Something that I have heard Mark Rashid say on a number of occasions is that our children help us with our horsemanship and our horsemanship helps us with our children. I reflected on this recently as another meal time at home dissolved into a great game for our 18 month old as she ran around the kitchen (when she was meant to be sitting down eating) and more of the food was finding its way onto the floor then into a little mouth. The time I spent cleaning up later gave me an opportunity to reflect on why it is that in some situations we had complete clarity (bedtime in our case) while other times were much more confusing and stressful for everyone concerned (dinner time).
It didn’t take too long before I started to see a similar pattern in my own and in clients’ horses. Some things were going really well and other areas just didn’t seem to have the same clarity, the outcomes were not as consistent or as predictable. And that got me onto ambiguity.
For those reading for whom English is not your first language, I’ll help you out a bit with this word. Sometimes there is a word which is just ‘right on the money’ as it says exactly what you’re trying to say and ambiguity is just such a word in this case. Depending on which dictionary you have to hand, it means “having several possible meanings or interpretations” or “lacking clearness or definiteness”. I think horses really struggle with any message that has several possible meanings.
A simple example of a mixed message would be a forward leg cue given simultaneously with a tight, holding rein, this would give the horse an instruction to stop and go all at the same time, which is pretty hard to do. But I think the implications of mixed messages are far more subtle.
I was working with a friend and client yesterday who is an experienced rider and a very considerate one as well. She absolutely wants to do the best for her horse and to learn from his responses so that she can refine her cues to be both subtle and effective. She also has some concerns about her saddle fit at the moment. When she gives a forward cue sometimes her horse goes forwards and sometime he swishes his tail and slows down. This is a perfect example of ambiguity coming from the rider. When she gives the forward cue, in part she wants her horse to go forward but because she has concerns about her saddle, concerns about asking in the right way and concerns about wanting her cue to be as subtle as possible, she sometime takes the cue away before the horse has responded. In other words she is not crystal clear about what she wants from the horse when she applies the leg cue. The result is that we teach the horse that sometimes we do need him to go forward but sometimes we will release the cue if he swishes his tail, puts his ears back and backs off. In this case there was a lack of clarity from the rider because of concerns about making a mistake or discomfort caused by the saddle. The long and the short of it is that the horse ends up thinking that the leg cue has two possible meanings, that’s ambiguous and its not going to give the best results.
Fear and other emotions in the rider is another area that can create an enormous amount of ambiguity for the horse. When we are frightened we generally leave large “openings” where we are not offering the horse direction because we are dealing with our own internal physiological stress responses. This is another time where we can give the horse mixed messages and we lack the clarity that he needs to help him through the situation.
The feeling that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to do anything with a horse gets in the way of a lot of people’s clarity. I really like Mark Rashid’s argument that there are many ways to do just about anything. Some may be better or safer or more efficient than others but if we leave the idea of “right” and “wrong” behind its much easier to try something with a horse with conviction and see what happens. Once we have some conviction that its OK to try something its easier to get clear and it really helps to stop those mixed messages.
So back to dinner time, what mixed messages had I been giving my daughter in relation to meal times? Well plenty! “Please sit down” didn’t always have any meaning and I needed to take a good hard look at my own attitudes to food, experimenting with new flavors and textures so that I could think about the subtle ways in which I was influencing the situation.
In summary, if something is not working out with your horse (or your children) then take some time to check that what you are communicating has only one possible meaning.
