Introduction
This writing is about a philosophy of nonviolence that is using our relationships with horses as an example, but it can be applied to our interactions with other animals and humans as well.
My approach to teaching horses is to learn first. We have a great deal to learn from horses about them and about ourselves. Being predators, humans need to understand that horses are prey, and they do not live in our world unless we engage with them. A predator engaging with a prey in a violent manner will always result in the prey fighting, fleeing, or being beaten into submission. It will never result in a relationship of mutual trust and understanding, the only relationship that results in horses truly yielding to us as leaders who have earned our right to be the head of the herd. Horses teach us how to be calm, empathetic, patient, giving, and yielding because that is who they are. This is how they are in the herd, and this is how they are with us, and we with them, if we can learn what they have to teach.
Schools of horse training such as Buck Brannaman, Parelli’s Natural Horsemanship, Monty Roberts, and the lessons of Jim Masterson, Mark Rashid, Linda Tellington-Jones, and Dr. Stephen Peters are teaching us new techniques for engaging with our horses in non-violent and more effective ways.
Most of the words on this page are based on my own experiences in teaching humans and horses how to communicate and how to yield. I get confirmation of my ideas and directions from the results with the horses and people with whom I work and from some of the greatest horse teachers listed above. There is a resource section below pointing to books, articles, and videos that are useful if you want to go more in depth into the philosophies and techniques of these teachers.
Calmness
Horses have been called giant biofeedback machines because, being prey animals, they are finely tuned to their environment and all animals in it. Notice how horses in a herd are calm, hanging out, eating grass or hay when a sound or movement could result in an instant response from tension to a stampede. Any condition other than calmness is troubling to horses, so this requires us to be calm. It is even possible to be afraid of a horse and calm around it at the same time. It just takes practice. A rushed or shallow breath tells the horse there is danger. A deep breath helps us to slow down. You can take a deep breath and push out your abdomen at the same time, then let the breath let itself out as you relax and exhale. Another approach is to take whatever thought, feeling, behavior is creating anxiety, just label it and let it go. Whatever you must do to bring yourself to calm, deep breath, mini meditation, a happy memory, a favorite song, a simple pause, etc. it is a good idea to do this before approaching a horse.
Calmness and Yielding: We are yielding to whatever is causing us to not be quiet. A horse who is quiet because we are calm is a horse more likely to yield to us. This calming of ourselves is our horse’s first step towards joining us, the first step towards yielding.
Empathy
Empathy for horses starts with realizing that this prey animal, and this herd of prey animals, is allowing the ultimate predator to walk among it, to handle it, and ask it to yield and cooperate rather than run from the predator. Understanding this is the beginning of empathy for the horse. Before asking a horse to do something, start first from where the horse is coming from. Try to see the world through the horse’s eyes. Horses must know where the exit is. Keep the stall door shut when inside with the horse. Horses must be able to warn predators with a bite or kick. Be aware of the signs such as eyes wide open, ears back, tight nostrils, etc. and calm and place yourself accordingly. Horses fight with some other horses, so when two horses who fight are being led or ridden in the same space give them a great deal of room away from one another. It is your job to protect your horse. If your horse is looking for some comfort and safety, give it a pat, scratch, and/or a kind word.
Empathy to Yielding: Being empathetic to the world in which a horse lives will result in more yielding on the part of the trainer, resulting in more partnership and yielding on the part of the horse.
Emotions
Horses are emotional animals. Every bit of behavior is an emotional communication. Horses respond, command, partner with emotions. Horses are right-brained, and if we want to communicate with them it must be from our right-brain. The hard part about this is that we struggle when the answer to a problem is not a bit of logic, an algorithm, a conceptual model, a set of principles, etc., and the beauty is we get to stop struggling and just be with our emotions. Therefore, training horses is a path, not a destination. The infinite subtlety of our emotional connection with horses continues to evolve. As we are teaching them to yield, they are teaching us about ourselves and our need to yield in our relationships with family, friends, and the community at large.
