Do Horses Actually Want To Be Ridden? - Elsa Sinclair

I typically just kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. All right, I am Elsa Sinclair and I am a horse trainer that specializes in horse training from the horse’s point of view. So what that means is I do a type of training without halters, without food rewards, and ideally without having control of the resources that the horse wants. So that means that I’m trying to use training as a form of physical communication between horse and human without using the motivation systems that most people do. Simple way to explain this is I am prioritizing developing the horses sensory system above and beyond their physical system.

But the premise that horses are herd animals and they want to be cooperative and collaborative. But in order to be cooperative and collaborative they need to have a strong and regulated sensory system. So we can do that by becoming part of their herd and encouraging the development of their sensory system. So I think for a. Lot of the listeners, this is probably going to be something very outside of their normal day-to-day with horses.

How did you get interested involved in this side of horse? Training. I actually had a student that asked me a really simple question, but she persevered in a really good way. And she said, do you think that horses like being ridden? And at the time I said, yeah, I think they really like it.

And she said, if horses had their own lice and all of their own desires and needs met and they weren’t in captivity, would they want to be ridden by a human? And I said, yeah, we bring in Mustangs all the time at older ages, and we teach them to be ridden. And I think they really like it. And she said, but do you think they had a choice? And I said, yeah, I don’t know that they did have a choice, but I think they really like it.

And she said, yeah, but if they had a choice, would they want to be ridden? And that I couldn’t stop thinking about that. I thought, has anybody ever asked that question? And I thought I was going to ask that question. I would have to set up some sort of a hypothesis and test it.

And then I thought, somebody should do that. Somebody should get an adult Mustang from the wild and spend time with them and see if they want to be ridden. If there was no external motivator for I was like somebody needs to ask that question. So then I spent like a year telling everybody I knew that somebody should do this project and everybody laughed at me. So clearly if someone was going to do the project, I was good project.

And then I was like, oh, I’m a single parent and I have a full time job as a horse trainer and I’m really busy and I don’t have time for this question. Maybe I’ll do it as a retirement project. And then I couldn’t stop talking about it. Every time I turned around, I was telling somebody about this idea. And then I had a really wonderful client who said, I really think that you should do this before you retire.

How do we make that work? How do I help you bring this project to life? And this is all in my book that just came out this year. So if people want more of the story, they can read the book Taming Wild. But it was really wonderful that I had this great client and friend John who said let’s make this happen.

So I ended up getting a four year old mare off the range and spending a year with her where she never wore a halter. She was never trapped between me and the fence, she always had an ample amount of friends to interact with in her social life, and she always had space to move away from me if she didn’t want to participate. I tried hard not to be associated with the delivery of food, so there was always food in the space that she could eat freely, but it wasn’t associated with me bringing it. And then my job was to spend time with her and see how far we could get in the training. Ultimately that turned into the movie Taming Wilds, and the documentaries outlines that adventure and it was far more successful than I ever anticipated it would be.

And it’s the most fun I have ever had with horses in my entire life. It’s also the slowest method of training you could possibly do. So I thought, I’m the only one that’s ever going to want to do this. Nobody wants to go this slowly. So I thought I’d go back to my regular job as a horse trainer, using motivators to help horses be good citizens and little by little eyed students.

Say, could you just show us a part of what you did in the documentary? And it snowballs. And now I spend 6 months of the year traveling the world teaching clinics. I have an online course and it’s all I do. What did your training look like before, and then what does it look like now?

So before I was raised in a very classical sort of pony club setting with dressage and eventing and a little bit of dabbling in pony games and all across and things like that. And then I evolved into doing endurance racing and French classical dressage. And then I evolved from there into a lot of work with Linda Tellington Jones and all of that coin awareness stuff, and eventually got into the whole Pirelli program, as a lot of us did in this generation. And that was probably where I was doing the most work when I switched over. Understanding for psychology and using pressure at the right times and places to develop the behaviors you want your horse that will hopefully help them thrive in the domestic world.

Then the project came around and we just turned everything on its head and said, what if the horse is perfect exactly as it is? What if it doesn’t need to change? What if we take this wild horse and we accept that maybe it will never want to interact with humans? It has all space it needs, all the friends it needs. And my job is to enter the space and prove to the horse I’m worth including in their herd.

How many things would they want to do with me? And that’s what I do today. So I currently have nine horses in my herd with my daughter. Not all of them are mine, but they’re in the herd. One of them is the stallion.

So we have a whole bunch of geldings together with the stallion. And that’s my current herd that I’m working with. My job is to enter the paddock and interact with horses in a way that makes them want to do more things with me that may or may not include riding, depending on how many hours we have to spend building them from the place they are to that level of skills. I’d imagine there was probably some type of ego death that had to go along with this because I just. I really try my best as a horse trainer to put myself in my horses shoes and and even just that in itself required some level of ego death.

