Over the Hill

A horse of a different color

Curtis Clark2018-02-02Leave a comment

Buddy, the over-the-hill horse, has had chronic lameness for over a year (more information in an upcoming post), and I’ve ridden him on trail very little, and in competitive trail rides not at all, which has been deeply disappointing.

But I was able to ride in the NATRC competition in Peñasquitos Canyon (north of San Diego) last October on a borrowed horse named Milagro. He is a Spanish mustang belonging to the author Audrey Pavia; she has ridden him in a number of competitive trail rides. Audrey has a younger Spanish mustang, Rio, that she is bringing along as a trail horse, and she wanted to start him out in the company of his paddock pal. I was pleased and honored that she asked me to ride Milagro.

Milagro and Buddy have similar builds, in that they are both short and stocky, with short massive necks set high. Buddy clearly has some mustang heritage, but his draft heritage makes him more massive than Milagro. Buddy’s feet are larger, but Milagro’s are narrow and tougher. When Buddy gets concerned on the trail, he usually goes faster. When Milagro gets concerned, he often stops.

Milagro is an experienced trail horse, and I am an experienced trail rider, and on the rocky up-and-down single-track trails of our conditioning rides he was a champ—less impulsion than Buddy, but more sure-footed. But on street trails, he slowed to a crawl, even when he was headed back to the barn (at one point I almost jumped off to lead him, thinking my walk would be faster than his). I agree with Audrey that he finds little of interest on the street trails except plants to munch on, and those require slowing down anyway. I was concerned by his speed, because NATRC rides have a set time that requires a pace of 3–4 miles per hour (for the Novice and Competitive Pleasure classes), and neither he nor Rio were even coming close at the walk.

Horse standing by horse trailer and defecating — Milagro performs diagnostics on his hindgut before the ride. I ditched the mechanical hackamore at lunch (I wasn’t using it) and went with the rein attached to the halter.

But it turns out Milagro is also an experienced dressage horse. I took him to a public arena and reminded him that he knows the working walk and the working trot, and then took him back on a street trail and reminded him that they are the same there as on the sand.

Ride day dawned chilly, but it heated up fast, with highs in the upper 90s. Audrey and I were both riding Novice, I because I’m a novice rider, and she because Rio is a novice horse. Fortunately she was in the lightweight division and I was in the heavyweight, so we weren’t competing against each other. The Novice course was just over 18 miles. Before lunch, it went upstream in the canyon (east), to a hill which was the first judged obstacle, and at the top of which would be a check of the horses’ pulse, respiration, hydration, and soundness (P&R). There were a couple of water crossings, some woodland, some chaparral and dry grass, and a fair number of bicyclists and dogs. Toward the end, the trail passed below a housing tract—Peñasquitos Canyon is an oasis of old California cutting through plateaus covered by suburbia.

Less than a mile from the turn-around hill, a couple of riders came back our way to tell us the trail was blocked by fencing. It turns out a water main had burst since the last time the ride managers walked the trail, washing it out, the gully was fenced off, and there was no way to proceed. We informed the ride managers by cell phone and they told us to meet them under a highway bridge where the trail ran along the creek.

Shade and water are a special delight on a hot ride. Milagro drank, and then decided to check out the edible vegetation along the shore. He likes to take every opportunity to eat. Many horse people say you should never let a horse eat along the trail, but they aren’t distance riders. The goal is to get the horse to eat when you allow it, and to allow it often enough that it’s not a battle. It has been a training challenge for both Buddy and Milagro, Buddy because he was initially sure it was never okay to eat, and Milagro because he initially didn’t see the point in not eating.

Woman riding horse across water — Audrey Pavia crossing Peñasquitos Creek on Rio. Milagro’s ear tips just enter the bottom of the frame.

Lunch was back at camp, and the riders and horses could both eat and drink freely. After lunch, the course went downstream, to the west. It was laid out as much as possible to stick to single tracks, to avoid bicycle traffic. About a third of it was through riparian woodland, with several water crossings (one was a judged obstacle). The rest was through scrub and grassland.

As we progressed, Rio showed signs of lameness, especially at the trot, so that we weren’t able to make up time from the slow walk. Because of the lost hill climb plus P&R in the morning, we were asked to trot the last quarter mile before the afternoon P&R. The vet checked Rio, and he and Audrey decided to pull him from the competition (he was trailered back to camp). I continued with Milagro.

