If Your Horse Can’t Say No, They Can’t Say Yes - Adele Shaw

So I typically just kick the episodes off by having the guest tell us who they are and what it is they do. OK, my name is Adele Shah and let’s see what do I do? I’m a equine certified equine behavior consultant and also just a horsemanship instructor trainer. I specialize in helping people connect with their horses and work with their horses and a way that builds that relationship, that builds the trust there and is positive for both the horse and the handler. Sometimes that looks more like behavior consulting and sometimes that looks more like learning a new way to interact with their horses with different type of training.

So usually positive reinforcement is a big focus, but we also do a lot of other things too. Sweet. One of the things that I really wanted to chat with you about was this idea of choice. And I come from the performance side of riding at the core of it, like I love my horses. And sometimes I feel like in some of these conversations, people can camp on one side or the other of you can’t have a good relationship with your horse if you do performance.

And the people in performance are like these people with these carrot sticks and rope alters, that sort of thing. So I think one of the interesting things that I’ve seen coming from your Facebook page and what not is this idea of choice, whether that be the choice to go for a ride or the choice of where to ride. So maybe we could get into one why that matters and what that sort of looks like in practical use. Yeah, absolutely. Choice for all species.

Humans, horses, dogs, cats, even animals such as worms or crickets or lizards. Choice is a powerful motivator and it is a, some would argue, a primary reinforcer, meaning that it is necessary for a good quality of life. It is very reinforcing to have when we have absolutely no choice in anything, when we have 0 autonomy, when we are just totally at the whims and the mercy of another being of something else. We will struggle to thrive and we will struggle to have a good quality of life because we are just a constantly. We are just in this.

We’re just waiting to be told what to do at all times and no choices are our own. We don’t even get to pick. Think about it, even for our horses, they don’t get to pick their companions usually. They don’t get to pick where they sleep at night. They don’t get to pick what food they eat.

They don’t even get to pick where their water comes from or how filtered it is or if it’s flavored or not. They don’t get to pick the type of stall shavings they get. They don’t get to pick their saddle. They don’t get to pick the riders. They don’t get to pick anything really.

They have very little to no autonomy when it comes to just how horses are normally kept. And when we think about this, and we really look at this, even with wild animals or feral animals, they have a lot of choice in their life. And yes, their quality of life may be not so great in the aspect of they may be starving or their hoof quality, maybe they get an infection and they die and so on and so forth. So those are not good things, but what they do have that our domestic horses really don’t is any kind of choice, any kind of ability to make decisions for themselves. If you were to put a human in that situation, the mental health outcome from that would be horrible and they would not be having a quality of life.

And the same actually applies for animals as well. And so when we can give them back some level of autonomy, some level of choice, even in small things like what food would you like today or picking a companion, that might be a bigger thing. But if we could, that’d be great. Or whether or not they want to leave the shelter. So when we can have an open set up, an open kind of floor plan idea for their barn where they get to pick whether or not they go into their stall and or they go out to the pasture.

This is huge for horses and improves their quality of life significantly. And so this, as far as management goes, we can imply or implement choice and the ability for them to make decisions on a day-to-day basis just through management practices and setup and that can improve their quality of life significantly. But when it comes to our training and interactions with our horses, we can also do this. And I believe that a lot of people, myself included, when I first started training differently, when I first started experimenting with this idea, when I first even heard of the idea of giving a horse a choice to be ridden or not, or to be tacked up or not, or go into the arena or not or go over a jump or not. My immediate thought was last dangerous.

And why would, and also why would they ever choose to do that? That was a sad reality when I realized that my fear around giving my horses a choice was that I feared them saying no. I feared that they would just not choose me, that they wouldn’t want to do the thing I wanted them to do. And we would never get to do those things. And I just feared being rejected.

It was a fear of injection. And then I also, the little bit more practical side of things was that I thought it would be dangerous because we’ve all grown up and been raised in this type of dynamic with horses where we had to be the leader and we had to be the one making the decisions, the ones choosing things. Because horses were dangerous. Horses were flight animals. Horses will just act on impulse and forget about us and we’ll just end up being really injured or hurt if we ever give our horses a choice.

So there’s a lot of understandable fear around getting the horses choice. But when I started to explore, when I started to explore choice and I really got into it and I wrestled with it and I started to experiment with it, ask my horses what they thought, I found that the opposite was really true. Actually from a safety perspective. My horses, I mean the amount of injuries and dangerous situations and just everything that happened before when I trained more traditionally or did more pressure and release type training or just more normal standard pass type training where there wasn’t a lot of choice for my horses was far more risky and far more dangerous than anything I do now. My horses, now that knowing they have a choice to do things will do.

Instead of bolting back to the barn, they just stop and look at me and touch my boot and ask me to get off and I say OK, we do something else. We don’t even have to go back to the barn or maybe we do. That’s just one example we call the stop buttons. And that would be an example of giving my horse a choice. And really what giving them a choice means is that we are empowering them to make decisions and also giving them more ability to communicate with us.

