Developing trust between two beings is the foundation of an ongoing relationship. When one being is human and the other animal, then communication is the cornerstone to building that trust.
“Where there is trust
in a relationship, there is
a sense of safety.”
For many of us, our equestrian life is a vocation, a lifestyle. It’s so much more than a hobby, an interest, or a sport. The rhythm of our lives is determined by our horses’ needs: We get up in the morning and feed up before breakfast. We prepare our own dinner after our horses are safely bedded down for the night. It is the love of the horse, and our special relationship with them, that motivates us universally, whatever style of saddle we choose, whatever the rules of our chosen discipline, whatever the monetary value of our “fur babies”. We want to have good relationship with our horse.
What are the qualities of a good relationship? Trust is pretty important. It is a foundation for the relationship to develop. Trust comes from the partner (human) firstly being consistent and predictable, and secondly, having compassion or care and concern for the other (horse). Some researchers have called this benevolence. Thirdly, the partner (human) being able to communicate this to the other (horse); and fourthly, the partner being competent in regard to shared activities.
Where there is trust in a relationship, there is a sense of safety between partners. You can see that this is reciprocal. The horse develops trust in the rider, and the rider develops trust in the horse. Trust in the relationship is tested in many ways. Perhaps high-level eventing is one of the best examples of a dangerous activity where the horse must trust the rider to ask questions he can answer, and the rider must trust the horse to be able to answer the questions she poses.
There are many other examples. In a day’s hunting, the horse goes across unknown, unprepared terrain at speed, the show horse or dressage horse enters the charged atmosphere of the big arena, the showjumper allows the rider to control the canter to prepare for the big jumps. The trail horse goes across the bridge or through the puddles. I am sure that you can alI think of a horse that you trusted, and think about how your trust developed in him.
All of these four qualities can be applied to the relationship we have with our horse. We can build trust by being consistent in how we behave around him, for example, daily handling, routine with meals, and moving around the horse in a way that does not startle or frighten him. We cannot expect him to trust us if we use punishment inappropriately, or if we frighten him or hurt him. If he bites and we hit him across the head and frighten him, he will have cause to not trust us. If, however, we speak sharply to him, and push him on the chest to move him backwards, we can have consistent expectations of him — for example, in staying a certain distance away from us when being led, moving off the leg immediately, or jumping the obstacle the first time etc. If we are consistent in our expectations of him and communicate clearly to him, he is likely to be much more relaxed because he knows what to do.
“The horse must feel able
to make a mistake and not be
afraid to make a mistake.”
Of course, we must have compassion and benevolence for our horses in caring for them and meeting their daily needs. The horse must feel able to make a mistake and not be afraid to make a mistake. Our benevolence should be expressed by patient and kind training, rewarding the correct answer, and generally avoiding punishment for honest mistakes. Remember that the horse has no capacity for the kind of reasoning that we sometimes attribute to him when we think that maybe he deliberately does the wrong thing in order to annoy us. He cannot think about how we would think.
We can communicate to our horses mainly by our actions. Just because the horse does not have the sophisticated language centres in his brain that we have doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have sophisticated ways to communicate, both receptive and expressive communication. We can pause when we see signs of stress, for example, the head raised, or attempts to move away. The horse seems to have a high sensitivity to communication by use of posture, movement, and vocal intonation and prosody.
Just think about those zebras on the savannah who graze peacefully with the lions, until the lioness changes her posture and movement to that of a hunter. We can use his ability to read our body language to let him know that we notice his discomfort and slow down. We can let him know that we notice and care about his discomfort in being girthed up by slowing down and rubbing him where he likes it, then working towards the ticklish areas, rewarding his tolerance of touch where he doesn’t like it by then scratching his favourite spot and moving back and forth between the uncomfortable spot and the comfortable spot, until he accepts it more willingly.
“When we are riding we also
communicate to him generally by
pressure and release of pressure.”
