Improving your Horse Sense- Understanding Equine Behavior

The Three A's

Assess(ment)- Of the horse to evaluate the mental availability, emotional state, and physical softness. Assessing is a foundational key to building a partnership with your horse because it gives the human a "starting point" of what needs to be addressed to help the horse.

Learning to recognize the constant, ongoing, subtle communication the horse offers in his behaviors that reflect his mental and emotional state, helps one peel back the layers and mystery of wondering what the horse will do next.

Moments of surprise from the horse's behavior come from a lack of ongoing assessment. Before, during, and after communication assessment of the horse's feedback continues to better recognize if what one is doing is helping or if more follow-through needs to occur for the horse to become clear and confident.

Anticipation- Many horses tend to be mentally ahead of where they are physically, because of their concern. Their movements may be exaggerated, tight, and often seemingly over or hyper-reactive. The horse’s physical behaviors reflect his mental and emotional state.

Common contributions causing a horse to become anticipative can include:

• Lack of confidence

• Unclear or lack of communication from the human

• Constant critical or "driving" communication rather than helping him learn to think through scenarios

• Demanding the "end results" of the horse without first creating segmented, specific communication that has meaning to the horse

• Communicating in a manner that creates fear vs. curiosity in the horse

• Not allowing the horse time to think through scenarios

When the horse is anticipative, it limits his mental availability or directability. This causes excessive, undesired, and sometimes dangerous movement. This often leads to a vicious cycle creating fear in both the horse and human.

Avoidance- This is a horse who is mentally unavailable or "shut down." He will create methods to evade interaction with his handler or rider. Contributors range from defensiveness toward human communication, a lack of clarity, pain or health issues, and distrust.

Physically he may display behaviors that seem very slow in response, heavy/leaning/pushing in movement, and little to no response to Human communication. Often a "hard" eye- little blinking with no "seeing" of the world around him. The horse will not seem to engage with other horses. They frequently look opposite or drop their head to the ground when triggered.

When a horse is in a defensive state he is not available to learn, think, search, try, or retain.

The dichotomy is that many of the slow, heavy, behaviors are perceived by the human as being "good" or that the horse is "bomb proof," because it seems like he is not scary in his slow or lack of responses.

The reality is, that if there is an unexpected scenario, unfamiliar one, or an emergency, the person would have little to no influence over the horse's responses. These scenarios usually trigger all the previously contained defensiveness to "all of a sudden" come pouring out in big and dramatic behavior.