And we are listening much closer and we are respecting how they feel in any given situation and responding accordingly. It’s just been really cool and very transformative to experience what it’s like when my horses actually choose to participate in things. Versus I show up at the barn today, I have the plan to ride. I go catch my horse from the pasture, bring him into the arena and go do my riding lesson. Versus now what it looks like is I show up at the barn.

I have a general thought of I’d like to ride today, but we’ll see what my horse feels like today. And I will go out to the pasture and I will invite them to come participate with me and they can choose to or not. And then when they do, we every step of the way I’m asking questions. Tack on, yes, OK, great. Tack on, rider on.

OK, great. Yes, we’re getting rider on and then we’re going out on the trail. And what’s amazing about it too, is after the initial period where I got a lot more Nos because they started realizing they have that freedom to say no. And so they started exercising it. They started communicating more clearly.

I really don’t feel like being written or, and usually we’ll get into this probably in a minute, but there’s a reason why they’re saying no and that really it takes us to that next level when it comes to having that partnership with their horses. But what I’ve seen is that now they say yes way more than they ever would have even way back then. I’m not seeing all the fallout behaviors. I’m not seeing any dangerous behaviors. And they actually enjoy it and they are eager and waiting at the gate and they’re ready to go.

I rarely have my horses say no to things these days unless something is wrong, so it’s a really good sign that I can take into consideration and make adjustments. If my horse is saying no after 20 times is saying yes, I’m like OK, red flag. I need to pay attention to this. Yeah, you touched on a couple of things. I was thinking about this idea of choice.

The first thing that popped up into my head from the listeners perspective was why would I give my horse a choice if they’re probably just not going to want to get ridden? And then I was. If your horse doesn’t want to do this, are either of you really enjoying it? Because like I’ve been dragged along the things I didn’t want to go to when I’ve had to sit there and pretend to enjoy it or put on a good face so that the people that I was with didn’t feel insulted. But it doesn’t fill your cup up.

And I what? So what? I think that’s a really interesting point. And two, yeah, I have a dressage mayor who she, I’ve been working with this mayor for almost three years now. And for the first two years, she was such a willing partner, so good at home.

And then she got to the point where we were going to start showing and taking lessons and all of that, and she completely shut down on the trailer when it came to trailering. And I got her to her first horse show. She was fine going there. And then I think through just being at the horse show and being overwhelmed by the whole thing, didn’t want to get back on the trailer to go home and cue us like having the vets coming and sedating her so that we could like literally just get her home. And so I really took a step back and said, OK, I don’t think the word stubborn got thrown out a lot towards this horse.

And I just knew at my core I was like, in the work, this mare has never been stubborn. She’s never really said no to me. She’s never. She’s just never shown me that. And you would think in two years I would have seen a hint of stubbornness if it was that stark about getting on the trailer.

And so I looked into sort of nervous system stuff and really giving her the choice of, hey, you can decide to not get on the trailer, but like when you fly backwards off the trailer, that’s a little dangerous. So you know, and actually through giving her the choice of saying you’re not stuck on here, she actually stopped rushing out of the trailer. She actually started just like coming on the trailer and taking deep breaths and being like, cool, OK, we’re here. And once that happened, we started getting a lot more nose with a lot of other things. And it turns out this snowball of us getting everything checked out right because we’re like, she just more and more than no became she used to pause 6 times.

It’s a quarter mile walk to the arena from the barn. So say she would pause 6 times going to the barn, I wouldn’t really put pressure on but I would wait there, wait for her to give a lick into chew and then we’d proceed. And it got to the point where she literally full blown started pawing. No, and funny enough, we just had the body worker out last night to work on her and she’s holy crap, this horse’s scapulas all screwed up this rib situation. She’s got this high done situation and and she’s never bucked me off yet.

So she’s clearly not in pain or the typical thought process of there’s something wrong versus this horse just doesn’t want to do this or whatever. And so that idea of like just really championing for the horse and saying there’s a reason they’re saying now, I think that’s the next step of just horsemanship in general. Because there are plenty of people that can do the, oh, OK, touch the cone or do that versus actually understanding when the horse is saying yes because they genuinely want to, versus them saying no because there’s something wrong. Does that make sense? Yeah.

And it’s such an amazing opportunity. Let me rephrase that. It is if we start acknowledging the no or them just being what is a no. A no is resistance. A no is not engaging in a similar behavior to what they did the other day, right?

It’s the absence of something that would normally be there. So we have to really define like what is a note in a horse and what is what means a horse is saying no. And those are the early things, right when we’re starting to see some signs of stress, some displacement behaviors, some reluctance or resistance to moving forward or to doing a behavior that they previously had done or just not as enthusiastically engaging in something as they usually didn’t. So monitoring those and having a good baseline for what our horse normally would do is critical for that. But sometimes we don’t have a baseline.