Emotions to Yielding: The answer to the problem of getting a horse to yield is to yield to our emotions and communicate emotionally with this right-brained animal. Emotional communication creates strength in communicating and strength in yielding.
Fear
Being prey animals, horses are hard wired for fear. Evolution has favored the horse who uses fear to stay out of the way of predators. However, fear in horses has many roots. Some horses were physically, mentally, and emotionally hurt by someone they trusted in the past. This makes a horse fear and not trust you. A horse can be afraid because you are afraid. New shapes, environments, and sounds are frightening to a horse. Horses that are in a great deal of pain can still perform many complex behaviors, yet a horse that is afraid can only run or fight.
We can help our horses deal with their fears by exposing them to new stimuli in a non-threatening way and by calming ourselves (see ‘Calm’ section). This is a partnership between horse and handler helping one another face fear.
Fear to Yielding: It is important to respond to a horse’s fear-based behavior with yielding. Hitting a horse and making it more afraid because it is afraid and acting on that fear is self-defeating. Fighting a horse who is biting or kicking or trying to pull out of your hand is futile. You will lose that fight and get hurt in the process. We hit our horses when we are afraid or wanting to retaliate. Yielding to the fear and the fear created behavior results in a return to calmness for our horses and ourselves. Yielding to fear teaches our frightened horses how to yield, how to yield to us.
Patience
Like people, horses come with their own personalities. They vary in terms of intelligence, physical abilities, anxieties, capacities, etc. For this reason, perhaps the number one behavior the trainer must have is patience. Some horses pick up quickly what you are asking them. Others pick up quickly but are slow to translate that into movement. Many must process what we are asking at a rate much, much slower than our human ‘get it done now’ orientation. A trainer pausing a few seconds after asking for a yield can many times avoid biting, kicking, and shutting down. Most of the horses I have experienced that are ‘shut down’ are disengaged from us due to our lack of patience.
High expectations for the horse you are training go hand in hand with respect for the horse’s capacity. Horses enjoy a challenge and are eager to learn if we approach them without our timeline for learning a new behavior. High expectations should come with an understanding that a horse has a unique set of abilities: The horse cannot operate on our timeframe for the mastery of a task. Patience, incremental steps, and going at the horse’s speed, not yours, are required. Horse and trainer achieve the desired goal as a team, without one leaving the other behind. Accomplishing a task may take one week or three years—the horse determines how long. Your patience and willingness to go at the horse’s pace speed up the process because you will not be wasting time in back and forth resistance.
Patience to Yielding: Lack of patience also results in lack of calmness, lack of focus, lack of empathy, confused emotions, lack of leadership, and the creation of a panicked horse. All of this creates an unyielding horse.
Rain pattering on the roof
Means nowhere else to be
My long legs and your bony hooves
Perhaps I’ll take a seat
Get lost while gazing
At your face
Remembering that feeling
When you trust everything
Lisa Tirion 2020
Trust
It might seem ridiculous to think that the ultimate prey can trust the ultimate predator, but it can happen. We can create that feeling in our horses. A prerequisite is that we trust ourselves. We have to trust that we can be assertive without being aggressive. We can be upset and angry, and let it go. We can be introspective while at the same time paying attention to what the horse needs. We can place our horse into situations of pressure and yielding with no more and no less pressure than is required. We can relax the horse using bodywork that puts her in vulnerable position to a predator, and she trusts us to keep her safe.
Trust to Yielding: A horse that trusts her trainer even when in a vulnerable situation is one who yields with the slightest of pressure or intention.
Respect
Horse trainers and their devotees talk a great deal about gaining a horse's respect and about disrespectful behavior when the horse is not doing what the human wants the horse to do. In addition to using the words 'respect' and 'disrespect' the students also maintain an attitude of coldness, hardness, and looking for threats from the horse.
The absurdness of this concept is clear when one realizes that respect comes from the neocortex of humans. Respect can only exist where there is a large neocortex, and horses have a tiny one. Small neocortex, no concept of respect.
