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Re: [RC] Did I Understand You Correctly? - Maryanne Gabbani

When I started training my herd to work with dumb tourists, I took about 5 years to teach the horses that they had to stop at the side of a road to watch for traffic before crossing, they had to slow down to a walk or trot for children, poultry and livestock on the trail, and that about a million and one things were not any reason to spook. I knew that I would be depending on the minds of my horses to take care of a bunch of people who didn't have a clue, so I wanted to be sure that their minds were okay.

They still get schooled on the trails to remind them of traffic rules and manners. But on the whole, I really rely on a bunch of very nice equines to take care of a lot of people who tell me that they know a lot more about riding than they do.

Maryanne
Giza

My late husband had exactly this objection (large moveable creature with a mind of its own) to riding and for some reason found sitting a number of feet off the ground in front of a bunch of dials and switches in an airplane cockpit relaxing. To each his own, but my creatures tend to take better care of me than his plane did of him.


On Jul 29, 2006, at 8:49 AM, k s swigart wrote:

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.



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