This was a challenge for both horses. Either is fine with riding out alone, but they were not happy about being separated, because that wasn’t part of the plan. As we rode away, Rio would whinny, and Milagro would stop and whinny back, so loud that his sides would shake and I could feel the bass notes up my spine. I would reassure him, and we’d ride on until the next whinny. The interchanges stopped after Rio was trailered away.

Milagro decided he needed to be back at camp. I had told him that Rio would be there when we got back—I don’t know whether he was listening to me or figured it out on his own, but he was ready to go. I didn’t want him to trot through the woodland, because there were low-hanging branches and areas of uneven footing, so I rated him back and a little bit of magic happened.

Rider's view of horse's neck and head, dirt trail, scrubby vegetation — Riding through the scrub north of Peñasquitos creek

Many mustangs have an ambling gait between the walk and trot, technically a stepping pace, that is sometimes called the “Indian shuffle” because it was observed in the ponies of First Nations riders. It’s a genetic legacy of the ambling horses of Iberia that were the mainstay of the conquistadores. Buddy has it, and once I figured out what it was and learned to ask for it, I used it a lot on trail—it’s about three and a half to four miles an hour, perfect for the Novice NATRC rides. Audrey had told me that both Milagro and Rio had originally shown this faster gait, but that it had evidently been trained out of them. But when I rated Milagro back from a trot, he dropped into an amble, and I broke into a big smile. Milagro ambles at about three miles an hour, but it’s still faster than his walk. He was satisfied with his progress, and we ambled back into camp.

Once we had our time, I rode him straight over to where Rio was tied to the trailer. They snuffed noses, and if I was understanding them correctly, Rio said “Where have you been?” and Milagro said “I’m glad to be back. You got any hay?”

As best Audrey and I can figure, Rio had a small pebble in his hoof boot pressing against a heel bulb, because when she removed the boots in camp, he was basically sound. Ride and learn.

Each horse you ride teaches you something new, and that makes you a better rider for every horse you ride

Old man and horse facing camera — A selfie with Milagro at ride’s end

Even before I really understood why, I knew it was important to ride multiple horses. Horses are as different as people, but until you’ve worked with a lot of horses, that statement is just words. There’s nothing to compare to the deep bond that can form over years between a rider and a horse, but each horse you ride teaches you something new, and that makes you a better rider for every horse you ride. When you approach each new horse with the attitude “What can this horse teach me,” you can only improve as a rider, and the horses whose lives you touch will be better for it as well.

I’m a better rider for having ridden Milagro, and he says he was okay with it, too.

Horse and botanist

Curtis Clark2017-09-082017-09-08Leave a comment

Broadleaf weed with purple flowers growing among grasses — Henbit

In Oklahoma, where I grew up, one of the first plants to show green in the spring was Lamium amplexicaule, which we called henbit. This little plant is in the mint family, although it doesn’t smell “minty” (or even “sagey” or “oreganoesque” like other members of the family).

Henbit and other members of the genus Lamium are also called dead-nettles. This had always puzzled me, because when they came up in the spring, they were one of the few plants “alive”, green and growing.

small weed growing in gravelly soil — Stinging nettle

One day I rode Veronica down to the grass and weeds on the slope below the arena, where she likes to graze (until it all turns brown in the late spring). Both she and Buddy had encountered Urtica urens, the annual stinging nettle. Both were stung on the lips, and both decided they weren’t interested in that plant any more.

Veronica reached down for a patch of what appeared to be stinging nettle. I told her, “I don’t think you’re going to like that,” but as she ate it, I realized it was dead-nettle, and the light bulb went on. It (and other members of the genus Lamium) superficially resembles stinging nettle, but it doesn’t sting—it’s “dead”.

Now if I had looked it up in Wikipedia, I would have learned that, but instead I learned it because a horse has a very different view of plants than a person, even if that person is a botanist.

I’m a botanist. You probably guessed that from the title and the scientific names. I’ve been fortunate in being paid to teach botany to college students for around four decades. But I’ve never stopped learning, and in this as in so many other areas, horses have been my teachers.

Buddy prefers mouse barley (Hordeum murinum) over slender wild oat (Avena barbata). Mouse barley is the commonest source in my region of the foxtails that get caught in dogs’ fur, ears, and nostrils. Buddy eats it before it’s ripe and breaking apart, when the grains are sweet and soft.