Behavior horses exhibit are only the behaviors that are innate to horses or behaviors taught by humans, either intentionally or unintentionally. Either way, the horse believes that the behavior she is exhibiting is the right one, no disrespect.
Respect to Yielding: Trying to teach a horse to yield via getting respect is an absurd concept and will result in less yielding.
Giving
Many times horses are approached with the thoughts of what can I get from today's ride; this horse will calm me down, this horse will teach me things about myself, this horse will entertain me, and on and on with thoughts about what we will get. This approach leaves a lot of good stuff on the table. If we approach our horses with an attitude and behavior of giving back to them for what they have given to us in the past a whole bunch of other things start to happen. The horse gets what she needs, so there is less anxiety, more connecting, more accepting of your leadership, and a great deal of other behaviors that you might have wrestled to get in the past. Horses always give back more than they get.
Giving to Yielding: Rather than trying to figure out how we can get a horse to give us yielding behavior we can yield to the horse and give the horse what it needs which increases the yielding to the giver.
Focus
Many trainers think their horses have some type of attention deficit. That might be so for a few horses, but the lack of focus could be caused by too much going on in the stalls, the horse actively resisting what we want, the horse is in pain, or the trainer is not focused. If we want our horses to be focused, we must be laser focused on them. Horses need to have a short attention span to be able to flee predators, so it is up to us to keep them focused. Talking to them and touching them are two things we can do to bring them around to what we are asking. If we are hitting the horse or otherwise using negative reinforcement, we are guaranteeing that the horse will be focused on that rather than our request to yield.
Focus to Yielding: Getting a horse to focus requires the trainer to be focused and to actively engage the horse’s attention to help it yield to what we are asking.
Listening
People talk about some horse trainers as ‘horse whisperers’. They are not whispering, they are listening. They are listening to the horses. When we listen to horses, they teach us what they need. Listening to horses teaches us when they are afraid, calm, focused and when we are afraid, calm, focused.
Listening to Yielding: Listening to horses telling us what they need and yielding to those needs rather than our preconceived notions will result in horse yielding to us.
Intention
There are two intentions, the horses and ours. If we are sensitive to a horse, we can read her intention before she moves because we are reading where her mind intends to go. Catching this moment and making our move is a mutual dance. Even if we miss the exact moment of intention, we can yield to the horse’s movement and then redirect the mind and body. Try communicating with the horse on an emotional level. Horses are very emotional and immediately let you know if they are getting your intention.
Horses can more easily pick up on our intention if we go from a calm state to one of wanting something. Starting from zero like this helps the horse see the difference and be prompted for something is about to be asked, so pay attention. Horses are always reacting to us emotionally, so if our intention is not consistent with our emotions the horse is confused.
One way we can telegraph our intention to the horse is to put our minds directly on the end state and not freeze it halfway. Think and point to where you want to horse to end up and not the starting position.
Intention to Yielding: The easiest way to get our horses to yield is to align both of our intentions by being focused and sensitive to the horse’s intention on an emotional level and shifting our focus from one of no focus and calmness to one of willing, pointing, and expecting yielding.
Observers
We learn a great deal about horses from just hanging out with a herd and observing their behaviors. Horses are also big on observing, and they observe us all the time, and what we do they do.
“Until 1998, brain scientists didn’t know the basis for observational learning. Then researchers discovered mirror neurons. Brain cells that code action, mirror neurons do not cause muscles to execute action – neurons in the motor cortex do that. Instead, mirror neurons prepare motor neuron to perform specific tasks, the way a symphony conductor lifts the baton before the music begins.” *
Horses watch other horses to mirror how to behave. Horses watch humans to mirror how to behave. This tells us we should behave how we want our horses to behave.
* Jones, Janet, PhD. August 2020. The 6 Ways Horses Learn. Equus Magazine.
Observers to Yielding: Horses observe, mirror, and learn how to yield from our yielding behavior.
