In the blog, horse issues separating symptoms from the root cause, the number 3 root cause that I talked about is lack of respect. I put a link to that blog here, if you’d like to go back and read it.
In this blog, we’re going to talk about how a lack of respect shows itself in your horse’s behavior.
In a lot of ways, this root cause, lack of respect, can be the most dangerous of all.
Think about it from your horse’s perspective. You’re taking away all of his natural responses of flight or fight and asking him to put all his trust into you and the decisions that you are making on his behalf.
You’re asking your horse to put his life in your hands, from his perspective, and all the decisions that are made are up to you as the rider. If you have not demonstrated to him that you’re capable of making good decisions on his behalf, and shown him good leadership skills, then he is going to show you a lack of respect in response to his fear for the inappropriate decisions that you have made on his behalf in the past.
If you have a boss that has shown that he cannot make good decisions, how comfortable would you be putting your life into his hands
If you have not shown good leadership skills with your horse, that is exactly the position that you are putting your horse into.
This is the hardest of the three root causes for people to accept. People do not want to accept the fact that they are the cause of their horse’s actions, especially by admitting that their horse has no confidence in their decisions.
It’s much easier to train a horse than it is to train ourselves as horse owners to make better decisions. We get set in our ways, and we decide that we are doing what’s best for our horse when actually, if we were on the outside looking in, it would be obvious that we were making poor decisions.
If your horse is exhibiting behavior that can include pinning his ears at you, making you move your feet, not leading well, and many other actions of dominance towards you, then the most likely root cause of the behavior your horse having a lack of respect for your decisions.
If you’re getting responses like that from your horse, then you have to analyze every way that you are interacting with your horse, right down from the beginning when you walk into the barn and make initial a contact.
Horse’s behaviors are a direct response to how we interact within them. Every action that we do causes a reaction from the horse, those reactions might be something positive that we want or something negative that we do not want.
Some people seem to be natural leaders and easily gain a horse’s trust in their decisions, and some people need to work a little harder at it. It is our responsibility, if we are not a natural leader, to work harder on ourselves to become the leader that our horse needs us to be.
Being a leader does not mean being mean or abusive. You would not want to put your life into the hands of an abusive person. It is your responsibility to be the leader that your horse wants to put his life in the control of. That is a good leader!
Once you learn how to become the leader that your horse wants to put his life into the hands of, everything else with your relationship with your horse will become better.
Your horse will draw confidence and courage and all kinds of other positive attributes from your good leadership.
There’s a saying that goes something like if you love something, set it free and if it comes back it’s yours. When your relationship with your horse reaches the point where you are the leader that your horse needs you to be, and your relationship reaches that point, then your horse chooses you, and then he is your horse, and you are his human.
We should always be striving to become the leader that our horse needs us to be. We need that and our horse needs that. When you become that, then you truly have your horse as a partner.
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