INSTINCTS

I have just brought home a Brittany pointer pup and at ten weeks old it is surprising how deeply programed his instinct is to point and to search things out with his nose. I have also just finished reading the wonderful book ‘Seabiscuit’ and was similarly surprised to learn how deeply seated the instinct is in racehorses to run and also to have ‘fiery’ behavior. In this book the reader is constantly reminded of the unruly behavior of racehorses, particularly horses like Man of War who was considered next to impossible and left a string of injured trainers and handlers in his wake.
So I began to think about horses and past experiences and the natural instincts of horses and wondered what role instincts play while working with trail horses. This is not a subject of absolutes, but I believe it is worth considering. Of course, horses do not point or retrieve, and you don’t open the gate with the fall migration and pick up your horse three weeks later in the Florida salt marshes, but they have some very definite and pronounced instincts.
First and most obvious is the survival instinct of the horse as a prey animal – fear, flight and fight. Second, I believe, is the herd instinct, the inborn desire to be inside the nucleus of the group and to instinctively understand the hierarchy of the herd, dominance, and the desire to fit in – again related to being a prey animal. Third, I feel, is the acute awareness, sensitivity and comprehension that horses have to their surroundings including other horses and people in their lives, and again, this is related to the horse being a prey animal.
Fear, flight, and fight instincts are ‘reactive’, they are an immediate action to a stimulus in their environment. Fractions of seconds count in the world of survival. Good for the horse but bad for humans because as the trainer or rider we want the horse to think before it acts. We want a ‘response’ to our pressures and cues, and when confronted with situations on the trail we want the horse to act responsibly, not react impulsively. And this difference is huge. Most of the bad habits that confront us like ‘hard to catch’, bucking, spook, pulling, kicking, barn sour, are impulsive reactions rooted in the survival instinct.
Understanding that this contrary behavior is reactive is important because it helps us understand that the horse does not think or know that he is doing anything wrong, he is simply reacting. This makes the difficulty less personal and can help us hold our temper and become more patient. It tells us that we need to get the horse’s mind beyond the point where it reacts to the point where it responds. Building a controlled responsive mind is what training is all about. Keeping instincts in mind let us look at some of the steps along the way.
First, remove the fear. Again and again, I see horses placed in situations on the trail that have not had the time spent with them or the training necessary to remove fear. People get hurt because they did not take the time to build trust between the horse and themselves, or to have them become familiar with surroundings, activities and training methods. Your horse should always be comfortable with your presence before you train or ride, excluding careful halter breaking, early round pen or lunge line work where your goal is to build trust. This may mean confining the horse in a corral with repeated contact, giving treats (being careful not to lose respect), and whatever it takes to get the horse comfortable with your presence. This can be difficult if the horse just does not like people but if that is the case then you need to ask yourself if it is the right horse for the trail.
Second, remove the fear of contact. If the horse reacts negatively in any number of situations and bucks or kicks or pulls or spooks, then start at the beginning and begin complete desensitizing. Desensitizing is a chapter but do not even think of riding or training beyond the round pen and lunge line until after the horse is completely desensitized, and this means touch anywhere on the body. Always begin in the least sensitive areas like the shoulder and work gently along the back upper legs and eventually to the upper neck, ears, belly, groin, and ropes between the legs, etc. If your horse reacts negatively to this basic touch then that needs to be your focus of training before moving on to more advanced training like indirect pressures, lead changes, etc. etc. Remember the idea is to be able to control negative instinctive reactions and make them controlled responses. All of our trail horses, eventually, and sooner rather than later, accept noisy poly tarps rubbed over their entire body.
Feet are paramount in the fear, flight and fight response. When you control the movement of the horse, in other words control its feet, you move up the ladder of dominance in the eye of the horse. We never attempt to ride or pack or do any advanced training until the horse moves freely upon command, which is easy enough to do on a lunge or round pen and then in close quarters with leading, stops and starts. If you freely control movement sideways and back it adds to your position of dominance. Keep in mind that it is mother nature, instinctive, for horses to impose, bully, and fight for position, daily, and if you do not have position above the horse your ability to earn controlled responses are about the same as a yearling telling the dominant mare what to do.
We purchased a friendly mare for breeding purposes, and she came with the worst pulling habit that I have ever seen. She had a nice colt and I was careful never to tie her or let the foal know she had any desire to pull. The foal was weaned and the mare sold. Three years later, after the gelding was well trained and a reliable young riding horse it just decided one day, out of the blue, to go into a pulling frenzy. The desire just seemed to ‘click’ and stay with this horse, and I am convinced some bad habits can be instinctive and not only learned behavior. Ditto for a stubborn Clyde cross mare we had that produced a nice sturdy filly that a few years later proved to be as impossibly stubborn as her mother.
So my opinion on these reactions like bucking, pulling, spook, stubbornness, is that you always give the horse the benefit of the doubt and try to have the issue corrected, but there comes a point when you need to decide if this behavior, which is to some extent innate, is something that you want to live with. As I get older I have less time and desire to deal with poor behavior. I also become less willing to blame poor behavior on past circumstance. I am not as willing to accept here- say explanations like; someone was harsh around his ears and now you cannot touch them; someone did not tie him right and he got loose and now he pulls so don’t tie him to anything.
Let me explain. In one study there were 102,000 horse related injuries in the USA in a two-year period, 11,500 were traumatic, sustained, brain injuries. In ten states there are over 200 deaths per year. Also, and estimated 70% of first-time horse owners get out of horses in their first year. The bottom line is that is you want to be a safe trail rider and continue to actually enjoy your time with horses then it makes sense to understand that the behavior of your horse may more deeply rooted than you think, and although you can certainly improve behavior with training do not be afraid or embarrassed or ashamed to know where to draw the line that says it’s time to get a more forgiving horse that is not so deeply entrenched in reactive behavior, no matter where the behavior came from.
These instinctive, reactive behaviors can be more prevalent with one horse than another and with one breed as compared with another. I have worked with many breeds over the years and started and trained well over a hundred horses in the past twenty years. There is a marked difference between, for example, cold blooded breeds and hot-blooded breeds when it comes to instinctive reactions like spooking, running, or bucking. I understand completely when a trainer or therapist tells us that if a horse reacts negatively or violently to biting, saddling, riding, or handling, to be sure there is no pain being experienced by the horse. However, for example, if we are on the trail rider and a twig gets between the pad and the horse, or some other object irritates the horse, I expect my horses to react by showing discomfort, not by bucking or dashing off or spooking or trying to kick or bite someone.
Finally, it is a horse’s nature to flee from predators so there is not a natural desire for a horse to be your friend. Instinctively, they consider us predators, and so when we begin our relationship, and when we jump on a horse, all of those extremely keen senses, senses that have allowed the horse to survive for generations in a fearful world full of predators, are focused on us and they can read us like a book. When you lack confidence, and you feel the horse knows it and is taking advantage of you, and acts beyond your attempts at control, it is also instinctive. I wonder how many of those thousands of injuries previously mentioned could have been avoided if the riders did not challenge themselves with horses whose minds had not yet been taken to a point of controlled responses. Train yourself, know your limit, stay within it!

Happy Trails!