Nowness
Horses live in the present. No past. No future. This is true of all prey animals. When we approach our horses, we must do so without thinking about something good or bad from the past or some what-if future. Horses need us to connect with them now, not thinking about something we did in the past with them or some imagined future yielding. Horses see us as distracted and not connected to them if we are not focused on now. This is one of the great joys of working with horses, they force us to not worry, brood, or imagine a future of fame or misfortune. We must leave our agendas and desires at the gate and just be.
Nowness to Yielding: Being right now, no past, no future requires us to be calm and focused, just the right state of being to ask our horses to yield.
Groundwork
Doing groundwork with horses is important on many levels. Groundwork helps horses learn how to move from front quarters and hind quarters, how to move laterally, in an environment that is better suited than mounted for helpful corrections. Groundwork creates a connection between the horses and riders that is immediate, direct, and not possible when mounted. Groundwork helps horses to engage with our partnership and leadership, reducing conflict when riding. Groundwork can be used to exercise horses when riding is not possible due to heat, rain, etc. Groundwork can be part of the rehabilitation of injured horses. Groundwork teaches the trainer how to interact with horses in ways that horses interact with one another.
Groundwork to Yielding: Teaching horses how to yield doing groundwork is a necessary precursor to yielding while riding.
Leadership
Horses need and thrive on leadership. Our work with horses is as a team, but they either must be led, or they will lead us. The leader is usually determined in the first few seconds of our encounter, and the maneuvering to see who is leading whom might go on during the entire encounter, depending on the horse. More important than controlling for the trainer is to be in control. In control over oneself. When a horse understands that you are calm and have a sense of direction it will willingly give you that leadership. Horses bestow leadership on the leader of the herd because that horse has demonstrated empathy, looking after the needs of the other horses, and a steadfastness and assurance that the leader will be in charge and do what is necessary to protect the herd. Leadership is assertive, not aggressive. Leadership is not a right – it is earned.
Leadership to Yielding: Horses will naturally yield to what we are asking them to do if we can establish that we are the leader of the team.
Bubbles
Many of the horses we work with have large ‘bubbles’ around their heads. This is the space between the horse’s head and you. Some breeds have larger bubbles. Some bubbles are created from past interactions with humans. We also have our own bubbles based on our own makeup or experience. Entering this space causes fear and a desire to flee or fight. We should always work with our horses to be able to handle someone entering their space because we must enter it to groom, put on halters, medicate, etc. We do not want to move too quickly into this space and be run over or bitten, so a way to respect our horse’s bubble is to slowly move toward the horse’s head. As soon as you see any reaction in the eyes, lips, ears, or feet, stop. Yield a bit, then move forward and repeat. You begin to understand where this horse’s needed space is. You begin to help the horse relax as you enter her space. Also, if you pay attention to your breathing and pulse, you begin to understand where your personal space is and how you respond to its 'invasion'. Sometimes it is our bubbles rather than the horse’s that is creating the tension.
Bubbles to Yielding: We must respect our horses’ bubbles and be aware that we should not just move right into their space without caution and sensitivity. Doing so will result in the opposite of yielding.
Circles
Circular movements are familiar to horses. Circular movements are related to the horse’s sense of personal space as mentioned in the ‘bubbles’ section. Sharon Wilsie and Gretchen Vogel, in their book Horse Speak: The Equine-Human Translation Guide, tell us that fearful or panicked horses run in straight lines, while calm horses move in circles. If you watch horses move in a group, you see them walk around each other in arcs, tracing the borders of the circular bubbles that make up their personal spaces. When a horse yields her space to you by moving her head over and taking her feet with her, she is yielding her space along her arc or circle.
Moving around these circles helps us redirect our horses and communicate in a language that the horses understand innately.
Circles and Yielding: We tend to move in straight lines like the horses’ predators do. If we yield to the horse way of moving, circles, the horses will be less afraid of our movements and more likely to do what we ask.
