Attitude is Everything

Anyone who has watched horses in a herd interacting with one another has witnessed an extensive amount of communication taking place via body language.  Horses don’t have any kind of sophisticated audio language that I’m aware of unless they communicate with some sort of sub-audible frequency that is imperceptible to human ears and hasn’t yet been discovered. Their entire vocabulary consists of a few basic sounds that are pretty easy to interpret.  What is much more sophisticated and complex, however, is their physical communication.  Horses are masters of body language.  They pay attention to the slightest movement another horse might make and understand what this movement signifies.

We humans on the other hand have come to rely so much on verbal communication that we tend to forget how much information body language can really communicate.  This is especially true when working with horses.  We may not speak the same body language as horses, but they are masters at this stuff.  It doesn’t take long for them to learn a new language and start interpreting every move you make.  Because of this, we have to be keenly aware of what signals we give to our horses when we work with them. 

Horses’ ability to read and assign meaning to every move I make has caused me to develop a particular aspect of my horsemanship that as a human I wasn’t initially aware of, my attitude.  I’ve come to realize that my attitude is one of the most influential components of my communication with horses.  Now, I’m not talking about my own personal attitude and things like staying positive or being open minded.  This is more interpersonal than intrapersonal.  What I’m talking about is the attitude I convey to my horse.  Once again, horses are masters of body language and because of this they will pick up whatever attitude I convey. 

Of course, your attitude can negatively influence your horse’s behavior.  If I’m working with a horse that is excited and nervous about something, I am likely to get a little excited and nervous too.  Well guess what happens when I get excited and nervous in this situation.  My horse sees the way I’m acting and thinks to himself, “I knew there was something to be worried about!  This must be even worse than I thought.”  I just confirmed all of my horse’s fears, plus added to all that nervous energy that was already floating around.

 Fortunately, with a little practice you can learn to convey a different attitude in this same situation and affect your horse’s behavior in a positive way.  Whenever I’m working with a horse that is excited and nervous about something, I always try to behave in in a way that would be equivalent to asking my horse, “What are you so worried about?”  Now I may know that a particular situation is terribly frightening to a horse, but I don’t ever want to let him know that I know it’s scary to him.  I always want to send him the message that he is the only one who is excited and would probably be better off to just calm down like everyone else.  To help myself with this, I often find myself verbalizing the message I’m trying to convey.  I don’t do this because I think my horse understands what I’m saying, I do it because I’m a human and I best understand verbal communication and this will help me to say the things I want to say with my body.  I’m also not always aware that I’m doing it and I probably look like a crazy person when I do it.

This power of attitude is effective in many different situations and should be practiced in everything you do with your horse.  When I’m asking my horse to do something he thinks is difficult, for instance going over a jump for the first time, I want to have the attitude that this is really no big deal.  I want my horse to think that I’m not worried or excited about this and that I may not even really care about it.  It’s almost as though I’m saying to my horse, “Oh, is there something in the way?  I didn’t even notice.  I was simply asking you to go in a straight line in which a jump happened to be set up.”   On the inside, I might be all excited and hoping that he goes over the jump, but I don’t want to let him know this.  As far as he can tell I couldn’t be less excited about the jump.  This practice works when I’m giving a horse its first bath.  I act as though the water is such a non-issue that I’m not even aware of it.  I want her to think that the water just happened to spray her on the leg, not that I purposely intended for it to happen.  There’s no reason to be scared of it because nobody else is.  Of course, I will have the discretion not to spray her directly in the face right away, but if I accidentally do, I want to act like it was no big deal.

Make sure that when you work with your horse you remain aware of just how perceptive he is to your body language.  The most effective way to control your body language is to try to convey the attitude you want your horse to believe you have.  It isn’t necessarily easy, but you can do it if you just stay aware of it.  Good luck.