Fran Griffen from Hunter Natural Horsemanship Centre, NCAS EA level one coach and natural horsemanship instructor provides information and strategies to help you communicate with your horse, naturally.
Help! My horse scares me to death!
How can something we love so much, frighten the living daylights out of us? We want ‘the dream’, galloping along the beach with the wind in our hair, but we go weak at the knees just riding out of the arena.
Are we just too old for this? Too useless? Too fearful? Is it just a matter of being confident, of sucking it up and getting on with it? NO and NO.
All you are experiencing are the effects of fear and anxiety, which have nothing to do with skill or bravery. Let’s take a deeper look and work to overcoming those fears so you can enjoy your horse.
Fear and Anxiety - In us Fear is a reaction to an actual danger signal - it involves physical and mental tension that helps you spring into action to protect yourself from something that is happening. The body suddenly gears up into fight or flight mode when, for example, a tree branch snaps and falls and your horse jumps sideways. Once you know the danger has passed, the fear goes away.
The physical and mental tension of anxiety is very similar to fear but with one important difference. With anxiety, there isn't usually anything actually happening right then and there to trigger the feeling. The feeling is coming from the anticipation of future danger or something bad that could happen, but there is no danger happening now. This is when you worry that a tree branch might snap and you are tense and bothered.
Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. It can be mild or intense or somewhere in between. All of us that ride and work with horses know that things can happen, so we do experience some anxiety from the ‘what if’ that lurks in our minds.
A little anxiety helps us to stay on our toes and motivates us to do our best. For example, knowing that we ride animals that can react to change, makes us prepare more and learn awareness. A moderate amount of anxiety helps the body and mind get prepared to cope with something stressful or frightening. Sometimes anxiety can get out of proportion and become too intense or too lasting, and it can interfere with everything you do with your horse.
Anxiety is often accompanied by a variety of physical symptoms such as trembling, twitching, muscle tension, fatigue, headaches, irritability, sweating, feeling lightheaded, nausea, feeling like a lump is stuck in your throat, and difficulty concentrating. Feelings of worry, dread, lack of confidence, lack of energy and sleep problems.
As I work with students to help them to develop a more harmonious life with their horses, fear and anxiety are common experiences, and it isn’t just our fear and anxiety, horses are exactly the same. Well not exactly, but they do display fear and anxiety in a prey animal way.
Fear and Anxiety - In horses Horses also experience fear and anxiety.
Although horses are wired to operate largely on fear, a reaction to perceived danger in that moment, those of us that have been around horses for a long time know that horses can also experience anxiety, an anticipation of future danger.
Luckily for us the horse doesn’t have the capacity to project too far into the future and analyse situations the way we do, but anxiousness can be triggered by certain situations, places and feelings.
Because horses are more ‘in the moment’ than we are, it is very possible for a horse to operate on fear one moment and totally relax the next. In the wild the herd will display behaviours of fear when the predators are hunting around them, but the moment the hunter has made the kill and the immediate danger has passed the herd put heads down and graze while Flicka is being eaten only 50 m away.
When we understand this, it helps us deal with our own anxiety and make good training plans.
How do we work with and overcome fear and anxiety? The first thing to understand is that it’s not all about us. It’s not about how old we are, how fit we are or how inexperienced we are. The horse is a part of the equation and to help us become less fearful and anxious, we must also be helping the horse to be less fearful and anxious when he is with us.
If your horse is scaring you, he is doing scary things, big prey animal things. He is skittish, or dominant or reactive, all normal horse behaviour, but it has to be modified to fit our environments. We need our horses to be calmer, braver and more relaxed than they would be in a wild herd. We need our horses to be able to communicate with us, another species, with a totally different brain. These are the things that help you to not be scared, it’s not about bravery it’s about communication and training.
Both parties need a program of desensitisation, then habituation. The horse will also benefit from cue conditioning to improve communication and set clear intentions. Systematic Desensitisation
To begin the process of systematic desensitisation, relaxation skills are taught first in order to control fear and anxiety responses. Both the human and the horse need to practice coming to a place of relaxation. Then tasks are crafted in very small steps that bring the horse or human closer to an uneasy place, then retreat and approach again.
For the human, they practice skills of breathing and imagery to stop them spiralling into total panic.
For the horse, we use approach and retreat exercises to bring them closer to the emotional edge and retreat before they tip over, that edge is slowly stretched until they cope with more and more situations. Both parties need to learn the strategy of starting and ending with relaxation in any given situation. Gradual exposure is the key here, whether it be to things or experiences.
Habituation This is where, after repeated exposure to a stimulus, the horse or the human becomes used to it, and there reaction diminishes or disappears.
Sometimes students are scared of picking the feet up, because horses can kick and there is an imagined fear that they will be kicked. By taking time and starting by just rubbing the legs and grooming the legs and being around the legs the human is more familiar and the next step of picking the legs up isn’t so big.
In the horses case it is very much in our interest to have him familiar with many stimuli. It is important that he can filter out non-vital and non-threatening information, enabling it to focus on more important things, like us!
Cue Conditioning This is where a horse becomes conditioned to give a particular response to a particular aid or cue from the human, this aid or cue can be a noise, physical touch, transfer of energy and ultimately a thought or intention. Done consistently, the horse will eventually respond to the smallest of cues and a quiet and clear form of communication is established.
A trainer using positive reinforcement at the right moment will encourage the horse to repeat behaviours. Its repetition will be a little hit and miss at first, but with continued use of positive reinforcement, the horse will learn the appropriate response to the stimulus.
Conditioning can also work by encouraging a horse to do something in the knowledge it will avoid something it dislikes, however I have found that basing my strategies on a majority of positive reinforcement, has worked well.
How does this help with my fear? To work through fear we have to work on ourselves, understand fear and learn strategies to minimise anxiety. We also have to help the horse to be less scary and that comes when your horse is less fearful, but also from clear communication and leadership from you.
Without clear communication the horse will be confused, a confused horse will be anxious or dominant and both behaviours make us nervous. The way forward is a systematic approach that involves both ground work and riding. The relationship, partnership and leadership must be your focus. Anyone can build those skills with their horse, it just takes steps, small steps at first.
I know the steps you need, I have helped thousands of students to build stronger communication with their horses and finally start to lead the life they imagined, with their horse.
If you really want to get some solid and systematic help you simply need to enrol in my 4 month online course. I have laid out all the steps, you pace yourself through the modules and I am available personally to help.
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