Slack
There is a concept in martial arts called “taking up the slack.” If the defender grabs an attacker and tries to redirect his energy with a violent push or pull, the attacker can sense this energy and fight back. But if the defender takes up the slack in the defender's space, whether it be his distance from the defender or the slack in his clothes or the slack in his skin, the attacker’s feeling of resistance changes into one of wanting to follow the direction and lead of the defender.
An example of “taking up the slack” in horse riding is taking up the slack in the reins rather than jerking them. Jerking the reins causes the horse to fight and pull in a direction the rider does not want to go. Gently taking up the slack in the reins, and slowly, but with enough force, pulling the horse to the right, left, or back results in the horse wanting to follow this lead. This technique also works for leading a horse from the ground and any other contact with the horse where we are trying to move her in a particular direction.
Taking Up Slack and Yielding: Reducing resistance by taking up the slack and not fighting is another path towards yielding.
Bodywork
Doing bodywork with our horses helps them to be calm, have less pain, and be less frightened. Bodywork can be grooming, stretching, rubbing muscles, engaging with meridian points, and chiropractic. The bodywork I like to practice is the Masterson’s Method. It is a way of engaging the nervous system in the horse in such a way that the horse does the real work by going from tension to relaxation in various parts of the body. Masterson’s is interactive. The trainers place their hands lightly over a meridian spot on the horses body, hovers when there is resistance or tension, then releases as the horse shows signs of relaxation such as chewing, yawning, one back leg lifted, head shaking, body stretching, etc.
Bodywork to Yielding: It has been demonstrated extensively that after bodywork horses are calmer, in less pain, and more yielding. Masterson’s Method is excellent at teaching trainers how to yield to the horse to teach the horse how to yield to the trainer.
Yielding
It all comes down to yielding, whether it is a branch of bamboo in a strong wind, a relationship worth salvaging, a de-escalation of violence between people, or a trainer wanting to have a horse that yields to what they are asking. It all comes down to understanding and experiencing calmness, fear, empathy, emotions, patience, focus, intention, nowness, leadership, and bodywork in relationships with our horses. We teach our horses to yield by learning to yield ourselves.
Resources
Grandin, Temple. 2002. Animals In Translation. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Brannaman, Buck. 2001. The Faraway Horses. Lyons Press.
Jones, Janet, PhD. August 2020. The 6 Ways Horses Learn. Equus Magazine.
Masterson, James. 2011. Beyond Horse Massage. Trafalgar Square Books.
Tellington-Jones, Linda. 2006. The Ultimate Horse Behavior and Training Book. Trafalgar Square Books.
Wilsie, Sharon. 2018. Horses In Translation. Trafalgar Square Books.
Wilsie, Sharon and Vogel, Gretchen. 2016. Horse Speak: The Equine Human Translation Guide. Trafalgar Square Books.
Hamilton, Allan J. 2011. Zen Mind Zen Horse. Storey Publishing.
Rashid, Mark. 2011. Horses Never Lie. Skyhorse Publishing.
Rashid, Mark. 2012. Horsemanship Through Life. Skyhorse Publishing.
Rashid, Mark. 2011. Nature in Horsemanship: Discovering Harmony Through the Principles of Aikido. Skyhorse Publishing.
Rashid, Mark. 2016. A Journey To Softness. Trafalgar Square Books.
Rashid, Mark. 2016. Finding the Missed Path: The Art of Restarting Horses. Trafalgar Square Books.
Hill, Cherry. 2012. 101 Ground Training Exercises. Storey Publishing.
Kohanov, Linda. 2001. The Tao of Equus. New World Library.
Langley, Mark. equineability.com.au
Jones, Janet L. 2020. Horse Brain, Human Brain. Trafalgar Square Books.
Credits
James Pricer: concept, design, text, video, editing, production
Kelly Ellis: design
Kelly Lacey: beginning video
Catherine Swan: Leadership video
Lisa Tirion: most of the photos and Trust poetry