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Herds, horses, and humans

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.

 

1 thought on “Herds, horses, and humans

  1. Nancy Charest

    The shy, less self-​confidant stu­dent can also be destroyed by barn kib­b­itzers who like to crit­i­cize and crit­i­cize and have noth­ing con­struc­tive to say. If you want peo­ple at your barn to deal safe­ly and effec­tive­ly with hors­es which is to every­one’s ben­e­fit, then peo­ple should say some­thing nice from time to time. It’s not to any­one’s ben­e­fit to have the upheavals of forc­ing peo­ple out of the barn with their hors­es. It’s nicer eco­nom­i­cal­ly and social­ly to retain your board­ing cus­tomers and keep a sta­ble “herd”.

    Reply

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