But to I always say, if you’re cross country schooling a horse and there’s an issue with something, I go just you have all day. You have all day to just do this one simple thing there. We don’t have to put a lot of pressure on it, but we have all day and even that psychology shift sometimes makes things go faster. But I think in your case, it genuinely could take all day. So how do you or how did you deal with the internal side of the switch from I want this thing to happen and I can make it happen to if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.

Maybe it doesn’t happen today. Maybe it doesn’t happen ever. Yeah, Yep, there’s definitely been so eager deaths along the way. I joke that a lot of my best ideas have developed while sitting in the hey Manger crying, because that is the fact of the matter. It’s I’m attempting a thing that may not be possible within this lifetime, though.

I really believe I’ve got a good enough structure now that I can train just about anything if the horse and I both live long enough. But that’s a real thing. Like it’s a thing. At some point we get too old to do the things we’re drinking. So what kind of time availability do we have?

I think the card I have in my back pocket is I was a pretty effective trainer beforehand with a lot of skills in my back pocket, and I know how to get a job done. I just know it’s more fun this way, and part of what makes it more fun is not knowing if it’s possible. So the not knowing if I can achieve it or not is actually one of my personal motivators. If I go about doing it the way I’ve always done it, I know I can get the job done. It’s actually less interesting for me now because I’ve been there now certainly I have been to the Olympics.

Like I could just keep raising my standards and keep buying higher level athletes and raise the expectation that way. I’ve chosen to go another path, which is for the most part, I only take horses that nobody else wants. And when I take a horse that nobody else wants and I show up and I would do training on their terms, I don’t know if they’re ever going to be willing to do normal horse things. And I am fascinated with that evolutionary journey. And it’s much more interesting to me than a journey in which I already know the outcome.

Yeah. Do you ever go into it with a goal or do you find that in itself puts too much pressure on the relationship? Or do you just show up every day and whatever that day brings, it’s just what it brings? So I do have a goal and my goal is always that my horses be healthier and happier, progressive. And I have some sort of graphs and charts of what that looks like.

What do healthier, happier horses look like? And so the way we make progress with horses, in my opinion, is either emotional, mental or physical. And ideally we have all three of those. But a physical training is what most people attempt to do, which is you do repetitions of movement to make muscles stronger. And that’s where most people approach it from.

And that’s great. Mental training is going to be a little bit more your positive reinforcement trainers, your clicker trainers with horses to figure out I have to do this to get that. I have to solve this puzzle in order to get what I want. And that’s another way we develop the horses. What I do is emotional training.

And emotional training is where the horse has cycles of emotion, and those cycles of emotion get linked to behavior patterns. So that means that when they felt good, what happened on the way to feeling good, that’s going to be something they repeat. When they felt bad, what happened on the way to feeling bad? That’s going to be something they avoid. So how do we link the healthiest behavior traits that we can to this progress of feeling better?

Not by making them feel better, just by noticing when the cycle happens naturally. When a horse takes a nap, they’re tired. Like they’re tired. They have to sleep. Part of being a physical being.

When they wake up from that nap, they are going to feel a lot better than when they went to sleep because that physical need has been met. It’s just a normal cyclical part of the day. So we have a million little opportunities like that where the cyclical type of the day is creating better or worse feelings throughout the day. If I want my horse to see me and come beat me, how do I link that to a moment in time when they happen to feel good so that every time they see me they fall into that pattern? I want to go spend time with her.

How do you do that without any other type of motivator like that? So it starts, you got to observe the horse and know what their cyclical patterns are, when do they feel better and when do they feel worse. And then your job is to be in the right place at the right time when their emotional state is improving. So I’ll give you really basic come into the paddock. I’m moving around.

Let’s say I’m filling water troughs, cleaning manure up, whatever it is the thing, wedding, checking fences, whatever I’m going to do in the pad. And I just move around the space. And as I move around the space, I’m going to watch that horse interact with their friends. I’m going to notice if they’re grumpy. I’m going to notice if they’re happy.

I’m going to notice if they’re sleepy, I’m going to notice their cyclical pattern. And once I’ve watched them and I know what’s likely to happen next because I’ve seen this movie 4 OK, at the moment when they are reaching that peak of emotional experience where they start to feel good, I’m going to stop everything I’m doing and I’m going to match and mirror their behavior. If your left foot’s forward, my left foot is forward. If you’re looking to the right, you’re I’m looking to the right. Whatever you’re doing, I’m doing it with you.

Now before we come off that peak and you start to feel worse again, I’m going to go back to my jobs. Now. They are starting to link a pattern. When I feel good, caught an Elsa have a person. Weirdly, they don’t know.

Those are two separate things. They’re somehow attached. So they become very motivated to catch an Elsa. How do I get Elsa to come over here? Because I felt good last time she was here.

So what they’re going to do is they’re going to start playing with behaviors and as they play with behaviors to see what gets my attention, one of the things they’re going to do is they’re going to use their five senses better. They’re going to smell things, they’re going to look at things, they’re going to listen to things, they’re going to feel things, they’re going to taste things. Those exercising of the five senses is what makes a horse feel alive in their own skin. Now, some of those are going to be overwhelming. And when they get overwhelmed, you’re going to know they’re overwhelmed because they’re going to start to push on their friends or try and get away from their friends.