Horse eating weed — Buddy eating Italian thistle

He loves Italian thistle (Carduus pycnocephalus), which is related to artichoke, and sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) and prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola), both lettuce relatives. If we ignore the “beards” of the barley, the spines of the thistle, and the bitter milky sap of the last two, these are plants we would eat. The flavor palettes of a horse’s palate are different from ours, but not totally alien.

Most botanists today don’t spend a lot of time with horses. But it wasn’t always so. The early botanical exploration of western North America by botanists of European ancestry was most often carried out on horseback, with pack mules. I wonder what they learned from their horses and mules. Was the knowledge that I’m now discovering once commonplace, in a world where equines were commonplace? Or were the old-time botanists as likely to look to their horses for guidance as I am to look to my truck? Many of their journals still exist, and so perhaps we could learn, if we looked, and if they bothered to write about it.

Group of yellow flower heads of a weed — Prickly lettuce

My days of botanical exploration are largely in the past. And there are real advantages to 4WD vehicles. But the view from a horse, and with the horse’s world in mind, should be part of the experience of every botanist.

“Reward your dog”

Curtis Clark2017-08-27Leave a comment

One of the things that my dog agility instructor often says is “Reward your dog,” most often when the dog has done what the handler asked for, and not necessarily what the handler wanted.

There are many ways in which dog agility and riding are different. Dogs are not horses, in agility you’re expected to not be in constant contact with your dog, and serious injury is less common in agility.

But there are some striking similarities. In both sports, novices overuse voice and hands to direct the animal, while experts use torso and legs. Both are often faster-paced than novices appreciate. Both require muscle memory. And in both sports, an activity that should ultimately be rewarding for the dog or horse can initially be scary.

Horse in a pastoral setting with a spaniel and a setter — Painting by George Stubbs

Any time the dog or horse is doing what you ask, that’s praiseworthy, even if it wasn’t what you intended. The reward is earned, and you should give it. Most dogs like food treats, or tug toys, or items they can chase, or that combine two or three of these attributes. None of these work well for a ridden horse—even food treats can only be given at the halt, and the horse reaching for them distracts from balance and straightness and turns the halt into a stop. But the one thing almost every dog and horse (and human student) wants is reassurance—“You’re doing good!”

One way that horses bond with each other is mutual grooming, and a common grooming destination is right in front of the rider’s hand: the area along side and in front of the withers. Because you’re the leader, when you scratch your horse there, you’re telling him “I’ve got your back,” and when you’re riding, you literally do.

Relaxing a rein to scratch is sometimes counterproductive when you’re being precise with the aids, and that’s where the voice comes in. Horses reassure each other by voice all the time, and while we can’t duplicate the details of what they’re saying to each other, we can reassure by voice in a way they understand. Reassuring vocalizations generally drop in pitch and volume: “GOOD boy” (this is different from dogs, where rising pitch can elicit excitement).

You might be thinking that reward is important for training, but is superfluous for lesson horses and especially schoolmasters, because they already know what to do. But they need rewards more than ever, not because you’re teaching them what to do, rather because they’re teaching you, and that’s how you let them know you appreciate the lesson. I’m not very good at that, because I often feel inept. But when your teacher is a horse, that’s really the only way you can show gratitude.

So now you have the tools. Reward your horse. Good boy!

Red light, green light 3

Curtis Clark2017-08-082017-08-093 Comments

Horses see a different world than we do, in large part because of specific differences in their eyes. This article will focus on one aspect, the way horse and human eyes react to the colors of illumination used for enhancing human night vision. If you’re not interested in the details, you can skip straight to the recommendations.

Like humans, horses have two types of light-sensitive cells in their retinas (the retina is the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye). Rods are sensitive to very low levels of light, but don’t discriminate colors. Cones do the color discrimination, but need more light than rods to do their job. In humans, rods are about a hundred times more light-sensitive than cones, and there’s no reason to expect horses to be any different. Vision involving the cones is called photopic vision and vision involving the rods is scotopic vision.

Photopic vision (colors)

Humans have three different types of cone cells that absorb light of three different wavelengths: 420 nm (nanometers), which appears blue, 534 nm, which appears green, and 564 nm, which appears red. These are “peak sensitivities”; each type of cone detects wavelengths shorter and longer than its peak, and there’s some overlap. We have “trichromatic vision”, and all the different colors we perceive are the result of our brains processing the signals from these blue, green, and red cones.