Reward him when he allows the girth to be slowly tightened, rather than just ignore his experience and just plonk the saddle on and do it up tight. We can let him know that we have noticed discomfort (tail switching, head raised, tension around the lips and eyes) when we come too close to a rarely handled youngster by backing off to where he is comfortable and approaching again slowly, backing off as soon as he shows us he isn’t comfortable. There is recent evidence that a horse can read the emotions on a human face, and other researchers have looked at the horse’s facial expression. Horses and humans have myelinated (insulated, fast) ventral vagus nerves that control the muscles of the face and voice and are implicated in the survival response of connect.
When we are riding we also communicate to him generally by pressure and release of pressure. He does what we ask and we soften our hand or our leg. We ask him to stop by pulling the rein or bracing our core, and when he stops we communicate to him that he did the right thing by softening the hand and relaxing.
Competence can be thought of as the skills we need to efficiently achieve the performance we seek. This includes knowledge, skills, behaviour and judgement. For example, riders need to be competent in maintaining a consistent contact with the bit in order to help the horse understand the signals of the reins. The jumping rider needs to be competent in regard to his balance to allow the horse to trust that if he jumps an obstacle he won’t suffer the discomfort of the rider using the reins to support his balance and pull uncomfortably on his mouth. It doesn’t matter how much you love your horse, if you are unable to maintain reasonable balance you are likely to cause him discomfort or pain and he may find it harder to trust you when you are riding him.
I have had the opportunity to ask some adventurous people how they decide who to trust when they are vulnerable travellers, for example, alone in remote India with no local language, or in Mongolia or a war zone. It is interesting that people describe knowing who to trust or not by a process of analysis and logic, but much more by intuition; by a feeling in their gut. Of course, a horse has very little capacity for logical analysis. He has virtually no pre-frontal cortex, the big protruding part of our brains behind our forehead that we use for analysis and logic. However, he has a prodigious capacity for intuition, mediated though the deep and old brain structures of the limbic system.
“Achieving relaxation of
the horse is one of the
holy grails of horse training.”
Where there is trust there is also a reciprocal sense of safety between the partners. The horse trusts that human and the human trusts the horse. I think that a sense of safety in relationships is extremely important; this is especially important for a flight animal such as a horse. A horse who feels unsafe will have his survival defence activated and be ready to run away. A horse in survival mode is not relaxed and will not learn. Achieving relaxation of the horse is one of the holy grails of horse training. Predator animals such as dogs learn when they are stimulated; prey animals such as the horse learn when they are relaxed.
Over the last few decades many leading horsemen (and women) have told us that we should see ourselves as the leader of our horse herd. This idea applies even if there is just you and your horse and not an actual herd. Proponents of so-called “natural horsemanship” have promoted this concept vigorously. In nature, the horse lives in a herd and so humans should apply the principles of the herd to horsemanship. So they say.
However, there is a more fundamental way to understand the relationship we have with the horse, and that is as an attachment relationship. For all mammals, the first and primary relationship is with the mother. We call this an attachment relationship. Baby mammals have a biologically determined bond to their mothers the moment they are born. She is the source of nourishment and protection. She makes the world safe for the baby. The mother is, of course, reciprocally bonded to her baby. This reciprocal bond is absolutely necessary for the survival of the newborn. Mammal babies need milk. They are born pretty defenceless and are dependent on adults of their species to look after them in order to survive. The hormone oxytocin that is essential for milk production is also is very important in the establishment and maintenance of any loving bond. When we look at someone, including our horse, with love, it stimulates oxytocin and gives us a good feeling.
I believe that thinking about the relationship we have with our horses as an attachment relationship, where we function more like a mother than the leader of a herd, offers a better model for understanding how we can help our horses be secure in a relationship with us where we facilitate trust by being sensitive, contingent, reciprocal, in attunement, in support of exploration, and welcoming the horse’s need for connection. EQ
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Kerry Mack discusses attachment theory in more detail.
