When and When Not to Do The Opposite Of What Your Horse Wants To Do

The Principle
One of the innate characteristics of a horse is that they quickly learn to anticipate things. So if everytime you mount your horse, you immediately squeeze him to start off, pretty soon he’ll anticipate this and start to take off as you are mounting him. If on the other hand, everytime you mount your horse, you sit there for a minute or two and pet him before you ask him to move out, he’ll stand there after you mount and wait for you to ask him to move out. This same characteristic allows us to get really light responses from our horses. If everytime you ask your horse to move out, you first just slightly lean forward with upper body (the prep cue), and if you get no response you squeeze lightly (the ask cue), then cluck (another ask cue) and finally, if you get no response you tap with a crop or rein or leg (the insist cue), pretty soon your horse anticipates the insist cue and starts to move out on the ask cue. Pretty soon, your horse anticipates the ask cue and starts to move out on the prep cue. Once you and your horse really tune into each other, you can refine this prep cue to an almost imperceptible movement of your upper body and off you go.

The Practice
So if your horse drops his shoulder and cuts out of your circle by the gait back to the barn, what do you do? You Do The Opposite Of What Your Horse Wants To Do. You immediately turn your horse sharply into the circle, cross the center to the other end of the circle and continue on around. After a number of repetitions of this, your horse anticipates that you are going to turn sharply in at the barn gait and stops dropping his shoulder and heading outward there. You do the opposite thing if your horse is cutting in. You turn him out sharply or even counterbend him into an outward small circle once before continuing on.

So when don’t you Do The Opposite Of What Your Horse Wants To Do?

One situation is if your horse is doing something out of fear. If your horse is shying away from a corner of the arena, i.e., bending his body in an arc away from the scary object and travelling into the center of the circle, you do not want to do the opposite, i.e., you do not want to i) prevent him from counterbending or ii) force him to bend or arc on the correct diagonal in the scary corner. Doing so will increase the adrenalin and fear your horse is building up over the scary object and may cause him to invert, buck or bolt. The right thing to do in this situation is to Make Your Horse’s Idea Your Idea. Go with his bend. Change your posting diagonal to help him feel balanced and thus more relaxed. This lets him know that you, as his leader, are aware of the fearful situation, tuned into his fearful feelings and are making decisions that will keep him safe and comfortable.

Similarly, if your horse has lots of energy (nervous or otherwise), wants to go and won’t stand still, it is very difficult to do the opposite and ask him to stand still. It’s not going to happen. Again, Make Your Horse’s Idea Your Idea by redirecting this energy into an exercise that takes a lot of impulsion. Then it’s a win/win situation.

What got me thinking about this was that I was giving a lesson the other day, and the girl had a horse that lacked a degree of respect. So, although we spent 15-20 minutes on ground exercises designed to gain some respect, the issue certainly wasn’t resolved before she got on to ride. So once in awhile, her horse decided she wasn’t going to listen to her cues to turn to the right but became quite head strong in trying to turn to the left instead. Now, although the horse’s body language in some respects resembled a horse that was fearful – i.e., head up, inverted, eyes wide, ears and mouth tight and fixed and became more so as we insisted that she turn to the right, her resistant behavior was primarily lack of respect rather than fear. So we did The Opposite of What Your Horse Wants To Do. She had a pretty good discussion going with her horse but did not get into an argument. The key here is, if you think that by doing The Opposite Of What Your Horse Wants To Do is going to lead into an argument that chances are you’re not going to win, then the best idea is to be pro-active, anticipate the situation before it happens and avoid it. In this situation, keeping a shorter right rein that blocks an unwanted left turn would prevent your horse from getting the idea in the first place or at least prevent your horse from getting so much counterbend in his neck so as to give you real problems in getting his head and neck (and eventually his feet) to come to the right. (As an aside, I teach never to pull a horses head, only pick up and allow your horse to follow a feel. In this situation however, with a horse that is demonstrating a lack of respect and wants to take off with you, a nice steady constant pressure is not going to cut it. You have to pull/release, pull/release in a smooth rhythmical manner using as little pull as required but as much as necessary to get the job done in short order. You want to end this type of discussion as quickly as possible before it turns into an argument.

Knowing what to do is sometimes a tricky business.

Make Your Horse’s Idea Your Idea vs Make Your Idea Your Horse’s Idea

I was giving a lesson the other day on the one rein stop and the lady’s horse, although calm and relaxed, had excess energy and wanted to immediately go (without being asked) after being stoppped and released. The tendency here would be to pick up the reins again and ‘hold’ the horse in order to prevent him from going forward. But this breaks the principle of ‘Let Your Horse Take Responsibilty to Stay in the Same Gate, Direction and Frame.’ If you persists in taking this responsibility away from your horse, they will forever be heavy in the bridle and require constant aides for their impulsion and body alignment or frame.

In this situation, what I’d like to do is ‘Make Your Idea Your Horse’s Idea’ by forgetting about the one rein stop for the time being and converting the horse’s excess negative energy (for the one rein stop) into a positive energy used for performing a suppling exercises such as tight circles asking for lateral and vertical flexion and then serpentines at the trot. Since this is a fairly gymnastic exercise where horses tend to break down to the walk, it would be great to not have to use any leg to keep the horse going and one could just concentrate on the supplying responses rather than impulsion. Once the horse showed signs that he wanted to break to the walk, then I we would switch over to the one rein stop exercise where most likely the horse would stay stopped after being released. In other words, the principle of ‘Make Your Idea Your Horse’s Idea’ put into practice. So we would then have accomplished two things without much resistance about either.

But the lady didn’t feel confident trotting out her horse just yet so I decided to ‘Adjust to Fit the Horse and the Situation’ by instructing her to release her horse from the one rein stop, and just before her horse prepared to walk off, ask (squeeze, cluck, spank) her horse to walk off thus putting into practice ‘Make Your Horse’s Idea Your Idea’. We did this and after 5 minutes or so, the horse was waiting 3-5 seconds before it started to walk off. So the horse was learning to wait for the rider’s decision and learning the principle of ‘Let Your Horse Take Responsibilty to Stay in the Same Gate, Direction and Frame.’