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Re: [RC] Did I Understand You Correctly? - k s swigartFrom: <Trailrite@xxxxxxx> Well, I've seen horses that will try to do exactly what your talking about. They loose in the end of course. Rope them down, put war bridles on them, throw them on the ground, drug them, spur them, put gag bits in their mouths, etc., etc. You get the picture. Humans have the use of tools over the horses will power. So I would say that horses on the norm do not have a choice. I have seen plenty of these horses too. And while I will agree that there are some horses that choose to let these methods engender some form of compliance, the ones _I_ see are the ones on whom none of these methods worked (for many people, I am a "last resort" trainer). There are some horses who would die before they complied with this kind of request (and many of them do, since these are the ones that get sold on until they end up at the killer, or do fatal injury to themselves in their resistance). I even have one that will resist drugs. And when people try many of these methods on horses, it makes many of them MORE resistant rather than less. I had one "cowboy" trainer who said that he had about a 50% success rate with these methods (the ones that it didn't work on, he didn't waste his time with, he just shot them and ate them). If horses didn't have choices, none of these methods would be necessary. In fact, if horses had no choices they wouldn't need to be trained at all, you could just take them out of the box and wind them up and they would operate according to the manual. If horses didn't have choices, there wouldn't be any such thing as a "problem" horse. Problem horses are those that exercise their choices in such a way as to displease their handlers. What horse training is ALL about (whether you understand the concept or not) is teaching the horse to make the choices that you desire. We, as humans, have lots of tools at our disposal to aid us in teaching horses this (including some tools that make it really uncomfortable for the horse not to make those choices). But there is no getting around it. If you want a horse to do what you want it to, you have to make it so it is what the horse wants too so that the horse chooses what you want. It is a common training mantra, "your horse has a mind of its own." And I know plenty of non-horsemen who are non-horsemen for this very reason. These people FULLY understand that to clamber up on the back of a horse is to put yourself totally at the mercy of that horse (and consequently think that anybody who is willing to do it is insane:)). As long as you are on a horse's back, you are going to go exactly where that horse goes. And that horse is going to go where its mind tells it to...or where it ends up accidentally. The only way you can affect the movement of a horse is to affect the horse's mind. I SUPPOSE you could get the horse to go someplace other than where it chooses to go by trying to get the horse to fall there accidentally, but I don't recommend it :). The fact that a horse has a mind of its own and retains the ability to make choices is, in fact, encoded in the law in many states. Many states have what are called "equine liability laws" which recognize that riding/handling horses is inherently risky because horses are unpredictable. The reason that horses are unpredictable is that they have the ability to make choices independent of the will of their handlers, and as long as they are sentinent, they always will. These equine liability laws recognize that there is NO way to get around this. We as humans can do all kinds of things (and some humans do some pretty unpleasant things) in an attempt to affect the choices that horses make. But unless we kill them, they will always retain their power to choose. Many (most???) of them choose to comply, and most of those that don't end up dead (or their owners call me :)). However, if the only way that you can garner enough courage to clamber up on your horse is to con yourself into thinking that your horse has no say in where he is going or what he is doing, go right ahead and think that. Your horse (because he is good natured) will probably let you get away with it. Personally, I prefer to try to figure out how to affect my horses' choices. Since I know they are gonna be making them. kat Orange County, Calif. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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