Sometimes horses are coming out of the gate like I hate everything and I hate life. And there’s there’s no yes, there’s only no. That puts us in a position where we’re trying to navigate. OK, Is the no because of pain or is it because of fear or, and sometimes those are the same thing, meaning not same but they go hand in hand together. Their fear of pain.

Sometimes the no is because of panic, like leaving buddies behind. A lot of horses don’t want to walk to the arena or go to the barn because their buddies are left behind or they don’t want to go to show because of that. Not about the riding. It’s not because they don’t love you or they don’t want to be your partner. Yes, but they need their buddies.

So where is this note coming from? And that takes a lot of practice and skill to be able to understand and evaluate and knowing your course and truly being invested in a true partnership. Because I think a lot of equestrians, we’ll throw around the word of partner. This is my, we wanna have partnership, my equine partner. They’re a good team together.

But can it be a true partnership if one of the partners doesn’t get to say yes or no, they’re just having, they’re just being drug along. I compare a lot of what we do, and this is going to sound harsh and I apologize if it does, but also it’s reality, which is that a lot of the equestrian community treats horses like vehicles or like a sports car that they park in the garage to keep clean and nice. They put the, maybe even put a sheet over it, right? And they keep it clean. They get it polished, they make sure it has all the nice shiny new gadgets and everything.

And then they take it out for the evening or the weekend drives and then they put it back in the garage to wait for them until they’re ready to ride again, until they’re ready to drive again. And that sounds a lot like what we do with our horses, and that’s removing all that autonomy and treating them as an inanimate object that isn’t sentient, that doesn’t have feelings and opinions and doesn’t have thoughts on the situation or feelings. And so if we’re really going to have a true partnership and if we’re really going to acknowledge that our horses do have feelings, that they do have a working brain, that they do have a nervous system, they are a lot like it. And there’s not a lot that’s different actually. Then we have to start with they can also say no as much as they can say yes.

We, it’s not just the no is very important. If my horses can’t say no to something, then what does that yes mean? It doesn’t mean anything. There is no yes, just compliance. So I have decided that I do want a partnership with my horse.

I do not want a relationship with my horse where the dynamic is that I am the controlling person and the horse is just subjected to being compliant to me and I have all the control. I don’t want that power dynamic. I want my horse to have more choice. I want them to have more say in the situation. Now, of course, this is a human world.

Domestication is not where horses were naturally meant to be in. They don’t understand colic and surgeries and going to the vet clinic and getting onto the trailer trailers are death boxes to them. So like all of these things we asked them to do, right? Not normal, not natural. Even putting shoes on a trimming of feet’s not natural.

They need it. It’s health, it’s necessary for their survival, but it’s not natural and training is not natural. So I acknowledge that and I acknowledge that I am their, I’m going to say guide. I’m their human guide in this human world and I do in because of that assume I’m more leadership type role in that partnership, but that doesn’t mean I have to completely remove all access to all choice and all freedom and everything from my horses. This is a giant there’s a big scale, right?

We can slide from all the way from one end to the other. And I think for a long time we’ve lived in the side of the scale where horses do exactly what we do, when we want them to do, and they have no choice or control over the outcomes. We pay for them. They’re expensive. And so I don’t want that kind of partnership.

And so that’s where I’ve worked really hard to find other ways to go about it. Yeah, I was listening to this podcast a little while ago that was talking about people pleasers, human people pleasers. And they were like, how can I trust your yes if I can’t trust your no? And I thought it’s the same with horses. If they just don’t even have the ability to say no, then they don’t have the ability to say yes.

And some horses maybe are better at just putting their head down and maybe shutting down and just doing the work. But then you don’t have a relationship. Yeah, that’s just a survival mechanism. They’re just in a learned helpless state and though they’re still not saying yes, they’re just surviving. We’re not thriving, we’re surviving.

That’s such a good analogy that people pleaser type situation, cause a lot of horses are they are people pleasers, meaning that not that they go around saying I’m a people pleaser, but it’s the same in the sense that they are very compliant. They want everybody to be happy. They are very biddable animals, which is why we’re able to ride these massive animals and make them do what we want. And one of the worst things that we can do, and I see it all the time on social media, I hear people make these comments all the time. If they didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t.

My response to that is what does it look like when your horse says they don’t want to do it? And then what happens to them when they do that, which is bad things. Horses that say they don’t want to do this very loudly and consistently and they have boundaries and they stand up for themselves. They get in a lot of trouble and sometimes it’s the end of their life. So we have bred them especially even more to be very biddable, very compliant and to very quickly move into more of a shutdown learned helpless state for and just survive.