Humans and other primates are unique among mammals in having trichromatic vision. Horses, dogs, and other mammals have only two kinds of cone cells, and dichromatic vision. In horses, blue-sensitive cones are most absorptive at 428 nm, and the other type of cone is sensitive at 539 nm, which appears yellow-green to us. Some humans have protanopia, a type of color-blindness in which the red cones don’t function; a horse sees the world much like that.

Important for our purposes here, the yellow-green cone can’t detect light with a longer wavelength than around 640 nm, which is a deep red.

Scotopic vision (“night vision”)

Horses have exceptional night vision relative to humans. Their eyes are larger than most other land mammals, to gather more light. They have a tapetum layer that reflects light back onto the retina (this is what causes eyeshine). And their retinas are richer in rods. In environments with moonlight, starlight, or even reflected city lights, horses can see well enough to walk, trot, or even gallop without running into things.

When a rod absorbs light, its visual pigment (rhodopsin, or “visual purple” in older references) is irreversibly changed (“bleached”), so that the cell’s ability to detect light is reduced until new rhodopsin is synthesized. In low light, rhodopsin is regenerated as fast as it is used, but a burst of bright light can bleach all the rhodopsin in all the rod cells, and it can take thirty minutes or more for the cells to fully regain their ability to function. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, humans regain a useful level of night vision within five minutes of being exposed to bright light, but horses need the full thirty minutes. The same horse that can run across a pasture under the quarter moon cannot easily discriminate details in a dark horse trailer when asked to enter it from bright daylight.

Illumination for night vision

Humans have poorer night vision than many other animals, and there are situations where it’s advantageous to maintain night vision even in the presence of illumination. There are two different approaches in current use.

The first to be developed was the use of red light. Rod cells are insensitive to red light, so they can stay adapted to low-light conditions even while the red cone cells form images. Red nighttime illumination is still used in aviation and some military settings, and in displays of some electronic devices.

Red light has a couple of disadvantages for this use: it requires a higher brightness, since it relies on photopic vision, and it’s sometimes difficult to discriminate shapes and nearly impossible to discriminate colors.

A newer alternative is to use bluish-green light, at about the peak sensitivity of rod cells. Because this is the light that rods see best, extremely low intensities can improve scotopic vision without destroying dark adaptation. In a sense, it’s like carrying around a full moon.

The effect of these two types of light on horses is totally different. Like humans, horses cannot see red with their rod cells, but they also cannot see it (or see it only dimly if it’s more of an orange-red) with their yellow-green cone cells. A human analogy is an infrared remote for an entertainment system: most people cannot see the beam even if it is shining directly in their eyes. For horses, deep red is “infra-yellow-green”, not really a perceived color at all.

Horse's eye open under red light on left, squinting under green light on right — Red light preserves horses’ night vision. At a brightness level high enough to be useful to humans, green light impairs their night vision.

And because horses have more rods, and more sensitive rods, than humans, a low-intensity bluish-green light, barely perceptible to a human, would be much brighter to a horse, and would reduce their night vision.

Recommendations

Red light preserves both human and horse night vision. Horses only see it dimly if at all, and continue to rely on their superb night vision. It allows humans to perceive shapes and see text and diagrams that would be much less visible with the inferior human night vision, but at the same time preserves that night vision for seeing in areas where the beam is not directed.
The bluish-green light used for enhancing human night vision is inappropriate for horses. It is only effective for preserving night vision in humans at the lowest level of brightness that a human can usefully perceive, and this is much brighter that the lowest level that a horse can perceive. If the human can see it, the horse’s night vision is already impaired.
Red headlamps or flashlights are useful for night trail riding; they have no effect on the horse’s night vision, and augment the human’s night vision. The use of white light headlamps or flashlights is strongly discouraged; they destroy night vision in both horses and humans in exchange for providing only a narrow area of illumination, and when they are switched off, horses need much longer to regain night vision than humans, and are effectively stumbling in the dark until they do.
Red LED illumination may be more useful for barns and outdoor stables than the usual fluorescent lighting. It allows a human to deal with a specific horse without destroying the night vision of all the other horses in the facility. Horses differ in their response to “having the lights turned on”, but even for the most nonreactive horse, it’s one more thing to put up with. In my ideal facility, there would be red light illumination everywhere that would go on with a single switch, so I could walk down the aisle without tripping on something. Each stall could have an individual white flood lamp, or I could carry a white headlamp or flashlight, if I needed better vision for a specific horse.

