The Attentiveness of a Mother

   As I was talking with a mother, I noticed that I did not have her full attention. Her young son was playing in a room next to where we were talking. She was listening to me, but she was always aware of what her child was doing (as she should be). At times she would politely say, “excuse me”, and tend to her child’s needs at that time. This made me think of how our relationship with our horse should be.

  I have been around many people who stop paying attention to their horse, whether it is to talk with someone else or to just tune the world out. For example, a person might be talking with me while their horse is on a lead rope. The horse senses that the person is no longer paying attention and in the process of snagging a bite to eat, the horse jerks the person’s arm half off. The person then grumbles about how they can never get the horse to just stand, behave, and not eat.

  First of all, that horse was just doing what he thought was best for him at that time. Food always looks good to a horse. Our job is to support that horse in a way that convinces him that it would be better for him to stand quietly rather than eat. We should make not eating the easy thing for the horse to do and eating the difficult thing for the horse to do. The question that should be asked next is how difficult do you really have to make the situation in order to discourage your horse from eating? In other words, you don't want to make eating the impossible thing for the horse to do, but rather make eating just hard enough that it causes the horse to choose standing quietly over eating.

  If the person had been paying attention to the horse, the person would have recognized the horse’s desire to eat and would have been able to redirect the horse before the lead rope was jerked out of the hand. When we mentally leave our horses, whether it occurs on the ground or in the saddle, we open up opportunities for the horse to do things that are undesirable to us.

  If the mother I was talking to had not been paying attention to her child, the child would have found himself in trouble very quickly. And just like a mother has a great instinct for seeing a disaster before it happens, we to must train ourselves and put forth the effort to stay mentally connected to our horses if we want our horses to be successful in learning appropriate behaviors.