The horses that don’t shut down end up in really bad places and or have really rough handling usually unless they happen to find a Unicorn of a human, which is amazing for them. But they’re very few and far between. The ones that are very invested in giving this horse a voice and are not insistent that you must be ridden or you’re a waste of pasture space or whatever it is, right? And that’s actually how I started changing is I came across a horse, she came into my life, her name was Tiger. I talked about her quite a bit.

She passed away in 2020. But when she showed up in my life. I was still very much in that old mindset of horses do what I say, they have to earn their keep. I can’t just beat another horse, passion, ornament, blah, blah, blah, OK. And they have to be compliant and do it.

I don’t think I would have told you that, though. If you had asked me, I would have said, Oh yeah, we’re partners. I love my horse and all that, but my actions didn’t line up with what I was saying. It was a bit of a toxic relationship there. And so then this horse comes into my life and this horse will not comply.

She will not. She’s panicked, she is scared, she takes 2 hours to catch out of the pasture, she’s difficult to get in the trailer, she’s terrified of everything, saddling, bridling, everything. Beautiful horse had really good training but once she she gets to a new home and she’s OK, I’m going to try. She was doing this at the old home too but got even worse when she was with me because I wasn’t. There’s a line of where I will cross when it starts to become abuse and everybody’s lines a little bit different and sadly, but it’s the reality of it.

So how far will you go to make this horse comply? And mine was much, it wasn’t as far as the owner before me. The owner before me was willing to do a lot more to make this horse comply. So she wouldn’t shut down, She wouldn’t comply. And so I was like, man, I can’t do more than I’m doing.

This is starting to become. It’s awful. She’s not happy, I’m not happy. We’re miserable. I’ve tried everything.

I’ve exhausted the vet appointments, I’ve exhausted saddle fits, I’ve exhausted the body workers, I’ve exhausted the farrier appointments, I’ve exhausted things and I can’t find the cause for this. Why does she keep acting like this? And at the time I didn’t know anything about nose and positive reinforcement and choice and all that. She pushed me to start exploring something new because I was to the point where I was like, I either have to put her down, sell her and who knows where she’ll end up, or I have to do something different. And so that’s why it started pushing me to learn more about what it could be like to have a real partnership with horses where they actually have a choice and things.

It was an adventure. It’s been a little bit of a bumpy Rd. to get here, but I am not going back. It’s amazing. Yeah, no, it’s I always tell people, so I event and do show jumping primarily.

And like one of the first things, once the horses learn to just go under saddle and they’re learning to jump, I will typically teach them to stop at the jump. Owners when they watch me are like, Oh my God, what are you doing? That’s the complete opposite of what you should want to do. And I’m like, I want to know that if they think I’ve screwed up that they can do this or that if it’s scary or they’re not ready or whatever, that they have this ability to say, hey, maybe we try something else or maybe this isn’t it or whatever versus hold my beer. If they’re confident enough, once they’re very well trained, that’s one thing.

But when they’re young or green or insecure, that hold my beer moment just really takes away from their confidence. And so I always teach them to stop. I had done a lot of work with off the track thoroughbreds and they’re they bid for the fences. And so a lot of it came from myself preservation of being like, if they know that they don’t have to go over the jump, maybe it stops the rushing versus adding a stronger bit or whatever. And I really noticed that their confidence I would skyrocket.

And I go, oh, maybe they’re bidding for the fences because of this internal fear of not either not being able to do it or the repercussions of what happens if they don’t do it or whatever. And so it wasn’t really on purpose, but it was that they had a say in, in at least this one aspect of the training. And every now and then I’ll show up to a lesson with someone. And I recently had an issue with a horse where I had run her and she got tired and we have a minute left on course. And I was like, we should be fine.

And really I should have just pulled her up and I didn’t. And I took her to the next competition and she totally quit. And after I had my little bit of a cry because I spent $2000 and didn’t make it past the show jumping, I was like, oh God. This stems from this last competition when she got tired and now she doesn’t trust going out there. But she at least knows well enough to stop and say, hey, OK, I actually don’t think that you’re good enough right now to go out there.

So we’re going to call it here. And of course, I don’t really use a wimp or a crop. And so I went and took a lesson with a very world renowned show jump trainer. I was like, this is what I’ve been dealing with. She lost confidence, whatever.

And it got towards the end of the lesson when she got a little bit hot and tired and he handed me a crop and he said, I want you to use this. This is not a negative thing. This is encouragement. And I go, God, it’s so interesting that you use these like positive terms with this thing that inflicts pain. And I do a lot of in hand ground work or like I’ll use a whip to point to a certain body part or whatever.

So I’m not like anti whip, but I just found it interesting where I was like, oh, you’re basically saying that this horse isn’t allowed to say no, but you’re saying it in a really nice way that will make people think this just is OK and that. So it really was an interesting point where I was like, oh, it’s not even that people are like I have had the trainers that are like beat that horse until they do like literally like that. And like we’re all crying because we’re like, I don’t want to do that, but this is what the trainer is telling me to do. And and then I have this guy who, you know, as he was saying, I was like, it sounds so positive. And in his head, it probably is positive because he’s sometimes I think people are concerned with, it’s not even the giving the horse the choice thing.