There’s push pull behavior that goes with being overwhelmed, and I’m just going to walk past that like it’s not happening. Then they’re going to hit a point where they look at something that makes them feel good. And I know it makes them feel good because there’s no push pull behaviors and there’s a little mobilization of their sensory system. And I’m going to stop everything I’m doing and I’m going to go match and mirror them and they’re going to go. That’s how you catch Elsa.

You got to wiggle your ears. Yep. Uh huh. And before they’re overwhelmed, I’m going to go back to my jobs and just watch them. Before you know it, they’re going to put more and more effort into wiggling their ears to see if it makes me put down what I’m doing to come over and join them.

OK, now they don’t know the whole picture yet. I know the whole picture. They don’t picture. All they’re doing is playing with cause and effect because they’re herd animals. Herd animals are always playing with cause and effect.

If I do this, what happens next? So what I’m going to do is I’m going to reinforce those 5 senses. Probably not this one of eating, because eating can be problematic for its own reason, but I’m four of them, Sight, listening, smell, and feeling. So when they use those 4 senses in ways that make them feel good, I’m going to put down what I’m doing and I’m going to go join them. Before you know it, they’re going to exercise their sensory system just to try and keep me around.

Now the only reason they want me around is because I’m never there when they feel bad, They’re going to feel bad sometimes. That’s the cycle goes around. You get grumpy, you get tired, you get irritated, overwhelmed. I’m just busy doing my own thing when they’re overwhelmed. And that leads to a linkage when they believe they always feel better when I’m there just because I timed it that way.

Not because I made it, just because I noticed it and I showed up. Interesting. So it’s almost positive reinforcement, but just of yourself, you are the reinforcement of this positive feeling and then you subtract yourself when the feeling starts to dwindle. Exactly. Interesting.

The difference from normal positive reinforcement is I’m not in control of it. I can’t hand them a carrot, have to wait them to produce that carrot internally, but they have to feed themselves the carrot. They have to use their eyes or their ears or their nose to stimulate their sensory system in a way that feels good and then I show up. So they are self delivering if the internal reward. I just happen to show up when it happens.

OK. And why would this idea of them being in control mean anything? So when they are in control of their own regulatory system, what happens is they learn how to use it so they can use it 24 hours a day even when you’re not there. So when they start to feel bad, they could simply so if they’re looking at something that starts to scare them. They could just switch.

To listen to something instead or feeling something. Horses do this all the time. When they get a little nervous and they reach down and itch their knee, what they’re doing is they’re trying to switch senses. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. If I switch my focus to something less overwhelming, maybe I’ll feel better.

So anything that becomes habituated where there’s only one solution to feel better can become problematic. So you can get really irritated with a horse that constantly goes to itch their knee. Every time they’re upset. You’re like come on, come up with another option that’s just a little pathological. If they can use all of their senses equally, you will find if one thing doesn’t work, they can try another.

And what happens is they develop a self regulatory system where they think before they move. So instead of overreacting and having fight and flight be their self regulatory system, they use their sensory system as a regulatory source. If I don’t feel good, think about something else. Once they have that regulatory system, it means that we can stay with them. We don’t have to go off and do our own jobs and just watch.

We can stay with them because they’ll start to feel bad and they’ll regulate it and make themselves feel good again. Interesting. So. Another thing that I wanted to chat about was this idea of consent. And I think for a lot of people, consent this.

Yeah, maybe my horse comes and greets me at the paddock and they come in with to the barn willingly and they do all of these things. But maybe they do always itch their knee right after I get on, or as soon as we start doing something that’s difficult or they start to do this other thing that I find obnoxious, shake their head or whatever. So what does? Consent look like versus compliance. So I think that you have, I look at everything as a spectrum there.

So consent is, well, consent is good. Consent is complicated because you’re consenting to something in the future that you don’t have 100% sure idea of what it is. So when horses consent to being ridden, they haven’t necessarily consented to being hit because they did the wrong thing, unless they get hit every day and then they’re like, OK, worth it because I like leaving my stable. It’s worth it to leave my stable because this table’s really boring. And I consent to being ridden even if it includes being hit because boredom is worse.

So consent is complicated in that they are consenting to something that is better than the alternative. And so we like to think of consent as a really good thing. And everything in life is contrast. One thing is always better than another thing. And one of the things that’s very complex is that when we give horses a really good life, they end up consenting to a lot less stuff because they already have everything they need.

If you aren’t have everything you need and you want, why would you then do something? I won’t. And so this is where if we look at it on spectrum, if consent is one side of the spectrum, we have something like alignment in the middle where we both want the same thing, or collaboration at the other end where we don’t even know what’s going to happen next, but we’re both working towards something fun. So how would you know where you are in that spectrum? And the way that I like to bring this about is in terms of how much push or pull is there in the relationship, OK, That’s one metric that we gauge by.

