Bad Pony

“Oh, she’s so naughty.” “My horse is so bad, he always bucks at the canter.” “The horse needs discipline; it’s too hard to catch.” “That horse needs to respect you and stop bolting.”

All those views have one thing in common: they are entirely anthropocentric. They ascribe human views and emotions to equine behavior.

Stop.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Gee, I’d like to be unfair to my horse today. Maybe confuse my body language cues with a side of incorrect pressure release.” But we all do it. Not on purpose, but accidentally. And like little drops of water, eventually small errors lead to big problems.

One day your mare is wiggly at the mounting block, so, impatient to ride, you hold the reins a little tighter and swing aboard. The next day, more wiggle, more tension needed to hold her still. Eventually the mare is spinning away from mounting blocks and someone has to hold her. That goes on, and then one day she bucks you off.

Why?

Escalating errors. Fear, confusion, possibly pain from her now bruised mouth and soreness from her now tense back under what used to be a well-fitted saddle.

Now it’s a “bad horse.” She needs a cowboy to teach her some respect. The cowboy is strong and has good timing, and can get the horse to submit to pressure more effectively than you can. The horse stands at the mounting block.

Problem solved!

…for a while. Several months go by, and the mare is obedient. But slowly her mounting issue creeps back, because the horse has not been trained, only forced into learned helplessness (resistance is futile) or flooded with sensory overload to the point where she reacts to nothing.

The horse in this hypothetical scenario is not bad. She is simply not able to understand from her handler that she needs to still her feet for mounting. She is now lacking the necessary skills, if they were ever correctly trained in the first place.

The mare needs her sore back and the bruises in her mouth to heal. She needs to learn to stand quietly with her handler in all scenarios, not just for mounting. The vet should be called; perhaps the root of the problem is some arthritis, leading to pain and anxiety over riding in general. Once all these issues are eliminated, the horse can be taught to stand to mount. And her rider needs to be taught how to correctly ask her to be still.

Listen to your horse. What is unclear, what hurts? WHY are they “bad?”

Even the angriest, most dangerous horses are what they are because someone made them that way.

Horses do horse things, and we have to learn to hear what they are saying before asking them to come into our world.