Executive summary: Red light, yes. Green light, no.

Let the horse choose the gait

Curtis Clark2017-06-25Leave a comment

Not all the time; that would be silly.

There’s a dogma among riders and trainers that a horse should move at the gait and speed that you choose, all the time, every time, and that any deviation is disobedience or “disrespect”. Allowing the horse to routinely choose gait, speed, or path is definitely dangerous, and a skilled rider should be able to clearly communicate expectations to the horse. But by being absolute and unyielding in your expectations of the horse, you are cutting off one of the most useful ways your horse has of communicating to you.

At liberty, horses almost always choose their own gait and speed. Even a horse running with a herd is choosing the safety of that herd. About the only exceptions are a horse being chased by a real or imagined predator, and a horse stuck in quicksand. Studies have shown that horses often choose gaits and speeds that are most efficient; this is hardly surprising.

Adding a rider to the mix changes everything. When a horse deals with the weight and balance of the rider, different gait/speed combinations become more efficient. Combinations that are not efficient have to be trained. Classical western horses have to be trained to the jog, which is slower than the trot they might choose themselves, and to the lope, which is slower than their preferred canter. Upper-level competitive dressage horses are trained not only to slower speeds, such as the canter pirouette, passage, and piaffe, but also extended trots. It’s true that some horses and even breeds have conformation that makes these combinations easier, but that doesn’t mean that they are in any way effortless.

So what might a horse be communicating by choosing a gait and speed that you didn’t ask for? The stock answer is “I’m the boss of you!” Some riders and even trainers are so insecure in their connection with horses that they always seize that explanation. Sometimes it’s even correct. But what if the horse had no inclination to be the boss of you yesterday, and is perfectly cooperative tomorrow?

Some other things your horse might be telling you:

I hurt. I’m developing an abscess, or my arthritis is acting up.
I’m not strong enough to do this for an extended period.
I’m scared. If you weren’t on my back, I’d run away, but I’m doing this displacement activity instead.
I’m grumpy, my ovaries hurt, and I’m doing everything I can not to buck you off, which I’d never do anyway.
I feel great! I want to run in the sun, power through the flowers, and I really don’t understand why you’re not down with that.
I feel great! I want to nap in the sun, munch on the flowers, and I really don’t understand why you’re not down with that.
You’re crazy! You’re asking me to risk losing my footing and killing us both.
You’re throwing me off-balance! I hear there are these things called “lessons”.
I’m sick. If you took my temperature, or even looked at my eyes, you’d realize that.

If my horse were trying to tell me any of these things, I’d want to know about it. Various horses at various times have told me most of these things. If I passed it all off as disobedience, I’d be telling my horse “You don’t matter.” That’s not a good basis for a trust relationship.

If I passed it all off as disobedience, I’d be telling my horse “You don’t matter.”

One of the trails Buddy and I take away from the stable has a gentle incline right as we leave the property. He always wants to trot it. If I ask him to walk, he will, but I don’t, because I can learn enough from the speed of that trot, the way his body moves, and the way his head moves to know whether there are any issues that I should address, or that might mean we shouldn’t go out at all. And the time he volunteered a walk, I could tell he wasn’t well, and we turned around and went back.

And then there’s the stop.

It’s true that horses can stop because they are lazy. Or exhausted. Or worried. Or confused. It’s hard to imagine a response that usefully addresses all those things (and more) without knowing (or even caring about) the reason.

When I first rode Buddy in what I like to call “contrived obstacle courses”, he would sometimes stop dead before an obstacle. I was green, and there was peer pressure, and I even thought about getting spurs. But I learned that if I kept him facing the obstacle without pushing him to go forward, he would eventually figure it out and go forward on his own, because he knew that’s what I expected. And once he realized that he wouldn’t be kicked at every obstacle, he calmed down and took them more easily.

So if your horse insists on a different gait or speed from the one you requested, think about letting him take it for a few strides until you figure out why. Remember that horses live in the present. Your horse doesn’t plot disobedience based on your past weaknesses. Give him the chance to tell you what’s on his mind, now.