And the other one is how much sensory expression does the horse have? So in other words, if a horse walks up to the mounting block and lines up for you to get on, really looks like consent, what are their facial features doing? If they are very Zen, relaxed, peaceful, that’s probably on the consent side of the spectrum. OK, They’re a little bit not sensory present, but they’re fine. OK, you get up into alignment, you’re going to find a little bit more tone to their muscles.

You’re going to find their eyes are a little bit brighter. You’re going to find that they’re just a little bit more awake and they’re aligned like they’re ready to do things with you. You got all the way to the collaborative side of the spectrum and you’re going to see a lot more ear mobilization. You’re going to see the ears twitching and turning and gathering senses. You’re going to see their nostrils flare maybe a little bit more on the left side than the right side, and then a little bit more on the right side than the left side.

They’re gathering extra perception. They’re gathering new information to figure out what’s going to be fun next. So. How One of the things that I’m interested in is how we make life for competition horses better than it has been. So how do we take these skills that you’ve learned with horses?

And maybe because sport horses have a shorter lifespan in terms of the ability to reach those goals, do we take what you’ve done and adopt some of those things into sport horse life? Yeah, I think that’s a great question to be asking. So the stuff that I use in Freedom is not going to be interesting to everybody because it takes too long. But the theoretical concepts can be applied to faster systems in really good ways. And so most of my students who will take my online course, we’ll do 10 or 20 minutes a day of the work that I do, but then they’re going to take the concepts and apply it to faster training systems.

And that’s where it gets really interesting. So there’s a couple of concepts that we can think about. One of them is the peak and rule. OK, pretty much everybody’s heard. And your session on a good note because it helps your horse remember, ended well.

It’s probably going to go well tomorrow. We’ll try again tomorrow. So everybody’s heard that, not everybody’s heard the peak and rule. So basically horses repeat what they remember and memories are usually attached to sensory perception. So do you ever get walk in a room and you smell a smell and all of a sudden you flooded with a memory because the memories attached to the smell.

Same thing with horses. A sight, a smell, a sound, a feeling. Memories are attached to senses, So what your horse remembers, they’re likely to repeat. The things they remember are also attached to the peak and rule. So the peak emotional experience, like what was the most intense emotional experience they had during that ride?

But it’s going to stick in their memory because it’s the height of sensory input. OK, so if every ride you think, what was the peak emotional experience for my horse? Not for me, but for my horse, When did they feel the best or feel the worst? Because of the information coming in through their senses. That’s going to be the thing they remember best.

And the thing they remember best, they’re going to repeat. Interesting. Now potentially they’re going to try and avoid it. So something really bad happened. Be like, I remember that because I’ve got to try and avoid it tomorrow.

OK, so they repeat what they remember or they repeat the avoiding of what they remember depending on how it impacts them. So if every ride you look at that peak and rule, you’re going to make a lot more consistent progress. The thing that I see a lot of people make a mistake with is they think of like pressure release as what you put on the horse. I put pressure on them. So they should try and avoid that.

The putting on and the taking off, it’s not actually as effective as you think it is. You’ve got to look at their ears and their eyes and their sensory system to know how did my pressure impact them? How did my release impact them? How did it shape their peak and experience. We don’t always have a lot of control over the peak of an experience.

Do have a lot of control over the end, so that’s usually the one that most people mention is the end. And on a good note, it’ll Mars ride better If you can include the peak rule in there, that’s really going to help you. Yeah, it’s. So I have a chestnut mare and she has a whole range of emotions and I basically got her for free because she was really tough to deal with and she feels very happy. She’s probably bipolar because she feels very happy, but then she’ll also feel very anxious and it can be tricky with a horse like that to do I stick this out?

Do I push more? Do I? And she is honestly the reason that I’ve looked at taking the sport horse thing slower because like, she would bronc after fences and she would do all of these things. And I used to really pride myself on being the rider that, yeah, I can stick all these bucks and I can ride all of these really problematic horses. And then I go, oh, my God, these horses are all just super dysregulated and mentally screwed up.

And so how do you take these horses who maybe they feel things so much that you just try to get them? Can you get them to even out emotionally or do you just have to accept the big with the bad? Or do you understand my question in there? So this is one of the other principles that translates from work and freedom to work in the more intense training system, and that is that basically you have three systems you’re working with. Let’s just start with this premise.

So if you’re riding a horse and your horse never ever pushed into you, that’s your bronching after offendably, their back comes up towards you. So if they never pushed into you and they never tried to get away from you, those are your runaways, your bolters, and they never ignored you, How much training would you have to do? Probably not much. Not much. So most of our training systems are just trying to control those three systems.

Now those three systems, the fight, flight and freeze have a bad side and a good side. So the bad side of them pushing into you, that’s your bronching, that’s your bucking, that’s your biting, that’s you’re attacking, all of that stuff. The good side is play. Play is the good side. So play.

Play is the push with pauses, OK, They push into you, but then they check to see if you like it. OK, here’s the unfortunate side of that. That’s your hugs, your kisses, your snuggles, your cuddles, your grooming, your all of that stuff that we as people of. It’s the horse that runs to you in the pasture. It’s the horse that comes to you that follows you, OK?

