, you'll see that there are a lot of questions being asked, a lot of questions being answered and a lot of repetition or patterns that you can see when horses begin to learn their second language, which is with humans, it's going to resemble a lot of the same patterns, meaning they'll be a lot of questions, a lot of answers and a lot of repetition. The good news is the horses are really good at looking for patterns and about asking for leadership. And they do this with the herd and with us. Once we know this, we can use this to our advantage when we're interacting with our horse, because time after time after time, I've noticed with myself and with other people that the horses are noticing the patterns that we have, even when they happen to be our unintentional patterns.
That means that when we have an intentional pattern. So maybe we're teaching the horse whoa or something like that where it's very intentional. I'm going to go out and I'm going to work on this that we are focused on and the horses can learn from. But there's so much more going on that we don't often pay as much attention to. For example, during feeding time, maybe we go in to feed the horse and we do or don't pay attention to how that horse is acting. While we're getting the green, while we're walking to the stall, while we're entering the stall, while we're in the stall, after we leave the stall, there are so many different touch points there that the horse is paying attention to that you may or may not be paying attention to. One thing that really interests me about this whole idea is that horses can learn how to learn. This is something that I've experienced over and over again now with a number of horses. And the shortest way to explain it is this when a horse moves up to college level, and that means that they're really good at some advanced stuff and that might be advanced riding advanced groundwork in my program. It's gonna be both advanced riding and advanced groundwork. When I say advanced, if I want to give you an idea, we're gonna be working on, you know, some of the show stuff that I take in where I'm going to be showing at a high level and raining or the groundwork is bordering on or is doing liberty.
Work has the capability of doing that when the horses are getting really advanced in their groundwork and their riding. If we've been training them in a way where they've been seeing the patterns, then they're doing what I would call learning how to learn. And once they've practiced this learning pattern for that long, they really, really good at picking up other patterns. And I think that's the part of horse training that gets people really excited when they either see that or get to experience that. While the college stage is really fun to experience and a horse that's in that stage of learning is really fun to introduce new ideas to because they're already caught on to this idea of how to learn. The reality is they all start at the other end of the spectrum, which is learning how to learn if they've had the advantage of growing up in a herd situation where they had a lot of different temperaments to interact with and a lot of different experiences to learn from. Then you can start with horses that have a pretty good leap on knowing how to learn before they even start learning their second language.
Now a great example of a horse that did not have that advantage would be my little rescue horse presto who came from the last chance cur- out and he was orphaned, taken away from his mother at 3 days old, and then in the first 30 days of life, was really sick a couple different times, and had to do lots of heavy, heavy antibiotics to be able to get over it. So he had a really rough first 30 days and very little interaction with adult horses. And then he was very sick during that first 30 days, even though there were lots of foals. Hang around at last chance corral. So presto is a great example of a horse that did not learn how to learn early, and because of this he's been really interesting because I'll even post some videos that I have up on YouTube. I'll post those links in the show, notes where you can watch him interacting for the first time with some of the older horses. Now, in those videos, you're also going to see Justice, which is another little horse that I adopted at the same time as Presto! And Justice had been with his mother for three weeks. So you can immediately see just watching the videos that justice has more language skills than presto. So when you see those two foals meeting our other adult horses over the fence line, you can see justice using his ears.
You can see him doing the baby talk with his mouth. You can see him rotating his ears forward and backwards, mimicking the other horses, responding to the other horses when they pin their ears. And then there's presto standing there, looking completely blank. At one point in the video, one of the mares, this reaching over, pins her ears, and presto has no reaction to it at all, because at that point he had not learned how to speak horse. The only horse he really had experience with were the other little foals running around that didn't speak horse very well and justice. So they did have a level of interaction, but not an adult that was influencing them and teaching them the adult skills of being a horse. So PressTV has been very interesting to watch and learn from. The more intentional you are with establishing patterns, the quicker the horses will catch on. And that's even true for a horse like Presto. Now Presto is lacking in some of those natural reactions, but he does still pick up on patterns. One of the best things I did for Presto was to turn him out all summer long. The last couple summers with popcorn, who is a very patient and diligent teacher.
And it's really neat because the more time that he has spent out in the field with popcorn and asking questions, which would be, you know, nipping him and playing with him and then playing with him and crossing the line and then getting corrected by him and and all of these interactions and hanging out with them and threatening him and then being corrected. So there's all this interaction going on where popcorn won't take the threats, but popcorn will play. And all this interaction has made presto much quicker at identifying patterns. But my part of this is that I make sure that I'm very clear with the patterns that I use with him. So when I'm going to get him in the stall, there's a pattern for how I approach. There's a pattern for how I put the halter on. I know how I'm going to handle it. If he does A, B, C, D, and because of these patterns, he's able to catch on quicker. And it's pretty neat because now I'm able to see that he's looking for patterns. For example, when I've been lunging him, I have been doing a little tiny bit of the idea of liberty work. So I will call him in closer to me. And now I notice that when I'm lunging him, he will start to come in closer to me because he's asking that question.