It’s confusing the horse. Like they’re so worried about horses being in a state of confusion of them. And so I think they try to be kind, quote, kind by taking the confusion out of it. No, you jump the jump, you do this thing. By doing that, they put the horses in this state of not being able to say no.

And it just really was such a stark because it was the first time I was like, oh God, people aren’t necessarily doing this out of malice because you see the videos of people and you go, Oh my God, they did this person is lost or whatever. And I was like, God, I just don’t think this guy is coming from this, from a point of wanting to be mean or. And but also culturally, what’s happening for a lot of professionals is they’re having to adopt different lingo and like therapy speak and we’ll cause it. We’ll call it positive washing of terminology because otherwise they’re going to become irrelevant. They’re going to get weaned out and pushed out of the where things are going and they’re going to get picked apart on social media.

They’re going to get ostracized, like all these things because we have a big movement that’s happening. There’s a big awakening in the equestrian community, which is amazing. However, a lot of people want the feels of it, the good vibes of it, and the idea that they’re being kinder and nicer to their horses, but they don’t actually have the practical application of it. They don’t have the head knowledge to be able to do it in a way that feels good. And So what ends up happens to it feels like there’s like a cognitive dissonance, like a disconnect between what they’re telling themselves is happening versus what is actually happening.

Because the head knowledge is not there and the skill set is not there. But they want the improved thing. They want to feel better about what they’re doing. So, and you touched on a couple of different points that were really fantastic. The positive terminology washing, the changing the terminology of things, what that is at its core, what he was saying is you need to apply either positive punishment.

So we need to talk about the terminology here because there’s a scientific terminology which is not the same as emotional terminology and or our English language terminology. So there’s positive reinforcement, which is what I emphasize and do a lot of, which doesn’t mean better. It doesn’t mean good. Positive reinforcement can be highly unethical if it’s done poorly. Positive reinforcement means addition of reinforcer, that’s all it means.

It’s positive as in addition, So mathematical. Negative reinforcement means subtraction or removal of an aversive, so something unpleasant as the reinforcer. Positive punishment does not mean good punishment. It means addition of something aversive, so unpleasant to decrease behavior. And negative punishment means the removal of something pleasant to decrease behavior.

When we’ve got these terms that people are just starting to learn about but don’t actually understand yet, floating around, people are like, oh, I use positive reinforcement. They don’t actually understand what it means and they don’t actually understand what it looks like in real life application. And so there’s this desire, which is a well intended desire and I encourage it and I think it’s great because I, it’s what led me to where I am now. There’s this desire to do better by our horses. There’s this desire to have that partnership.

There’s the desire to be kinder and gentler and achieve these relationships with our horses that we’ve wanted since day one. I don’t, I’m sure most of your listeners have watched Black stallion or whatever it is as a kid and or spirit and are like, I want that. But then we get it into the horse world and we realize, oh, we got to use whips and crops. We end up being the Colonel or whoever he was in spirit who was trying to break the horse’s spirit. But we want to be the other guy and we want to be the one that’s got this bond and this connection with our horse.

And there’s no tack and we’re just jumping over canyons together. But we don’t know how to get there. But we start using this really nice terminology and thinking, Oh, we’re using positive encouragement or whatever, but we’re using a whip because it’s what we know. So what he actually meant in technicals for scientific, the learning theory is he was either asking you to use negative reinforcement if it meant like a constant tapping. So if you’re just tap, tap until the horse does it and then you’d stop tapping, right?

So that’s negative reinforcement. You are applying an aversive, so something unpleasant until you see the desired behavior and then you release it, you take it off. So it’s another version of a spur or even tapping the horse with the whip. If they start to refuse the jump as a correction, we’ll use that word correction. That’s actually positive punishment.

So you’re applying an aversive to decrease the likelihood that the horse will stop at the next jump. Because if they associate, I’m going to get hit with the crop, even if it’s lightly. If I stop at a jump and I don’t want that, I’ll go over the jump, then that is positive punishment. So we have to separate some of this terminology from reality. And This is why I really encourage people to take the time to do a short but deep dive into learning theory and what these terms actually mean and actually understand what it looks like in real life application when it comes to horses, but also other species.

And then when they’re watching coaches and trainers and social media influencers and whoever training, turn off the volume, stop listening to what they’re saying, watch what they’re doing and associate and look, oh, that was negative reinforcement right there. OK, that was positive, whatever it is. And start training your eye and training your brain to recognize what’s actually happening in the brain for the horse and for us, so that we can see through all of this use of these different terms that sound really good but are just covering up the same old stuff. We’ve always been doing it. Nothing has changed.