So we tend to train a ton of that when they’re babies. When you train too much of that on a good day in a good moment, it turns into all the bad stuff on a high stress moment. Interesting. So that horse then Bronx after the fences. Now there could be pain issues and all that sort of stuff too, which we go into.

But what my observation is that we train that into them when we do an excess of draw or play. Now that translates down into yields. The natural horse and chip programs get really big on keeping the horse out of your bubble and making sure that they step away and making sure they know their yields. Even the dressage riders, you’ve got your shoulders and your hunches and your all of your lateral work, all of those yields. When you overtrain your yields on a good day, you’re ending up with a bolter on a bed.

Interesting system. It’s just a higher level of stress now. Where I like to work is the last quadrant, which is thinking using the sensory system without changing the body is the opposite of your freeze and your rest. So if you overtrain them to smell and look and listen and feel on a good day, on a bad day, they’ll be like, I got to just relax and tune out for a second and you know it. That’s.

Pretty sick a better response than. Yeah, I don’t love being ignored. I really don’t love being ignored. But if they’re like, I’m having a really bad day, I got to check out go, oh, you’re having a bad day. All right, we can work with that.

So what I do is I overtrain the sensory system on a good day, and then on a bad day we get a horses. I really need a nap. Then secondarily, I’m going to train the yielding system, the drive, the stepping away from pressure. And on a bad day, it turns into I really want to be farther away from you. OK.

Now, the reason that I trained that secondarily is that it’s actually technically not that hard to ride a horse that’s bolting if they don’t come at you. And he said there’s no butt. If there’s no, they’re like, I just need to leave this situation. You can usually ride that out. The problem comes when you’ve trained so much draw and push on good day that on a bad day, you then get the bucking, the spinning towards you.

OK, All that stuff that’s dangerous is actually at you. I’m not saying we don’t want it because we do love a horse that snuggles. I love a horse that runs to me and the pastor. I love a horse that follows me. Need it to be my third priority, not my first.

If it’s my first priority, hopefully I can ride a buck. Emotions come in cycle. They’re not going to buck forever. If you can just undulate with them and move with it and not make a, you’ll get out the other. Side yeah, no.

It’s so interesting you never I did the OK, this horse must be in pain or have something. I never believe we can fully tell that a horse is or isn’t in pain because they can’t tell us. But she gets regular body work PMF, the Cairo, the acupuncture, the vet flexions, the radio. I checked those boxes so I go OK, this is either emotional or physiological. And for her, once she started jumping bigger fences, it went away because I think she had to focus a little bit more.

But I never once thought, oh, this is something that was trained into her by not. That has nothing to do with the buck itself. Like, that’s such an interesting, like point. So for people who have young horses, yeah, or breeding farms or whatever, should they just leave their horses completely alone? I feel like babies are very curious.

So even if you go out to throw feed, they come up and they’re like, hey. And so how would you think about those early years of being with the horses to try to mitigate the later in life stuff? Right. So this is something I have, I would say all the baby horses that I’ve raised. I now look back and I think, oh, I could have done that better.

So this is me speaking from a humble beginner’s mind place of I’ve got some ideas that I still have to prove. Maybe that’s a fourth movie. We’ll see. But theoretically, I believe that the healthier you make the parents, the better the babies will be. So if you, yeah, the babies are going to be curious and they’re going to come up and they’re going to interact with you.

And I certainly think that you need to acknowledge them when they do that. But if you could duck past baby and circle around and give mom a ton of attention, just LED mom with all that attention that you wanted to put into the baby, the trickle down effect of that would be phenomenally good. So give mom all of the grooming, all of the attention, all of the exercise, all of the hugs and snuggles and cuddles and everything that you want to do, give it to mom and then let mom train that baby. Now obviously there’s hoof care and vet care have to do a certain amount of training just for health reasons, and I acknowledge that. But when you’re doing it again, you want to think about the peak and rule.

So when you were working with that baby, was their peak emotional experience, was it using their sensory system or was it throwing their body into you for scratches? That’s now their peak emotional experience with the human is throw the whole mass of their body towards that human for scratches and that’s that becomes the reason why later in life they say you have to set boundaries for your horse. I actually think you don’t have to set boundaries for your horse if you’ve set the habits correctly in the 1st place. If you teach them to push a lot, then you are probably going to have to set boundaries for safety later. Yeah, it’s almost the same psychology of like when horses rush fences and people go, yeah, my horse just really loves jumping.

And so that’s why they rush the fence. It’s they’re just dealing with these big feelings that they have no clue how to correctly output. And so in the case that a baby is throwing themselves at you, would you just walk away? Generally I’ve been walking away doesn’t work very well because they have such an automatic draw. If you walk away, run after you.

So the key is to walk past them so you can touch them. But what you got to do is you got to wipe them off on another horse, wipe them off on a tree, get through their blind spot so they have to think about something other than you for a moment. And I watch horses do this all the time. I just had my stallion out with a bunch of new sort of teenage boys and watching them duck around the trees to ditch the other one behind a tree for a moment was hilarious. Where they’re like, OK, we need a break.

