Episode 30: Correcting Behavior We Dislike In Our Horses

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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. Let's talk about the idea of correcting a horse for behavior that we dislike in this episode. I'm going to share three examples of corrections, a different way to think about corrections and a story to help you remember it. How smooth are your corrections? If your horse anticipates your correction, does it make him better or does it make him worse? Here are some examples of corrections that I want you to ponder from the horse's perspective. Number one, the writer begins to mount, the horse begins to move. The rider makes the horse move more as a correction. From the horse's point of view, what would this look like? Here's another one. The rider asked the horse to walk forward and the horse is resistant or hesitant. The rider backs the horse up as a correction. From the horse's point of view, how does this look? I'm going to propose that if your correction is going to be effective, your horse needs to think about the correction that's coming, and as a result of that thinking, the horse should get better. Here's an extreme example that I actually saw happen when I was in college. There was a stallion that was in training with a trainer, and every time this horse stallion would talk, the instructions for anybody leading this horse were to jerk on the chain and back him up. And sure enough, it did influence his behavior. He did get to the point where he changed his behavior a little bit.

But the other thing that started to happen was he would begin to knicker or talk and then he would start to back himself up. Eventually, one day, someone was leading him through the parking lot from the turnout area back to the barn, and he began to knicker or talk and then ran himself backwards. Now, know that because during this backup, he was doing this on his own, like he wouldn't respond to forward motion like on the on the lead rope because he was anticipating the backing up and he slipped and went over backwards into a pickup truck right through the driver side window, right into the driver's seat. Don't panic. The horse was completely fine. Did an impressive number of crushing the whole side that, you know, like the top of the roof and the doorframe and broke the window. But the horse got up. Not a scratch on him. Truck wasn't that truck was not fine. The truck owner was not fine and the trainer was also not fine. The example here is think about it from the horse's point of view. Does the correction cause the horse to anticipate and get better or worse? Let's go back to that horse that won't stand still for mounting. If the horse won't stand still for mounting and begins to move and the rider moves the horse more than from the horse's point of view, the horse was standing and the horse saw the rider approach and then the rider is going to move him. So why not move? In the writer's mind, this is a correction or a punishment for not standing.

But this is too big of a leap for the horse to make. The horse can't make the leap of maybe if I stand still. Maybe they won't ask me to move. Literally, the anticipation of the correction which is moving the horse in this example causes the problem to be amplified. Let's think about a horse that's hesitant to move forward. If the horse is hesitant to move forward, it doesn't understand the forward cue. So by backing him up and I'm going to do air quotes because he won't like it because, you know, a lot of horses prefer forward over backwards. But if the idea is I'm going to back him up because he won't like it, then I think the true logic here would be my horse is resisting my forward cue. Maybe I'll back him up until he will resist my backup cue and go forward. At this point, this is getting too confusing. I would remove the backup from the training completely. Don't back up at all. If you don't have forward motion, if you can't get forward motion, stop backing your horse up. And even in the case of an emergency stop. If you look one rain stops or a lot of these emergency stops that you see in magazines. They don't include backing up. They include bending the horse around, circling the horse, turning the horses head. They don't include backing up because one thing that makes shutters run through professionals almost more than anything else is a horse that backs up and possibly goes over backwards, because horse that goes over backwards is very dangerous, because if the horse goes over and lands on you, then it's very dangerous for you and the horse.

Nothing good comes from horses that run backwards, whether it leading them or whether you're riding them. So we don't want to introduce this as some kind of an anticipation. Some of the keys for good corrections are slow hands and a stair stepped progression and a release of the cue on the desired response. So the horse that won't stand still. I need to have some kind of a cue where I release the pressure when they do the desired response, which would be standing still. So for the horse, that won't stand still. I personally add bending their head around past 45 degrees and holding it there, and as soon as they stop moving their feet I release so they quickly learn that if their feet are moving and their head is being bent around there, one option is freeze my feet. They let my head go straight again. So this light pressure actually teaches them to search for something, search for something, search for something. They stumble onto the idea that freezing their feet for a second works and then I let go and they get a reward for freezing their feet so I can essentially teach a parking brake the horse without the forward motion being solid. I would begin tapping and with a rhythm. One of the things that a lot of people do when they're tapping is they don't carry a good rhythm.

So I often tell people to think about a quick light tap lightly like a woodpecker, but a light motion like that, like tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Something with a rhythm that's very noticeable if you break that rhythm. So if I'm going tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap and the horse takes one step. If I hesitate in that tapping, it's a very noticeable difference. Notice that the tapping doesn't have to be intensity. That can be a light tap.

I can change the intensity, but intensity and rhythm are not the same thing. This rhythmic tapping is often much more effective because the reward is much more noticeable, which we talked about in the last podcast about clarity, and the other thing is oftentimes people don't carry any kind of a rhythm when they're trying to get the forward motion. They might, you know, bump three times with their legs, squeeze really hard once clock twice, tap shift themselves around. Start again. And there's no clarity. All of those little hesitations between the tapping and the squeezing and the caulking and the changing to a different cue gave all kinds of little releases. And the horse hasn't even figured out the pattern of the cue for forward yet. So I suggest rhythm.

Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Because it's very rhythmic, monotonous and it's very much like, are we there yet?

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

It'll start to drive you crazy. It'll start to get to the horses to. Your correction should be smooth and clear, and if the horse anticipates it, they should correct themselves. In the standstill example, if the horse anticipates me bending and holding until their feet freeze, then what happens is as soon as I barely start to bend, the horse freezes their feet and stands still thinking, I know how I'm gonna get this release. I'm going to get this released by freezing my feet with the rhythmic tapping. The horse thinks once this lady begins tapping, she will tap for a very long time until I take a forward step. If I take a forward step, this is how I get the release. If your corrections are smooth and clear and structured in a way that if the horse anticipates them, then the horses will start correcting themselves and it becomes a beautiful thing. One short story to help stick this in your mind permanently. Back when my kids were a little, very little, I noticed there were times that they would come to me and they'd been fighting. I could hear it kind of ramping up because I could hear them in the basement squabbling and they would come upstairs and it would be he said this and he said that. And it was all confusing. And I accidentally started using some of these horse training techniques because it was all I knew.

And I basically said, OK, guys, run to the end of the driveway, everybody, and then come back and we'll talk about it. And the reason I was doing that was because I knew two things. I needed time to think about how I was going to handle this. And that movement movement always helps people think more clearly. And they would run to the end of the driveway. They would come back and we would work it out. But something I did not anticipate was that over the next few months, the number of squabbles that I heard got less and less and quieter and quieter because in anticipation of everyone having to run to the end of the driveway and back, they started to figure out how to work it out themselves. This is a perfect example of the correction helping to get the outcome that is desired in the next season of the podcast. I'm going to be directly discussing how we influence the horse's body, whether that's through trailer loading or other questions that have come in. I'm going to be speaking directly to influencing the body. I will, of course, be referencing the mind and the rider. If you have any specific questions you'd like to have answered during the upcoming season of the Horses Body, you can find a voice mail tab over on the right hand side of my web site.

It's orange and it's right along the right hand side. Go over there, ask your question, and maybe it will be featured in the next season of the podcast. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

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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