He noticed that I was always ending on that. So he's starting to ask that question a little bit earlier because he's seeing the pattern. The neat thing is that when the horses learn to look for patterns, they start learning faster and it turns into this beautiful snowball as they learn how to learn and they find these patterns and they hold onto them. Here are two other things that can happen that are along the lines of learning how to learn. One thing you may have seen is a horse who has taught a human to do something. And this happened over and over again where the horses start to teach the people how to behave. A great example of this would be a mounting block. So maybe a person walks over to the mounting block, sets the horse up beside the mining block, turns to climb up on the mining block, and the horse moves away and the person climbs down off the mountain block to move the horse back. A lot of times you'll see a horse that has learned how to train their human to come down off from the mountain block. Because the pattern that the horse has figured out is that the person leads me up here and stands me here. And when they climb up, if I move away, they climb back down and reposition me.
And sometimes this is. Accident. That's usually how it starts, usually starts as an accident, but some horses will pick up on the pattern where they can make the person come down off the block and move away. And so it's very interesting to watch the different horses and see who has learned how to change what the rider or handle or in this case is doing. Another way to look at this, too, unfortunately, is that not all college level horses have been trained through the method of learning how to learn. Some have been trained to be reactive. And in that case, those horses don't necessarily enjoy the learning process. So sometimes those horses will do a lot more reactive or negative anticipation type responses. I talked about it a little bit in episode 25 where I called it an avoidance, anticipation and avoidance. Anticipation is the opposite of learning how to learn. In this example of learning how to learn, what the horse is doing is they actually have a positive anticipation of the learning cycle. So, for example, when I'm lunging presto and he starts thinking, oh, she often ends by doing this liberty work that calls me in a little bit closer. I will come in a little bit closer. He's participating in a cycle that he is enjoying the learning process with. If, however, he had been trained in a way where he was wanting to avoid a consequence, then that would be a much more difficult situation for him to get to want to enjoy.
This whole thing is the opposite of learning how to learn. It's learning how to avoid punishment. And so in those cases, if the horse is afraid of the correction, afraid of discomfort, afraid of what's going to happen, then these horses sometimes will perform amazing things at times in the arena. But there's a disconnected type feeling with them as far as them being able to learn multiple things in a really short amount of time. What that means is just to put it into a more clear example is that you might have a reining horse that can do an amazing job doing a training pattern, but the trailer loading is really sketchy and they come blasting off or, you know, you're not quite sure if they're going to be safe when you're leading them around different things. And and you're not quite sure if and if you start doing this where you're not quite sure about this and this and this and this and this. But they're super high in one area. Then I start to get suspicious that I'm not quite sure how thorough that training was because it did not impact that horse across the board, across its life and its way of thinking. And sometimes that will be something that's pointing towards a horse that had a little bit more of a reactive training learning situation. I'm very intentional with paying attention to the patterns that I use when I'm handling my horses.
I recognize the pattern that I feed and do I always feed starting from this stall of this stall. And I make sure I. VERRIER play with it. I am consciously making decisions to know and recognize what patterns are happening and what the side effects of those patterns might be. An interesting thing for you to do would be to pay attention to any of the patterns you might have with your horse. A really simple one to pay attention to is feeding time. There are generally several steps that go on during feeding, no matter what your situation is, unless they're just living out on the grass and then you're just super lucky and you'll have to find a different thing to analyze. But typically, if you're going out to feed the horses, whether it's hay or grain, whatever you're going out to deliver and whether that's in the stall or in the field, start paying attention to the pattern because the pattern starts as soon as you are within ear shot. When they can hear you, the pattern begins and the pattern ends. When you're so far away that you can't see or hear them anymore and start paying attention to how many steps you could break that down into in your mind to pay attention to what's going on with those horses as that whole thing is unfolding.
It's a great way to get more aware of what's going on because the horses learn how to learn whether you are paying attention or not. And the more aware you can be, the more intentionally you can be with then redirecting these things. Thanks again for joining me this week and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.
If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcasts, please visit Stacy Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.
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Mounting block trick you taught me is still working great! This episode makes a lot of sense. I have learned to take more baby steps instead of trying to rush the training. It works much better that way!
Awesome! Yes, lots and lots of little steps. Next weeks episode mentions how many times I have people mount and dismount at clinics, lol. You know that from first-hand experience!
This episode was so enlightening. Your examples were very clear and helped me a lot.
That’s great! Next weeks episode goes a bit deeper into the idea, I hope you enjoy that one too!
I seem to love all your podcasts and this one is one of those! Texas (my gelding) was started early, quickly – and not finished – then lived the life of luxury in a field for 5 years doing nothing so he needed a restart. He could be difficult, terribly herd bound, would shut down, and even low rear to a sit when we started. I watched your videos and the Jac series no less than 4 times and did a year of ground work with him. I have found a trainer (because I’m not close enough to you lol) who really understands Texas and that he isn’t trying to be difficult, he is just trying to understand – and mostly that means taking it in smaller steps and he will do whatever you ask. I think Texas had to be taken from Avoidance Anticipation to trusting and breaking it down – giving him time to process in baby steps. Now, he really enjoys their lessons and is doing really well. I can’t believe I had two “trainers” locally who said they worried about re-starting him at 8 years!
Good job! I love the idea of re-starting. Horses are totally capable of learning at any age, especially when they see the pattern. It is so fun to give them the gift of understanding:)