So generally you’re going to with the babies, you’re going to have to either go through their blind spot behind their tail so they’re like they start thinking about something other than you, or you’re going to have to duck behind another horse. You’re going to have to give their sensory system a moment to latch on to some other source of fun. Because if they’re staring at you, they get locked onto. You’re the only source of. Fun.

Yeah. And I guess it goes back to that, what you were saying earlier about when we were chatting about consent and that the horse wants to leave the stable because this thing is less boring than being in here. When you give the horse an opportunity to feel these big feelings in association with you, that’s just going to go and go as they get older and eventually transfer into riding. Yeah, God, it’s also interesting. So.

Going back to the sort of competition side of things, do you think it’s possible for horses to choose to compete? Would they ever choose to compete? Or 100% think horses could choose to compete. There’s a lot of factors that go into that and the morality of how you would set that up is going to be questioned by a lot of people. So if life is contrast, competition has to be better than something.

Eventually it’s just better than a boring life at home. OK, There’s some horses that hate boredom. They just want life to be more interesting. Even if you put them in a herd, they’re like, I talked to these horses 24 hours a day, every day I’d like to go meet some different ones. So if you set them up the right way, you can use boredom as the contrast.

And that’s my favorite type of contrast I’m not into because I don’t use any tools. I don’t have a lot of sort of negative things I can deal out, but boredom is something I can use where, yeah, your life is fine, but it’s more fun with me. And not because I hand you carrots. Because I take you places and I expose you to things. Tickle your sensory system in a way that’s not overwhelming.

So what would you like to see from a force in order to know that they’re emotionally or sensory able to handle competing? That has to do with the amount of push or pull they’re exhibiting in their body. Their regulatory system should be able to tone up or tone down the level of push depending on who their partners are. So I’ll give you an example. You’ve all seen that horse that bucks their way around a jump course, limbs in every direction between the fences and the rider who sits there, it’s not even happening.

Like they’re totally comfortable with it. They’re like, it’s just what he does and it’s not that hard to ride and it’s fun. That’s a horse that has realized my partner can ride this and this is a hell of a lot of fun. That’s different from the horse that box and the rider cranks up on them and then it gets worse and then they’re both fighting for survival. When you get a level of push or pull that makes either partner uncomfortable, what is the whole relationship degrading?

Like, it gets worse and worse, and then when it gets worse, usually we get bigger spurs, we get more control modalities. And that’s where I feel like perhaps it goes a bit wrong. OK, so if they have a regulatory system that’s working, they go, oh, my rider’s uncomfortable with that. Maybe I need to tone it down a little bit. OK.

And you, of course, that’s, you can dial it up with a rider who can do it, and they can dial it back down with a rider that’s feeling a little insecure. They’re herd animals, so they are designed to work cooperatively with others if their sensory system is operating correctly. Interesting. Yeah. So it’s they’re gathering information from us just as much as we’re gathering information from them.

And we’re both gathering information about our surroundings to make decisions regarding what we’re going to do. Next. Exactly. In your ideal mind, because we’re not just talking about the competition is at my barn, right? I’d have to get my horse on a trailer.

I have to show up at a new place. I have to go to the dressage arena and then I have to go to the stadium arena and then I have to go do cross country or maybe I have to go to this hunter arena and then I have to go to this hunter arena. And so in order to know, because what I find is that forces who show up at their first schooling experience or their first, they do tend to feel those overwhelming emotions, right? Like they’re like, this isn’t Kansas anymore. Like I’m not, I don’t know anything that’s going on anymore.

Everything I thought I knew, I do not know. And you make it fun enough for them that they go, OK, that wasn’t so bad. And then the next time you bring them, they go, OK, I remember this. So would you advise to deal with the overwhelm or would you say once the overwhelm is there, back off? What does that side of things look like?

Yeah, there’s a quote on a T-shirt who sell. Is it getting better or is it getting worse? And so basically, if you have the capacity to make the situation better, dive right in, do something about it. OK, If you look at the situation and you’re like, this is only getting worse. If I add to this, I am only making it worse, then you have a choice to just hold course because emotions go in cycles.

So if you just hold course, eventually they’re going to feel good accidentally. That’s just how it works. Or you realize we’re not going to be here long enough for them to feel good accident. We got to back off because we’ve got to figure out how to way to lower the stress and they can have a somewhat good association with what happened today. And so ideally we can be really bold and go forward into situations and be like, yeah, it’s overwhelming, but it passes.

Look, this and this and then you’re having fun. Isn’t that amazing? You got through the bad part to the good part, OK, but somewheres just don’t have the capacity for that. And then you decide whether, OK, can we just tack along at a low intensity until they feel better or do we dial it? I’ll give you an example.

I get Mustangs, I’m way up in Northwest Washington on the West Coast of the US, and I get Mustangs from Oregon or Nevada. And so we have a 1314 hour drive. We use Mustangs, haven’t spent time in a trailer. They don’t know people, they don’t know cars. Everything is overwhelming.

