Episode 25: Is Your Horse Anticipating?

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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 talk about anticipation.

Hey, you ready? You ready? How about now? You ready? See what I'm doing there?

So. Anticipation. Friend or foe? I think anticipation is one of those ideas. This kind of like a double edged sword. If you don't stop and think about it the first time, I say anticipation. Most people think of it as negative. I think it is healthier to go back to that idea of it being something we can balance on that teeter totter that I'm always talking about. I also like to replace the word anticipation and instead I like to call it trying too hard. I think I might have to write my own dictionary of horse terms because the more podcasts I record, the more I realize that I'm making up creative horses instead of problem horses and complicated horses instead of problem than your horses asking a question. That's why it's doing that. So I think I'm coming up with my own language for getting you guys to think outside the box of just labeling things in a negative frame. So if we can look at anticipation as trying too hard, sometimes the horse will be trying too hard in ways we want, and sometimes the horse will be trying too hard in ways we don't want. Either way, I do want you to recognize this. We use anticipation as a training tool in horse training. We want the horse to anticipate, really think about it when you're teaching a horse to stop. I'm gonna use the example of a way that I teach horses to stop. I would say the word woo. So I would say, whoa, deep and low so that it doesn't sound like any other words I'm going to say in conversation.

I would then hesitate. Then I would ask the horse using whatever method I needed to. Let's just say I pick up on the reins, ask the horse to stop and take a step back. If I do that ninety seven times. The horse is walking. I say whoa! In my head I count one one thousand two one thousand. Then I slowly take the slack out of the reins and ask the horse to step back one step. After ninety seven fifty three, one hundred and sixty seven times, I don't know exactly the number times for your horse. Maybe it's only twelve. But after a certain number of repetitions, the horse will see the pattern. The horse will start to think every time my human goes who they then take the slack out of the reins, ask me to step back, and then give me a reward. And the horse will anticipate this series of things. And then the horse will hear the word whoa! And then the horse will automatically stop and take a step back. This is anticipation as your friend. Anticipation has an interesting arc. No matter which example we use it for, whether we're using it. In this example of woe or whether we're using it in in an example that we might look at negatively, which I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But whichever way that we look at it, anticipation has this arc. It's that bell curve that I mentioned in episode twenty three where it starts out as our friend and then as a Bill Bell curve goes, it builds up and it's our friend for that first half.

And then the anticipation can become the enemy or the foe, because if we don't like what the horse is doing, we then label this anticipation negative. An example of that would be you give a pony to a child and the child rides the pony around and then rides back to the barn, jumps off, puts the pony away, it takes ninety seven, fifty three, maybe twelve, maybe one. Not very many times before the pony goes small child dismount from me right here outside the barn door. And then what happens is the next time the child gets on rides away the pony goes got an idea. Let's go back to the barn, let's go back to the spot. You get off and you put me away. This is a form of anticipation, but we label it bad because it's not something we want. But a lot of the times it is something we are creating. And if we can take it and say the horse is trying very hard to figure out how to get to the end of this lesson, we can actually put a number of different responses in to that spot. I actually have an amazing example of this type of anticipation on video and you can see it over on my YouTube channel. If you put in a search for Stacy Westfall and find my YouTube channel, you will find Stacie's video diary.

Jack. Episode 26 Episode 2 6. I'll put a link for it in the show. Notes of this podcast at my Web site Stacy. Westfall dot com in episode twenty six. I was consistently videotaping Jack and the coolest thing happened when I got on him to ride and we were videotaping. He actually volunteered the things I had been ending on. And so in the example I just used with the pony. The thing that we kept ending on in that example was riding the pony back to the barn. So the pony started to anticipate and drag you back to the barn. In this video that you can see on Episode 26, I had been consistently ending my rides on Jack with either spinning or with backing up. So if you watched that episode, I actually was able to point out that I wasn't making this happen. I simply got on. And you can see if you watch the video that he had 50 hours of training. I tracked my number of hours of training. So from the time I started doing groundwork and he was just simply halter broke when he came to me until this video happened, there'd been 50 hours, but I had been teaching him a way of thinking, a pattern of thinking, and that involved anticipation and the use of it as friend. And in this video, you can actually see the horse saying, I remember what we ended on. Let me try that right here to see what happens.

