I don't operate under the assumption that horses have no other motivation than waiting to please. By the same token I don't believe that they lay awake at night trying to figure out how to stymie me, either. ;-)
What I have learned, from some extraordinary horsemen, is that horses are, by nature, social creatures and inclined to want to get along. It is not necessary to be a clicker trainer to have this philosophy!
I do believe that I am most successful when I assume that if the horse knew what I wanted and he believed he was able to do it--he'd be doing it. I don't believe that some horses are looking to dominate me. I do believe that even the surliest horse would prefer to 'get along' if only he could see his way clear to that end. It is just more peaceful and horses are designed by nature to prefer to live in harmony. Better to see the lion that way.
In my opinion, horses don't just argue for the sake of arguing, as people do! ;-) Horses would prefer to get along. If a horse is fighting me then he must feel that he is at risk some how and needs to fight. My job is to eliminate that worry from his mind and set him up for success. When the horse realizes how easy it is to be successful he'll start saying, 'oh well then why didn't you say so in the first place'. Therein is the 'lightbulb' moment I seek.
The hardest cases are those horses who have gotten into the habit of fighting. It is like they don't know any other way. These are the ones who need things chunked down yet even more and often times coming in a 'back door' with clicker training can at least open them up to the possibility of things going a different way. I have a particularly surly Dutch WB stallion in mind when I say this. He'd totally learned to put up a fight in a "I'll get them before they get me" kind of way and people believed that they needed whips and chains in order to control him. Very sad really.
But his last owner (after a string of owners) decided that just being 'better than the other guy' (in traditional handling) wasn't going to be enough to change this guy's way of thinking. Although she may have made some mistakes (being new to clicker training) the fact was when the door was opened the horse realized that these people were actually trying to communicate with him his entire demeanor changed. It brought tears to my eyes more than once to discover that this horse, who'd endured so much pain, was really inside a smart, sweet, extremely sensitive horse who really did want to get along--if he only knew how.
So while I don't believe that horses just wait around benignly waiting to please me, if I operate under the assumption that "he would if he could" and make it my mission to figure out how to show the horse the way to success, then I'm a lot more successful. While my eyes were opened to this as a result of learning about clicker training it has resulted in a major paradigm shift in all of my interactions with horses no matter whether it involves clicker training DIRECTLY or not.
And that was a very powerful revelation!
|