What’s interesting about having such a long trip to get home, if you put them in there, you don’t open the door. There’s hay in there. They’ve can survive without water that long. You get them home, you open the door, they go out in the paddock, they generally will get right back in that trailer within 24 hours to check and see if you knew, OK. They don’t have a bad association with the trailer because they spent long enough in there with friends that it went bad.

Horrifying to Yeah, This place isn’t too bad. I have a client who has a Really sensitively thoughtful horse. He needs to really process everything and he’s at the point where he’s getting ready to start having off property experiences. And I live in Aiken, SC, so we’re so lucky because we have venues that host schooling shows all the time. And So what I find it’s similar with the young horses is I’ll go to stable view and get a stall for the weekend, even if I have no plans on competing.

Just being there and hacking around. They go through the Oh my God, this is so overwhelmingly scary to. Oh yeah, there’s my friend that stall 4C and we’re BFFS now. And OK, there’s the arena that I go and walk, trot around and. But yeah, I guess it all just.

Comes back to time. Being able to stay in a situation for long enough that the emotional cycle goes around and they feel better again is a really interesting thing that we don’t realize is possible. It’s not always possible. There are some situations you would go in that just would get worse and worse and kill themselves, and you have to be able to recognize those, obviously. But there’s a surprising amount of intensity that horses can deal with if you just give them time to adapt.

I guess another I definitely want to be conscientious of your time, but another thing that I’m interested in is this idea of her dynamics because a lot of sport horses and sport horse farms, the horses can’t really be in turn out with other horses because of hind shoes or supplements, whatever. How important is it for courses to feel and touch and be with other horses? And how maybe in some of these sport horse settings do we attempt to give them some of that as safe as possible? Yeah. I think it is absolutely vital for them.

They are herd animals. They do not thrive by themselves. Now the interesting advantage you have when you have a horse and work is you become their herd. So the work that you do with them becomes so important to them. And in some ways, I feel like for good or for evil, we do use that along these lines of consent because if they don’t have herd mates, you’re 100% dependent on that ride with you to get their social needs filled.

And so you can actually use that in a lot of good ways to have them really look forward to their work because it is integral to them that they are herd animals. And you can question the morality of it. But at the end of the day, if they’re happy, and that’s what’s most important to me, is that they are happy and healthy in their lives. Now, would I rather have them in a herd where they have friends? Yes.

But we also have to realize not all herds are created equal. So in a horse herd, you have to remember that if they lived in a natural horse herd, they would have both several mothers and a father and a huge array of siblings. We raised domestic horses, generally speaking, in a group of mares with no father right there, they’ve lost their guidance for knowing how to play. Learning how to play is something they learn from their dad. Generally moms aren’t great at teaching them how to play because moms are too busy feeding and caring.

OK then we generally wean them and put them out with a bunch of same age same sex partners. They do not learn great social skills from same age same sex. There might be an old nanny in there, too old to supervise, and he was like, I just want to sleep under the tree. You guys sort yourselves out. Then you have all of these young boys or young girls really developing some maladaptive social skills.

Then you get them into work and you put all four shoes on them and you say, I want to turn you out with this other horse that has no social skills. And you go, why does that look so dangerous? All right. So I do think that herd life is vital for horses, but I also think we need to recognize that in the domestic world, we are raising a lot of horses that don’t have great social skills. And so how do you navigate that the best you can in the city If they don’t have all four shoes on, they navigated a lot better than if you like everybody brass knuckles.

Yeah. So I don’t think that it’s as easy a conversation as we want it to be. There’s a lot of people who just say horses need a herd, end of story. Give them friends, that’s it. They’re social creatures.

They do not thrive living alone, but sometimes having a human that works them every day is the only way that need is getting. And that’s how do we do it as best we can. Yeah, I worked at a barn that had like a 30 or 40 acre pasture and they were a sail barn, so they had probably 30 geldings in this one big field. It was my first time ever seeing horses in a herd. We had Marin gelding turnouts, but I never really saw them interact because I never really had a horse in that paddock.

But when I have horses that I have to go and fetch all throughout the day, you really see, OK, this is here click and you hang out with these horses and we would feed in feedback. So they would come up in their own order and they would get their feedbacks in the same order everyday, like maybe one or two courses in the same little click would switch. But it was really my first time seeing forces just interacting as horses. And a lot of these are off the track thoroughbreds, right? So like their upbringing was completely sheltered.

And so then Fast forward, I have my own barn and I buy a yearling off the track during COVID. That was like my COVID purchase and I had this degen paddock of this 32 year old retired thoroughbred, this 10 year old thoroughbred gelding who was cut late and my baby horse. And I also had my mare paddock and it was always funny because the boys would be playing even this 32 year old thoroughbred would be like trot around behind the other two. The mares are in the corner plotting world domination and the boys are playing like halter tag and nipping. And then the big guy would decide he’s done and he would just turn his butt and everyone would scatter.

