Don’t we all just want a stable life?

Creating personal balance has always been a challenge for me. As a  “type A” personality, my free energy was spent on work, work, more work and a parade of all-encompassing hobbies, activities that maintained my interest until I “mastered” them, at which point I became bored and gave them up.

I struggled to find that grand passion, something that would give me focus and be a counter-point to a world increasingly filled with busyness and materialism.

For me, the lifelong passion is Equus ferus caballus, the domesticated horse, and they are the only interest that has never waned. Although I didn’t understand it at the beginning, horses are mirrors of people, and they reflect what is good and bad about us. A distracted person will create a distracted horse. An unhappy person will create an unhappy horse.

In fact, the horse’s changing nature requires lifelong understanding, commitment and focus.  Large and powerful, every interaction with a horse is a unique experience because they are exceedingly responsive to the emotional and physical energies of their human partners. I think of them as fur-lined meditation!

Forging a meaningful partnership with a horse requires letting go of outside distraction, maintaining positive energy and staying focused on the needs of the horse at all times. Every moment with a horse is an opportunity to listen and learn. Accomplishing the smallest task with a horse strengthens personal focus and confidence, and it provides excellent life lessons for dealing with other challenging life situations. Happily, the ability to focus and control personal energy – under all circumstances – spills into all areas of your life, helping to create that stable life that we all want.

Susan

Can it be this simple? Clicker training – or positive reinforcement for desired behavior – traces back to the 1980s and dolphin training. As a training tool, clicker training  stands in direct contrast to virtually all horse training methods, which use negative reinforcement… or mostly negative…  reinforcement to train horses.

Years ago, I had dallied with the idea of rewards-based training, but I was dissuaded from its use after speaking to Anouk, a burgundy-haired trick rider who performed a liberty horse act for the circus. Very familiar with animal training, she had nothing good to say about positive reinforcement techniques. “We do not use  methods that give treats,” she emphasized, “because in the circus, the animal must ALWAYS perform the trick, whether they are hungry or not.” Positive reinforcement could never be relied upon, she insisted, only negative reinforcement.

To be sure, negative reinforcement has been the dominant training method used with horses. If the trainer wants the horse to move back, for example, she applies pressure to its chest, immediately easing up on the pressure as the horse steps back. If she wants the horse to move to the side, she applies pressure to the side, releasing it as soon as the horse moves away. The metal bit applies pressure to the mouth, and as soon as the horse responds with the correct head/neck flexion, the pressure is removed. Until very recently, almost every horse trainer (including most so-called natural trainers) used negative reinforcement, applying physical or psychological pressure to the horse, and stopping the pressure as soon as the horse performed the desired behavior.

So what changed my perception of positive reinforcement? A friend, Karen Jones, rescued a badly abused Lipizzan/Andalusian gelding, and she found that traditional training methods did little to overcome his severe fear and extreme emotional blow-ups (so extreme that she was advised to euthanize him during her first months of owning him). Struggling with a way to give her damaged horse a clear understanding of what she wanted and then reward him for positive behavior (not just punish him for incorrect guesses), Karen resorted almost exclusively to clicker training.

The results with her horse were nothing short of amazing. Her success prompted me to investigate clicker training anew and then implement it for our horses, and it’s proving to be very successful and popular at our farm!

Susan

“But she followed me home,” my partner replied, when I asked him why he wanted to buy a several-month Lipizzan old filly. Well, not exactly all the way “home”, but we did find ourselves studied and followed incessantly by a weanling filly on one of our horse-buying trips to the Austrian National Stud. Highly independent at a very young age, the little Austrian filly seemed particularly enamored of Keith, leaving her dam to walk along the fence line, eyes on Keith.

We didn’t know her name, but we admired her conformation and her movement. She floated, twirled and skipped into our hearts. Later that afternoon, we asked the breeding manager if he knew her . “Not sure,” he said, but agreed that we could look for her, stable-by-stable.  We found her, with her mother, a short time later, the filly recognizable by her heart-shaped star. “Nein, Nein… she is not for sale,” he laughed.

Fabiola – 72 was her name, we learned, and negotiations were complicated because this little girl was Piber’s intended replacement for her mother, also called Fabiola.

Several months later and after relentless pressure from the Chief Horse Husband, we came to an agreement and Fabiola was on a plane for America. Long since settled into our farm in Connecticut, Fabiola is an elegant presence on our farm. And no, she never lost her curiosity – or her whimsy –  about her environment and the world! Fabiola remains one of the most interesting – and interested –  mares we’ve ever had on our farm!

Susan

I was lucky to have grown up in a small town in southern Wisconsin. Our Victorian home sat on the east bank of the Fox River, across from a Morgan horse farm, and the horse farm was the first thing I saw each morning. My days were spent with horses, thinking about horses or enjoying the outdoors in other ways, often with four-legged pets in tow.

To say that horses were important to me is an understatement – as a child, I was horse-crazy!  My family didn’t have horses, but I hung out with horse friends, read all the horse magazines and books I could find and dreamed of the day that I could have one of my own. Used tack and blankets cluttered my bedroom, as though buying the accessories of a horse would guarantee I get one.  As often happens, the dream slipped away during high school and university, buried under time demands for school and my early career.

In my 20s, however, I rediscovered my childhood love. While working as a University instructor, I connected with an amazing German dressage instructor, who bred Arabian horses and gave riding lessons on her Hannoverians and Arab crosses. She was “old school”, believing in the absolute care of the horse and in the importance of learning riding basics by taking the time it takes: endless lunge lessons, strengthening exercises on horseback and lots of flatwork. She stood two stallions, and I had the double blessing of learning the finer points of horse care in a professionally-run breeding operation. With her as my dressage instructor,  I rode, showed, and endlessly watched horse competitions. Many a weekend, I sat next to her at a horse show, learning what good gaits should look like from the ground and how not to mistake front leg “flash” for genuine engagement. As my riding progressed, I leased a horse and then bought my first horse, a 12-year old Morab.

By the time I was 30, I’d determined my chosen breed would be Iberian.  By that point, I felt pretty comfortable around horses and showing. I’d fallen in love with Andalusians, their looks, intelligence and temperament, but I wanted a horse with a little less “brio” and a lot less orbital movement.

My selected breed? Lipizzan, of course! But that’s a follow-up story.

Susan