So he's asking a question which we talked about in an earlier episode of this podcast. It is so cool when you can start to see that a lot of these places where it would be easy to label the horse as doing something bad like the pony trying to drag the child back to the barn. It is simply a case of anticipation. So what I'm doing here is I'm labeling these things like trying too hard so that you can start to see through your horses eyes how he's viewing what's happening.

Let's look at a few more. Let's say that horse is being ridden around in an arena and sees the gate and tries to leave a lot of times. That pattern has been put into the horse by the rider who goes into the arena. Does the work and then rides to the gate or rides out the gate and to a different location to end the horse, then begins to anticipate the end coming in a different location, something as simple as riding around the arena and dismounting at the end. The opposite of the gate can actually change the anticipation that you want to label negative, which is leaving the gate a really common thing that I see over and over again with people who are working on advancing their horses. Is that the rider will use their leg for, let's say, something like a lead departure. And it's been going fairly well. And then what happens is the rider closes the leg. The horse anticipates loping off. So the rider hasn't really fully given the cue, but the horse anticipates loping off. The rider assumes they're using too much cue and lightens up their leg and the horse gets a release of pressure. The rider was closing the leg. The horse start to go like, I'm going to go. I'm going to go. And it was trying too hard. And the rider is like, oh, that's way too much.

And they back off and the horse gets more sensitive. So now that rider who used to have to close their leg and actually kind of squeeze and ask over time, that horse can become so light that that rider feels the urge to break their legs off from the horse. I used to do this when I was a barrel racer. I got to a point where my legs felt like they needed to be embraced way away from the horse, because if I even moved my feet within 12 inches of the horse's side, that was like walk. Eleven inches away from my horse aside was trot, and ten inches away from my horse's side was like dead run. Like I had to ride all the time with my legs braced off because I had over sensitized my horse because the horse anticipated going, because I had spent a bunch of time getting it to go. And then we kind of went off the other side of that curve and I didn't know how to handle that. Another place you really see anticipation is somebody walking to the middle of a show, Penn, on maybe a reigning horse, or if you see a horse that's gone in a lot of classes where the announcer will click the microphone on and say, trot now or walk now or give directions.

It's really funny because you'll actually get horses that will hear the microphone click and they will go ahead and just automatically change gates, which isn't always good because maybe they were going to say reverse directions and the horse was like, hmm, maybe this is lope because the last hundred and sixty four times the horse knew I hear a click. And then we automatically change speeds. So the horse tries to listen to what I'm going to say, help you out. So the horse again is trying too hard and the horse volunteers a speed change. And the rider a lot of times can get frustrated if you can start to see it from your horse's point of view. He's just trying to help you out. He sees a pattern trying to help you out. Yes. This is still a problem. We can still work on it. But the first thing we have to do is get you seeing that the horse isn't actually trying to be bad. He's actually trying too hard. If you look up anticipation, some of the words that are associated with it would be excitement and eagerness. And those are things we want from our horse. But from some of the examples I've given, you can see how they can go off the deep end because eagerness to get back to the barn can be viewed as an undesirable thing.

But think about the opposite of anticipation. The opposite is unreadiness. I didn't make that up. Google did. The opposite of anticipation is unreadiness. So anticipation in itself, again, is just your horse trying too hard? One of the cycles. You can easily get trapped into is a difficult cycle where your horse anticipates something and then you as the rider, anticipate the horse anticipating that thing. Can you hear it? It can be an anticipation cycle. Your horse is anticipating the click of the microphone and your anticipating the horse doing something and you get tense in your body. So you've got to feel a recognize these moments were anticipation is a problem for you as the rider because you're anticipating these things and you don't have answers because remember, these are just questions your horse is asking. So if you don't have an answer to this one, this horse anticipates. This is when you start to get tension in your body. And this is when you're more tempted to judge your horse negatively. Instead of trying to see through his eyes how he's ended up making these choices. What I'd like you to do is put this into action by simply going back in your mind to a time when you recognize anticipation happening. Keep in mind it can be a good anticipation, meaning you said, whoa, and your horse actually stopped and took a step back without you having to use the reins.

Or it could be an anticipation where it wasn't so positive. And maybe you can go back and work out now that you're looking from your horses point of view. What he may have been trying to get to one last. No, as I wrap up, and that is there is a difference between a positive anticipation and an avoidance anticipation.

I'm going to talk in another episode about my views on stress and that type of anticipation, but I'm saving that for another episode. Thanks so much for joining me today, and I'll talk to you again next week.

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

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