On the face of it, not too much effort is required to control a horse or even dominate them. You can use force or the threat of it. Alternatively, you might opt for bribery or trickery. You may even assign fancy names to these types of approaches, calling them positive or negative reinforcement, punishment, operant or classical conditioning, habituation or the like. Taking it further, you could even immerse yourself in detailed studies of the theories underlying these terms and attempt to apply them.
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Pip was the epitome of a horse “controlled” by a human. She had been ridden to an advanced intermediate level of dressage in the Netherlands and was relatively easy to control, albeit that she had the reputation for being a fiery ride, prone to bolting with a novice. Indeed, I even found it so easy to dominate my mare, that I ended up doing so with embarrassing frequency, especially when she began to reveal to me the futility of my apparent success. She would do everything I required but would switch off while doing so. Responding to stimuli was possible but meaningful communication not. My initial response was frustration, anger and more domination: in a nutshell, impotence!
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Yes, I could control the creature before me but was it still a horse? Pip had developed a capacity to do all that was required of her by consciously withdrawing from it and going on autopilot. She had become the robot that training was designed to create. Vicki and I used to travel around the world to attend the World Equestrian Games and the equestrian events at the Olympic Games. What I saw there was a more refined version of what was essentially the same. What I have since seen achieved with positive reinforcement is much kinder but in the case of trained behaviour, the outcome is essentially the same: the creature is controlled but the horse – that sensitive, sentient, graceful, inquisitive and powerful being – has gone AWOL, absent without leave.
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(Taken from the book, When Horses Speak and Humans Listen. For more information see http://www.horsesandhumans.com/mainsite/whsahl.htm)
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The illusion of liberty. With a whip and a rope in a small square arena, I used to achieve less with Pip than in the situation depicted at the bottom of this page.
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In short, I can train a horse but if that training goes further than teaching building blocks of meaning (similar to the function of words in a language) to produce conditioned behaviour, the creature exhibiting that behaviour will not be the horse with whom I started out, because they will not be capable of any spontaneous action or response while exhibiting it. I will be controlling that conditioned creature but not the horse, assuming that it is possible to control a flight animal that weighs as much as a car even with an array of metal and leather restraints and instruments of coercion.
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So is there any point in training? I believe that there may be to the extent that such training facilitates spontaneous communication and connection between horse and human. But if the object of training is merely to produce a conditioned illusion of the dream of spontaneous interaction between the species, is there any point to it?
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Yet, if it is impossible to control a horse, how then is it possible to get anything done with the creature? Perhaps through contact, communication and connection between a horse and human who are both fully present in the moment, where the horse chooses to follow the human and to do what the latter requests? Does this make the human a leader? In as much as the human is capable of inducing the horse to choose to follow them perhaps? Or does the human not need to become first and foremost a trustworthy friend who offers the horse safety, security and joy without expecting anything in return, and who finds within themself the means to suggest a course of action to the horse without expecting the horse to comply but doing so while so fully present and “intentful” (not to be confused with bossy) that the prospect of the horse declining their suggestion does not even feature as a remote possibility?
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Although Pip and I are linked by a lead, I have less control over her than alone at liberty with a whip in a small picadero.
Andrew you seem to ignore and/or disapprove that many horse owners keep the animal to convey these owners from point to point, either on horseback or using a carriage to be pulled by the horse. Many such owners are not expecting anything ‘ in return’, inasmuch as these owners to whom I refer do not invest any personal labour or emotion in horse husbandry; they pay another human to do that for them.
Do these circumstances disadvantage the horse ? Not necessarily so.
The impression I have is that you believe that horse should have free spirit and life choices. That is not necessarily the only good way or the best way to live. ( include humans in these words )
In the human context….think ‘wage slave’. For lots of humans it is a concept that works.
Thus switching now to how we keep horses, the wage slave concept may be ok and they can get there emotional interaction with other adjacent horses kept on the same principle.
Hi Patrick
Perhaps one of the most profound tragedies of human life is not merely that the bulk of us have become “wage slaves” or “slaves to our business” (if we are entrepreneurs) but that we have also come to accept it as normal. If this is the purpose of life, I am happy to end it now.
While we humans ultimately have a choice to accept such “slavery” or to find ways to reject or reduce its dehumanising influence, horses do not. We can make that choice for them and I choose as far as possible to enable my horses to live a life that is as compatible with their nature as possible.
At a push, I can perhaps understand why a human may misuse a horse to eke out a living in a situation of poverty but outside of such a situation I refuse to condone the human abuse of horses in the pursuit of pleasure, profit or ego. By the same token, though, I will not condemn any human who is guilty of this, for it will help neither them nor the horse concerned (or me for that matter).
Be well!
Andrew
Last line of my recent reply…delete there…….insert their………
uh huh….it is very much the case that…….I agree to disagree with you.
Hi Patrick
That is fine, although I suspect that the conversation which really matters is not that between us but between you and your horse! Do you allow them to disagree with you?
Be well!
Andrew
You are a wordsmith who chooses to write at length about horse-human relationships and since we are right now in information exchange I will mention that for me your articles are far too long………..due to my short attention span……..I might not be alone in this regard.
Just a very few words…..how could I possibly forbid my horses to disagree with me ?…….but when we do disagree it does not go unchecked and we interact to a solution.
But I do not feel inclined to write any more……
Patrick
Dear Patrick
Point taken about the lengthy articles. This is why my recent posts are drastically shorter than those that precede them.
It is okay not to write any more if this is your inclination. Thank you for all your feedback to date.
Be well!
Andrew