Do not forget why we came to have a domestic relationship with horses, and
that as intelligent animals horses have a capacity to learn.
1. As I have mentioned before, read Stephen Budiansky's books: "The Nature
of Horses", and "The Covenant of the Wild". These books detail why the
inherent nature of horses as herd animals allowed them to become domestic
animals. Their social organization, and body language was an absolute
requirement for the change in their status from wild animals to domestic
partners with humans. This partnership has been beneficial to both
species.
2. Horses are intelligent. They can and do learn foreign languages. Human
is one of them. Young horses are born with some instinctive knowledge of horse
communication, but have to learn much of it. If you don't believe this, put a
horse that was raised alone into a herd. I boarded a horse for a couple of
years that had only been with its mother and then had been alone in a pasture
for 5 years. Every morning she would try to steal food from the herd boss. He
would give her ears. She would ignore him. He would then turn around and give
her both hind feet in the side or rump. She would then move off and sulk. The
next morning it was the same thing. She had not had a chance to learn how to
be polite at the critical age, and never did get it. I was very happy when she
moved on
It is easiest to teach a horse to respect humans and human language, if the
human tries to make his language and requests as close to the herd leader as
possible.
I really agree with this, but my experience (limited to a
small bachelor band) is that the herd relationships are much more complicated
than what most people think of when they hear the term "pecking order".
My horses all get along very well, but the leader is not the horse that gets
the food first or even the horse that wants to get the food first. The
leader (the horse that the others want to be around and will follow anywhere)
is the diplomatic horse, who gets his way through persistance rather than
force.
Mark Rashid describes this kind of leadership in several of
his books.
