"If any of my horses is not expecting a leg cue and I bump them with my leg, odds are there will be no response to the first one. The problem arises, and problem is actually too strong a word as it is not that hard to adjust for.. the problem arises when I am doing something where a leg cue or shift in balance IS an expected part of the activity."There are two very interesting things revealed by this comment, both of which I think can be affected significantly by training. Over the last couple of years, my trainer has actively worked with me at trying to improve these particular issues.
I think they are root causes of lots of problems people have with their horses in non-rote performance situations. (calf branding, cutting, mounted combat, polo, cross-country, team penning and sorting, etc as opposed to rote situations like reining or dressage test patterns, barrel racing, gymkhana, etc.)
"If any of my horses is not expecting a leg cue and I bump them with my leg, odds are there will be no response to the first one. "If your horse isn't listening, he absolutely won't "hear" you even if you're "loud" with your cues... or if he does, he'll be surprised and act startled rather than responsive. But you can teach your horse to be "always listening". You can also lead your horse into a "listening mood" if he's not paying attention on a given day.
Horses wind up not listening for several reasons, among them:
- if other stuff going on is more interesting than you are
- if they think they already know what you're going to do
- if they think that all you ever say to them is meaningless noise.
- if your cues are always "big"
- if they are unconfident and are looking for support from somewhere other than you
If your horse is mostly good about listening to you but sometimes just "isn't into it" or "isn't paying attention" you can lead them into it by putting them through some warmup exercises that help focus their attention. For example, Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman have a couple of different exercises they have had us go through to really focus and bring horse and rider together. One is to ride very tight serpentines at a walk, overbending in each direction so that they are more like s-shaped snaketrails rather than serpentines. When you start, one 's' might be 30 feet long but you slowly tighten it up so that by the time you get to the end of the arena, an 's' might be 4 or 5 feet long. If you can do this with a soft rein, asking less and less each time to get the same bend, by the time you hit the end of the arena, your horse will be listening very intently to you. The idea isn't to overdo the suppling but to progressively refine how subtly you are communicating and how carefully your horse is listening back to you.
Similarly, you can do a rockinghorse exercise where you ride ten steps then back ten steps, then ride nine and back nine and so forth until you are going one step forward and one step back. Do this once or twice, focusing on getting lighter and lighter on the rein with each request and your horse will be listening intently by the time you reach one.
At one point, Jack and I were struggling a little with how easily he would accept the snaffle when I was bridling him. When I asked my trainer for help in refining my technique in getting him to accept the bit, Bonnie first had me work him for about ten minutes on just a leadrope, asking him to "cut the pie" around me: from standing facing me, I'd ask him to partially circle and then stand in another position and I'd be very particular, not satisfied until his feet were in *exactly* the position I had desired. We worked our way through various time positions on the "clock". After about ten minutes of this his attention was focused on moving his feet very precisely and listening closely to what I wanted. Then we went back to bridling and immediately were able to work through eight or ten repetitions of putting on and taking off the bridle in a smooth manner because he was listening and going with me instead of against me.
"The problem arises when I am doing something where a leg cue or shift in balance IS an expected part of the activity. "One of our trainer's "hobby horses" is in getting horses to not just do what you ask of them, but to get their brain working with you, actively trying to figure out what you want and what the best answer to the problems in front of them is. She consciously tries to frame her lessons in terms of setting up a problem for the horse to solve and then waiting as the horse works out the answer rather than providing the answer for him or "pushing" him through it. "Fix it up and wait" is the mantra. She only steps in when the horse isn't going to be able to make it or when it would help to raise the energy level a little so that the horse can be successful.
Not only does it keep things more interesting for the horse and help reinforce the idea that it's important to pay attention and listen closely so he doesn't miss anything, but it also teaches the horse that what's going on is a conversation and he's a thinking part of it, not just the recipient of a stream of orders. There are lots of hip terms for what's going on... "Willing Partners", etc. But the bottom line is that reasoning is a habit in all animals as is complacency and dullness. And if they have the reasoning habit, they are an awful lot better at figuring out what you really want, even when you're presenting mixed cues.
There are lots of ways to get this going, too.
Some of the simplest ones involve getting your horse to shift its weight. If you want your horse to learn to move it's foot at a certain time, you could take the approach of cuing him, then putting pressure on him until he does it. Or, instead... you could put your horse almost-but-not-quite off-balance and then ask for the cue and wait. The horse knows you want something and it will start trying to figure out what, trying different things. Since it's off-balance, the first thing it might try would be shifting its foot to regain balance, giving what you want so you can reward not only the correct action but the process of figuring it out as well.
Another good, simple one is to take your lead rope and wrap it around your horse's butt so your horse is "wound up" in it. Then step back and put a small amount of pressure on the leadrope and wait. Eventually your horse will figure it out and "unwind" himself, following the feel of the rope around in a circle until he faces you again. This exercise can be used to get a lot of other good things going too, but it's definitely a good example of using "fix it up and wait" to encourage your horse to puzzle out what you want him to do.
Sometimes a horse just isn't willing to figure things out. ("Doesn't have much try".) You often see this in horses that have been used as schooling horses for low-level dressage or have been "overtrained". You may never again recover the life in these horses they once had but you can often get some improvement by instead of waiting for the horse to successfully do what you asked, you instead reward any slightest try. For example, when you ask a dull horse to step the forehand to the left, maybe all you get is a skin twitch on his neck. Rewarding that lavishly even though it wasn't what you wanted and trying again might earn you a flick of the left ear on the next ask, and you can slowly build from there. You aren't just getting the horse to do what you want, you're teaching him that trying is worth something and that not all answers are easy but that figuring it out is worth the effort.
By the same token, our trainer will sometimes reward "the wrong thing" when the horse does it because the horse went through a thinking process to figure it out. She's not rewarding the wrong action, she's first validating the thinking process and then on subsequent attempts getting more and more particular that it end in the *right* action. The result is the horse is more likely to try next time and is more likely to get it right because it's finding value in thinking about what it's doing instead of just reacting.
