Horse Training

Recently, someone asked me "What do YOU define as training?  Are lessons and training the same thing or different things to you?"  Since my answer is sort of conventional for the cantankerous, vaquero-tradition-inspired crowd, I thought I'd share it here...

•  Every time you reach for your horse for any reason, you're doing it "with quality" which means offering a good feel and expecting a clean response and coaching/teaching/supporting/working with your horse until you get what you asked for.

There is no separate "teaching" activity any more than as humans we have a discrete "learning" activity.  It's continuous and you have little choice about it since you can't exactly tell your horse to pay no attention to your actions when you don't happen to be in training mode at the moment.  Your horse is going to learn from everything you do whether you like it or not.

Parents whose children have cheerfully  burbled some overheard cussword inappropriately in front of strangers know the truth of this.

• "Lessons" are when someone else teaches you something about how to work with your horse.

• "Horse Training" is what people call it when they get money for something they do related to horses, whether it does the horse any good or not.  "Trainers" are the people who get the money for what they do.  The "Horse" is the target of the exercise... and sometimes the beneficiary.