And now that same baby horse is five, and I have him out with my boss thoroughbred mare because he needed to learn a little bit of boundaries. And it is so funny to watch him navigate being in the paddock with this mare, who She’s sweet until she doesn’t want you in her space anymore. And then she’s like, all right’s grandkid. And he is. I am out of here.

Peace by. It was nice seeing you. And he always circles back and hangs out because he was like, yeah, I just was not in the right spot. But to just watch them navigate as friends, as an the thoroughbreds happen to be like relative siblings. I mean, they all are at this point, but so it is interesting to watch.

And I go, I don’t even know how are these two just going to be each other’s emotional support animals all start bringing them to shows together and doing all of the things together because they don’t really care when the other one leaves. Like they’re not bonded like that. Or sometimes I’ve had horses where, Oh my God, my friend cannot leave. This is the worst thing ever. And these two are like, please take the other one.

I need a break. But when I put them back in the paddock, they’re like, hey, I missed you so much. And it really makes you think is how important is this? Because as a horse trainer, sometimes I feel like I just don’t have the time to give them that all the time. Like, as much as I would love to, there’s only so much time.

And that’s like the core theme of this podcast. I think it’s like time and how to spend it like properly. Physical fitness is all really built into rest. Like you, you have to work out and make your muscles stronger. But like, you have to get appropriate rest, otherwise you just end up injuring yourself.

Horses in our herd have a collective sensory system where if one is sleepy, the other one can look out for them. If one is listening, another one’s looking like they use their sensory systems collaboratively, which means they get more rest. OK, so if you have a horse by itself, what happens is that they are going to feel more vulnerable every time they need to shut down their sensory system. He’s watching. And then what you get is you get horses that either just shut down and pretend they don’t care, like they adapt because horses are really adaptable, or they just never get the same quality of rest.

And if you’re not getting the same quality of rest, you’re never going to get as strong. That’s what we know about strength building. Strength building needs both exercise and rest. So that’s what your herd life gives you, is your horse can exercise their sensory system and then rest it because somebody else is filling in for them. Yeah.

Now, those separate separation anxiety horses, those are horses that feel like they are dependent on someone else’s sensory system. So basically you can look at what they pay attention to and you will get horses that outsource half the jobs and they just never do that half of the jobs. And then when you go to separate them, they’re like, I can’t leave my other half that does half my jobs. So in a healthy herd, you get horses that can do whatever job needs to be done. If somebody else is sleeping, they’ll just fill in on the jobs that need to be done.

Those are the horses that don’t have separation anxiety because they’re like, if there’s not another horse, I’ll do all my own jobs. It’s fine. You get separation anxiety when they’re like, I can’t. That’s the other half of my sensory system that we’re leaving behind in the pastor. And so sometimes people will sort that out by saying no, I’m your other half now as the person, I will fill that role.

And that’s fine until you have to leave them at a show and you find them box walking because you can’t sleep in the stable with them. Oh, that’s like a whole nother podcast all on its own. So as we start to wind this down, what advice do you have for people who are looking to develop a better relationship with their horse? Whether it’s in work, whether it’s just in being together, what is a piece of advice or a first step or something that riders can do to really start being a part of their horses herd. I would say observe sequences.

You can observe your horse when it’s out with other horses. You can observe it when it’s just out in the paddock by itself. You can observe it as you’re riding it. But take notes at the end of your day and notice what sequences did I observe. This happened, then this happened, and what you’ve been assigned.

Is there some predictable sequences? This got better and better, but that got worse and worse. When you can predict a sequence, you can decide how to interrupt it or change it. Obviously, the sequences that get better and better, don’t touch, don’t mess those up. The sequences that get worse and worse, you think, oh, is there anything I could do about that?

So if you’re riding, maybe you do a downward transition or return or take a walk break, or like, how do I interrupt the bad sequence so that it doesn’t become the habits? How do I make sure not to interrupt the good sequences? Because we want those to be remembered. OK. And so if you can become a pattern recognizer, take a note at the end of the day.

When I was watching the horses with the other horses, I noticed that when another horse touched his tail, he got really angry. That’s really interesting. But I also noticed that when that other horse touched his shoulder, he took a big deep breath and seemed to relax all his muscles. That’s really interesting. Now I know he has better associations about being touched on the shoulder than the tail.

Interesting. Awesome. This has been such a fascinating conversation. How do people find you? Follow along with what you do.

Tammywild.com is my websites. Tammy Wild is also the book and it is also the movies. So I’ve 2 movies out, one about training the first Mustang and one about doing a trip across Costa Rica with a couple of rescue horses. Both of them are Taming wild. The 1st is Taming wild a girl on Mustang.

The second is taming wild put a Vida. I’m working third movie now. You’ll find all that information on the website. I teach an online course, I travel to teach clinics and this is the most fun I’ve ever had with horses. I love working the sensory system first, but I also love seeing how it fits with all the other training methods.

So I tend to be a bit of a purist, but I find that it meshes really nicely with pretty much whatever you’re doing, long as you have some consciousness about the horses needs being met. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Sam. Thanks for inviting me.