You were just using different words and it makes it sound better, which is the situation you were in. Yeah. And it really, as I had looked back over the last couple of months at just the lesson itself, I really have been playing with this idea of, I think a very common term we use as writers is like tools in our toolbox and like what tools we have in our toolbox to fix a problem or to create a new behavior or whatever. And what I’ve been playing around with a lot is I don’t really ride with a whip anymore. And I did that specifically because I would find myself in a situation where I would start to get emotional or frustrated and I wouldn’t like wail on my horse, but the horse would do something and I’d be like, OK, just go forward or do whatever.

And then I realized I have no freaking idea how I would solve this problem without the whip. Like, that in itself is the issue. And so. You actually when we use tools like you mentioned, like the big bits and stuff and they get results, right, because they work by definition, it all works. The rider is being reinforced like for using those, whether it’s negative reinforcement, it’s usually negative reinforcement for us because there’s something that we don’t like is happening.

And so we I have to think about the exact situation. But either way, we’re being reinforced for it because we see something we don’t like, we do an action, whether it’s putting on a bigger bit or using the whip a little harder or whatever it is and we get the result we’re looking for. Guess what, that’s positive reinforcement in the brain. So we are actively also learning through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment. And so we are active learners the whole time too.

We get so hyper fixated on how much we’re training our horses, but we’re actually also learning the whole time. And This is why it’s such a slippery slope into bigger and more aggressive tools because it’s really reinforcing to use them because they work and they work fast. And when you reduce the, your ability to access those tools, you have to get creative and look for alternative routes to your reinforcement, which is to get the results you’re looking for. And one of the hardest things for people to do, myself included earlier on is to start all the way from the beginning and look at Ground Zero. OK, I’m going to relearn everything.

Like I had to relearn leading. I had to like, how do I teach a horse to lead with positive reinforcement only because a lot of times what people want to do is keep the stuff they currently have and then just add some treats. That’s technically we could argue back and forth depending whatever, but it’s technically still negative reinforcement and you’re just counter conditioning with some treats. And so you’re not actually training with positive reinforcement at that moment. And so for you to go, I want to lead with positive reinforcement only quotation marks only because we can’t have completely isolated learning from all the other parts.

It’s just, it’s the emphasis, it’s the focus. When I say positive reinforcement, we have to, in our minds, it’s really easy for the horses to learn how to do this. They love it. They have so much fun, they learn very fast. But we have to retrain ourselves and we have to relearn how to access our own reinforcement, which is getting the results of our horse leading with us or being able to go to the show or getting over the jumps or whatever it is, picking up a hoof.

And so that’s actually the hardest part is applying all of the things that we’re learning to ourselves and recognizing that we are having to learn something new and learn a new. Use a different path in her brain now to access the same kind of reinforcement we wanted before. Because you were talking about what about if I didn’t have the, what would I do now? You put yourself in that situation where you had to find a different path in your brain to access the reinforcement you were looking for, which is a great opportunity to explore alternative options, possibly kinder options. Anything else?

I had a. Horse very recently. This horse is a show jumper and she is a relatively seasoned horse. There had been a lot of things changing. She changed pasture.

The farm that I’m at got a stallion. We were hacking one day and the neighbor’s guardian dog ran up to the fence. We were lunging one day and the neighbor’s dog ran up to the fence. All of these things slowly chipped away at her nervous system to the point where she ended up in a complete Free State and to the point where I literally could not get this horse to trot. And this is when I was like, OK, before I start, like, tap, what other options do I have?

And that I realized I was like, I don’t really have any other options. So I was like, I guess I’m just going to get off and call it a day. And So what I started doing was just on the ground. I was like, does she even know voice commands? If I’m on the ground and I tell her to walk, does she walk?

If I tell her to trot in hand, does she trot? What is my cue to get her to trot without the whip? All of these things. And I was like, I’m there doing my little trot. Come on, trot without trying to put pressure on the halter and like all of these things.

And I was like, but it only took two sessions of that before I was able to get back on her. And I started slowly again in the saddle. And I was like, OK, trot. And then she was like, oh, yeah, cool, got this. And I was just like, oh, my God.

In any other world, I would have just used the whip or used the spur or whatever to say, I know you know how to trot. Let’s go. And so that in itself, and we’re only talking like 3 weeks ago that this happened. So it’s not. And this is where I get into the thought of what even is if we wanted.

I always think of with how prevalent social media is that at any given point people could be taking pictures or videos or whatever of your training and how ashamed would you be if the videos of your day-to-day training showed up on the Internet. And I think so many riders would be like devastated if what happened on their farm. Which is so sad. Sad. Yeah.

And I’ve been a firm believer for years that, you know, FEI should be able to do barn drops, like just drop into your barn on any given day and see what happens. No notice, no anything. And like, how much would drug choices and what you know, specifically with drug, because I’ve worked in plenty of FEI barns where the horses are getting all sorts of medications, but they literally on a whiteboard have how long out from the show the horse can have that drug and whatever. And I’m just like, and that’s a whole nother conversation of what are you trying to cover up? What is your horse doing that’s making you think it needs to be on all of these medications?