Make it bigger

Curtis Clark2017-06-11Leave a comment

A number of years ago, I worked for a time with a graphic designer, Gunnar Swanson. He also taught graphic design students, and he told me that when a student was concerned that a design element was too big, he told the student to make it bigger. The idea was that some elements just “want” to be big, and they need to be released from “big, but not quite big enough”, and that in other cases, making the element bigger would cause the designer to see the design in a whole new light, and come up with different solutions.

Maybe a decade ago, I applied this idea to bits: If a bit isn’t giving you enough control, switch to a milder bit. For my part, it led to riding in a rope halter (more about that in a later post). The basic idea is that, although bits are for control, they are never for more control, and that if a bit seems inadequate in that regard, the rider should return to the basics of horsemanship and forget about metal gadgets.

A second example of “make it bigger” occurred to me recently. If your horse is going too fast, ask him to go faster. “Too fast” gaits are often the result of nervousness or pain. If you ask the horse to slow down, it may very well increase the nervousness, even if it relieves the pain, because restraint never made a horse less nervous. If you ask the horse to go faster, that can sometimes relieve the nervousness, and then the horse will be able to slow down more calmly to the speed you wanted in the first place.

Restraint never makes a horse less nervous

Of course, you should only do this if you’re ordinarily comfortable riding the faster speed. Many riders get nervous when a horse speeds up, and this feeds the horse’s nervousness, but when you ask the horse to go faster, you’re not reacting, you’re doing something, and that should calm you down, as well.

Mare worries

Curtis Clark2017-04-082017-04-08Leave a comment

Life worries: horse, food and more food; owner, a bunch of different things — Courtesy of Horse Network, formerly Horse Collaborative

And chickens. And mountain lion shadows, which can skulk independent of their lions. And missing stable mates...Oh! There you are! What a relief! And stallions...I’ve heard rumors. And water crossings, especially with mud. And that same tree.

This post is inspired by and dedicated to Veronica, a mare’s mare, who reminds us that for horses, safety always comes before food.

Back in the saddle with Stanley Milgram 1

Curtis Clark2017-03-231 Comment

In 1963, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram published the results of a study he did to measure the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure and perform actions that conflicted with their conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were taking the role of Teacher in a learning experiment. Actors took the roles of Experimenter and Learner. The Experimenter instructed the Teacher to ask the Learner questions, and if the answers were incorrect, press a button to administer an electric shock to the Learner. The Learner, an actor, intentionally answered questions incorrectly, and responded as if to a real shock. As the experiment progressed, the Experimenter asked the Teacher to increase the level of shocks, even though the reactions of the Learner suggested that he was in great distress. In the first set of experiments, 65% of the participants administered the highest level of shock, which they were told was 450 volts.

Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” —Wikipedia

Others have repeated the experiment in the years since; I was reminded of it by reading about a recent repetition in Poland. And I thought of the early education of many riders.

“Kick, kick, kick!” The staccato music of a lesson barn.

There are reasons to kick a horse. There are many more reasons not to. Most kicks administered by riders to horses are given out of frustration, and almost always before other methods of communication have been exhausted. Fortunately the kicks of an eight-year-old don’t do much damage to a horse, and most lesson horses have experienced worse. Unfortunately, the student is never taught how to recognize when a kick is necessary, but rather that it’s always necessary when a horse isn’t “obeying”.

And the expectation has been created. Force is always an option. Pain compliance is nevertheless compliance. And by the time that eight-year-old becomes an adult, with spurs, or a crop, or a twisted-wire snaffle, or draw reins, “Kick, kick, kick!” has been internalized. When other “authority figures” chime in with “Show him who’s boss,” “Horses don’t feel pain the way we do,” “Make him yield at the poll,” the message is reinforced. We’re teaching the horses, so it must be okay.

Where do we go to find the evil here? We all came through the same system. We learned the same lessons. Some of us realized what we were doing and said, “No! I won’t do this any more.” Others continue to go along, because of ignorance, social pressure, or expedience. Kick him. Push the button. You have no other choice, you must go on.

