Training without doubt isn’t just about dealing with doubts that build up within our human minds as we train; it’s also about the doubt that our horses develop as they interact with us.
Do we really inspire trust between horse and human, or are our horse’s unrecognized doubts opening the door to miscommunication?
Horses trained without addressing their doubts, and the stressors that come with those doubts, often have holes in their training that make the horse appear difficult or ill-behaved.
In reality, they just don’t yet understand the whole “communicating with a human thing” in a way that makes them feel good and safe about human interaction.
My goal is to train in a way that doesn’t open the door for these growing levels of doubt to begin with. The idea is to create trust that sets horses up to succeed, rather than triggering escalating doubts that ultimately lead to failure.
In this article, I want to dig a little deeper into what creating doubt in horses looks like, and then how I would go about relieving those doubts to build trust for future communication and learning.
Build trust. Relieve doubts.
When you help a horse overcome doubt, trust is built.
When a person escalates doubt into stress, trust is lost.
Overcoming doubt relieves the stress initially created by it.
Escalating doubt creates similarly escalating stress which, when too much, creates trauma.
The idea is to build up more trust based interactions over a session rather than interactions that take trust away.
Work below a horse’s stress threshold
It’s hard to teach a stressed horse anything, so the goal is to relieve doubts rather than escalate them. This builds the trust needed to communicate without opening the door to trauma.
Horses have individual tipping points of stress — their threshold. Once enough stress builds up and teeters over the edge, they either blow up or shut down.
I aim to work below this threshold and relieve as much stress as possible before I move on to teaching new things, or into more stressful situations. It’s extremely hard for horses to learn, or retain anything taught, when in a state of panic, as seen when they barrel past their stress threshold.
When panicked, they enter the fight, flight or freeze side of their nature which isn’t set up to learn. It’s purpose is to help the horse survive.
Learning and thinking happens when that part of the brain is switched off, or relieved.
A relaxed, trustful horse learns better than a panicked, doubtful one.
Some doubt is natural
It goes without saying that natural doubt is bound to happen as we train, and open doors to communicate that were previously locked. But “manmade doubt” as I call it, is a mistrust built between horse and handler that pushes a horse towards the edge of their stress threshold.
It’s manmade in nature because horses wouldn’t have that doubt without our input.
An example of a horse doubting its human
Think of a sliding scale with Doubt on the left and Trust on the right then consider this scenario:
A horse has never been exposed to a halter before. Your goal is to put the halter on for the first time.
You approach the horse quickly and try to corner it with the halter. The horse avoids you and trots to the farthest corner of the pen. It doesn’t understand why you are chasing or what is in your hand. Is it dangerous? Are you dangerous?
The needle at the center of the sliding scale moves a step left towards Doubt.
You continue to chase the horse with the halter in hand. Each time you chase, the needle moves further left until it bottoms out. The horse begins to sweat, his eyes widen and he elevates his head.
He doesn’t understand the situation, feels like a prey animal on the run and has reached his stress threshold.
The horse has now associated the halter with stress, danger and being chased. Nothing was learned and the horse harbors manmade doubt as a result.
This is how horses become hard to catch and halter. These are the holes in training created by unrelieved doubts.
These are the feelings I aim to avoid creating as I try and teach a horse something new. I want to avoid these manmade doubts and instead work on enabling the needle to steadily move towards Trust.
How to train without doubt
Rather than chase the horse with the halter to get the task done, I simply try to get his ears on me instead.
This pushes him to think rather than react because it’s not an ever encroaching threat. I shake the halter without chasing. Every time he flicks an ear to me, I stop shaking the halter.
If he gets curious and takes a step towards me, I’ve just enabled the sliding scale to move towards Trust. I offered a stimulus and then the release of that stimulus. It didn’t hurt him or stress him out so he gained a small bit of trust to keep trying to investigate the thing in my hand.
I didn’t cause him overwhelming stress. I kept him below his stress threshold.
His continued curiosity will eventually allow the halter to go on — well, curiosity, built trust in me and consistent repetition.
I want to foster interactions like this one, and then build the rest of my communication around that newly discovered trust.
I want to train without the manmade doubt that developed as a result of chasing the horse into a state of flight.
It’s much easier to build trust steadily rather than push too hard and try to get trust back once lost.
Why train without doubt?
Horses who are pushed past stress thresholds do not learn well.
When in a stressed state, horses are in the fight, flight or freeze side of their brain and not the thinking side. They’re reactionary. Spooks, for example, are reactions, whereas slowly walking past a scary thing with ears pricked, alert — that’s thinking through a stimulus rather than just reacting to it.
Horses learn best when not stressed. They’re safer to be around, too.
Horses who are pushed past stress thresholds often build trauma through association which can be challenging to undo.
The horse in the first half of the sliding scale scenario likely associated the halter with hardship, and so, will actually be harder to catch rather than easier.
By not allowing doubt to build up between myself and my horse, I’m promoting positive communication rather than the stressful interactions that make a horse less willing, or able, to learn.
Setbacks
Setbacks are expected. It’s not easy to get communication right every single time. That’s why I think of this process as a sliding scale.
Some days, you’ll gain a few ticks of doubt but what’s important is that you are able to recover a few ticks of trust by the end of the session. Trust must overcome the doubt created. End on a good note. Balance the scale.
Go back to basics. Do something the horse already knows and understands. Reinforce his trust with something you know he isn’t inclined to doubt.
To wrap up
I transitioned from a “just get it done” mindset to more of a “keep stress below the threshold to build trust” mindset because I realized it’s easier to build trust steadily from the get-go, rather than struggle to get lost trust back.
I try to communicate and train my horses without opening the door to escalating doubts. I only expose them to more stressful situations when I know they have a solid foundation of trust built with me, and also a solid foundation of training to help deal with those more challenging scenarios.
Everyone has their own preferred methods of training. This just happens to be the one that works best for me and my horses. It takes from multiple horse minds out there and mixes nicely into a principle that gets the job done for me and my moral compass.
That’s the beauty of continued learning and benefitting from the knowledge and wisdom of others. I hope that some tidbit in this article benefits you as you figure out your path towards what works best for you and your horses.
Keep the curiosity alive — Elle