But but yeah, it so I always think I’m like if a video got put up. I would feel so much better of people seeing me do this little trot saying trot, trot, trot versus like me using the WIPP, even if it’s lightly constantly to get the same result that I was able to get by taking it 2 sessions versus the one session and having it done right then and there. And. Which is why we’re seeing such a big change in evolution in the equestrian community cuz we have more access to each other we’ve ever had before and more behind the scenes, more things showing up and we’re all and also the general public. So people who don’t know anything about horses are coming on and being like, do you have to beat the horse to get him over the fence?

That doesn’t seem right. It’s a little concerning that people who have no idea about horses have more ethical awareness, more welfare awareness, more recognition of a horse stressed or in pain than the majority of equestrians do. They literally do. If you ask any person off the road to watch a horse doing some sort of training exercise and you ask them whether they’re stressed or relaxed, I would bet so much money that they would be able to identify it, and they won’t even be able to tell you why. They can just see it.

But we’ve been so conditioned to ignore it and label it as things like stubbornness and a horse of being a dominant, whatever it is, all the labels, the red mare label thing that we just have ignored it and ignored it. And we should be ashamed of some of the stuff we do. I’m ashamed of some of the stuff I used to do and I would. Obviously I’m human and I make mistakes. My learning curve was not, it didn’t happen overnight.

I didn’t. All of a sudden I switch over, But it’s gradually gotten better as I’ve practiced at it and as I’ve learned that I’ve created new neural pathways and I’ve created more access to the type of reinforcers I’m looking for. I’ve created new behavioral patterns, things like this. I’ve worked really hard at that, but I used to do the worst of the worst as far as and I’m not, I don’t hide this stuff. I used to ride in like really heavy rocker like heavy used to use whips and chains to get horses into trailers, used to blindfold them to get them in the stuff that I it’s just bad.

I forced laid horses down like it was rough. And I don’t do any of that stuff anymore. And there’s a bit of that peer pressure coming from social media because now we have other equestrians holding us to better standards. And additionally, we have the general public saying, hold up, this isn’t right. We would not do this to our dogs.

We wouldn’t do this to cats. If somebody did some of the stuff we did to horses, to a dog, the pitchforks that would come out the fire, the rage that would be experienced by the general public would be astronomical. Yet it’s every day for horses. And that’s so sad. Yeah.

I think it was earlier this year maybe or maybe at the end of last year, where in eventing the conversation of whips at competition really came into question. I was having a conversation with my mom, who’s a very old school equestrian. She’s a fox hunter. She grew up western, so she’s a bit wild in terms of her riding horses. I remember being like, I think it’s important that oh, because I was having an issue with a horse or something and my mom was like, God, why aren’t you using your crop?

That’s the whole point when she used the term, you always go to war with your weapons and I go. Oh my gosh. 1 isn’t war. I shouldn’t be struggling so hard with the task at hand that I need to resort to force in. That mindset What?

A mindset and also I use the same example of. It’s not about whether or not equestrians can understand the nuance of. In the best case scenario, like I always use the example of, say you have a table left-handed bend to a right angled corner. A lot of inventors will have a crop in their right hand, and even if they don’t necessarily use the crop, they might put it against the shoulder or whatever to give that horse a wall. Because the question is literally asking the horse to run out to the right side.

If nobody can just turn tune into this on the general broadcast station and they see 30 people come around and use the crop on the right shoulder, they’re going to be like, how much 30 people hit their horse with a bat? And that is not a good look. And my mom, she got all defensive. And then I was like, OK, we’ll move on. And she called me the next day and she was like, I really thought about it and you’re right.

Like it’s not about whether or not even if it is right, it’s how can it be perceived? And I’m like, why do we have to one? Should we be designing courses where that’s the question, that’s the answer that people have to do, or there are just so many things that go into it. But what is your stance on where ethical training and good trading meets sort of competition and where the pitfalls and maybe the goodness is, but where we can be better? Before I go into that, I want to go back really quick because you gave such a beautiful example of what choice could look like for a horse and acknowledging their no.

And I wanted to draw back to the beginning of our conversation where, OK, so you were talking about how with your horse, I think it was the mayor, she didn’t want to trot. And so you got off despite probably your internal monologue yelling at you to make this horse do it. So you got off because she said I can’t do this. You gave your normal cues, you said your normal things. She’s done it before in the past.

But today she said no, I cannot do this. And you said OK, this is frustrating but I acknowledge the no and I’m going to respect it. Something where people get hung up on, and I did too until I got more experience is they end the story there. So they end the story at OK, your horse told you no, you got off and you let her win so you’re never going to get the trot again. That wasn’t the end of the story.