A couple of reasons for wearing a helmet that you might not have thought of

Curtis Clark2017-03-202017-04-06Leave a comment

Chaps for the head

Chaps, or chaparejos, are coverings for the legs, originally intended to protect riders going through thickets of shrubs. But shrubs come in all heights, even here in southern California in the land of chaparral, and a helmet protects you from the higher ones.

leaves and acorns — Leaves and acorns of coast live oak

This is coast live oak, a tree with stiff branches and leathery, spiny leaves. Horses generally know how tall they are, but don’t have a good sense of how much higher you are when you’re in the saddle, and so you learn to duck. And it’s nice to know that your helmet protects you from all the stray branches.

Sure, you could wear a cowboy hat—oh, and use the chinstrap to make sure it’s not ripped off your head (it does have a chinstrap, right?)—but hats cost about the same as helmets, they don’t protect your head as well, and they tend to get ripped up a lot faster.

Trust

There are plenty of riders and trainers who demand blind obedience from horses. (For the horses’ sake, it would probably be better if these folks didn’t wear helmets.) For the rest of us, an important part of our relationship with horses is trust, and people will tell you that they don’t wear a helmet because they trust their horse.

A friend once wrote of her horse, “My life is in his hands.” That’s certainly true, and most people who work with horses understand this. But I responded, “It is also correct to say that his life is in your hands.” We all know many ways our horses could kill us. But it turns out that our horses have misconceptions about how we could kill them.

What will happen to your horse if you are killed or severely impaired by a traumatic brain injury? Yes, there are sport horses that could be easily sold and continue their careers with new owners. There are owners whose families have the resources to take care of a horse when the owner is unable to. But the majority of horses are one sale away from the kill buyer. It doesn’t matter that we don’t play the predator and kill and eat them. The commonest way we kill our horses is by not being there when they need us.

The majority of horses are one sale away from the kill buyer.

When I ride Buddy, I know that he goes out of his way to avoid killing me, and there are times when he has believed himself to be in great danger that he clearly wanted to take me to safety with him. I trust him. But I know that he can make bad decisions.

Buddy doesn’t expect me to kill him (even when I squirt medicine into his eye). He trusts me. He may not realize that I, too, can make bad decisions, but I know it.

When I wear a helmet, I am acknowledging that he can make bad decisions. When I don’t wear a helmet, I am making a bad decision, a decision that in the worst case will result in his death. I owe him more than that.

Herds, horses, and humans 1

Curtis Clark2017-02-152017-02-181 Comment

In their herds, horses maintain a social framework of friendship, dominance, and leadership. Much has been written about this. But that’s not what this post is about.

Mark Rashid has written about horses wanting to fit into “our” herd. Left unstated is that the resulting herd consists of both humans and horses.

I think it’s important to note that I am a firm believer that horses probably don’t, nor will they ever, see us as a member of their herd. Rather, I believe it is just the opposite. I think horses do everything they can to fit into “our” herd.
—Mark Rashid

Just as we can misinterpret horses as other humans, horses in the combined “our herd” interpret us as horses. Some horses/people are dominant, and some are submissive. Some are leaders, and some are followers. Humans can act kind of screwy sometimes, but really there’s no other way to see them than as really strange horses (or as really gnarly predators, but that’s not where we’re going with this).

Virtually every equestrian agrees that humans need to be the leaders. Most horses are looking for leaders, and it ill suits them or the people around them when they think they have to be in charge to stay safe. A very few horses are natural leaders, and it ill suits the people around them to allow them to take this role with humans. And it’s part of the training of every equestrian to be a leader of horses.

We humans also have social hierarchies, and we don’t put those away when we are around horses. And a useful instructor–student relationship requires that the student defer to the instructor, at least during the lesson.

The problem comes when an assertive instructor dominates a submissive student, and the horse decides the student is of lower rank than he is. We’ve all seen horses in lessons defer to the instructor rather than the rider, and this is only natural—the horse is looking for the person in charge, and that’s the instructor. But if the instructor should leave the arena, the horse should always look to the rider. If the instructor so thoroughly dominates the student as to lower the student’s status to less than that of the horse, the instructor has failed, no matter how much teaching or ego gratification might have gone on.

It’s easy to watch for this, and for many instructors it’s easy to correct the problem, by building up the diffident student in the eyes of the horse. For instructors without that ability, or who are challenged by the diffidence of a particular student, the solution is to help the student find an instructor who can work with them.

Putting people below horses, intentionally or inadvertently, has no place in horsemanship.