The end of the story was why did she say no? And how can I help her say yes? OK, so we go back to the drawing board. Maybe it’s we need to figure out if there’s a pain cause maybe it’s she just needs to be reintroduced to verbal cues. Maybe she just needs a couple of days of rest.

Maybe she I need some more positive reinforcement to encourage it. I don’t know. There’s a lot of different options. There’s literally trillions of options of things we could do. But the point is that when we’re talking about choice and control for our horses, when we’re talking about giving them choice and allowing them to say yes and no, it looks as simple as something like that where you acknowledge your horse doesn’t want to do something that you’ve asked for it.

They didn’t want to do it, They weren’t jumping too in and excited about it. And you’re like, all right, cool. I accept. Let’s go back to the drawing board and figure out, and maybe it’s within the same session, maybe it’s the next day, maybe it’s a week later. It doesn’t really matter because your horse is not winning.

It’s not about winning. They’re not trying to get one over on you. They are not this manipulative mastermind that is trying to take over the world that we have been led to believe. It feels like they just want to keep the peace. They want reinforcers.

So either release from pressure or something impetitive. So something pleasant for them and they want to avoid aversives, avoid unpleasant things, they want to avoid punishers, corrections and they just want to thrive. They want to be feeling good and they want to just live their happy life, which we all do. So if we acknowledge those Nos like that, then and we are actually doing a good job of supporting our horse and making sure they’re thriving, we will problem solve it. We will figure out where that nose is coming from.

And sometimes that means we need to be more consistent with our application of negative reinforcement. So that’s the pressure and release. So maybe we needed to break it down into smaller pieces for her. We add a little pressure, she takes a half step forward, release pressure. Maybe she’s a little confused about what we’re asking.

There’s a lot of options like I said, but that is an example of choice for horses. It is not letting your horse run over you. It is not the same thing as letting your horse dominate the world. It’s not the same thing. It’s never riding again.

Giving your horses choice, listening to them, letting them say yes or no is something as subtle as that. Now we can get more, we can progress down the hierarchy of like more clear and obvious, yes and no. So like when I’m doing what we call cooperative care and horse training with positive reinforcement, I actually train behaviors where the horse, if they touch this object, it means yes. If they touch this object, it means no kind of thing. Or if they touch this object, it means yes.

And as long as they’re holding it, they’re continuing to say yes. But if they stop touching it, that means no. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It can be more like your example, which was a beautiful one. So I wanted to tie that back into our beginning of our conversation because I feel like that was a very practical application of what this can look like.

And it’s not this big pie in the sky idea that you guys can’t be applying tomorrow with your horse or today. Go out there and apply it today with your horse. If your horse, you walk out to the pasture with a halter in your hand and they run off, guess what? That was a no not. Today.

So we need to figure out why. So it’s not no, OK, now I can never catch my horse again. It’s just not right this second. We need to figure out why your horse doesn’t want to be caught. And then we need to find a way to access the yes, we need to find a way to make being quote caught.

Let’s just say your horse runs off away from you when you see that halter, when they see it. This doesn’t mean you can never catch a horse again. We’re not throwing your hands up and being like, I guess their feet are going to suffer and they’re never going to have medical care again. That’s not what we’re talking about when we say give your horse a choice. We’re talking about acknowledging your horse does not want to be caught.

Something is wrong. Something is not pleasant about being caught. What is it? How can I change it? How can I make this better for the horse so that they want to be?

And that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what choice looks like for a horse. That’s what listening to them communicating looks like. That’s what having a good partnership looks like with your horse. Yeah, no, I think that’s such a good example.

And This is why, just to give my own little tangent, I had a horse who I would consider myself quite a type personality. I think a lot of horse people are they’re either really A type or really B type. And I had a horse who was probably just as a type as I was like very, she was very Workman and she would come up to me. I did self-care. So I was at the everyday doing the care whatever and she lived out.

So I would just go out and I would show up with my halter everyday and for 10 days straight she would come up to me and I’d be like, cool, we’ll go work these ten days. On the 11th day I would walk out with that halter and she would canter to the far back corner and be like no. And instead of being like you’re going to get, I’m like, OK, she wants today off. And I ended up inventing her into the upper levels. And I’d found out right before our first international that she was completely blind.

And I think just from the fact that I’d always given her a choice of what to do, I always let her stop at jumps. And she finished her career with a clean competition record. Like never had an issue that literally she just I was like, OK, I trust you enough to and I’m like, but you could have said no well enough. This is to find out that you were blind. This is what I mean, that horses are so biddable.

There’s, they just want to get along with us. They just want to do their thing. They just want to be there’s. It’s not that they want to make us happy, because I don’t want to project human emotions and feelings onto them. But if we can make their lives at least somewhat reasonable and enjoyable, they will do it, and they just usually will unless something’s wrong.

That’s the thing. If something’s wrong, they’re not going to. They are going to because we can make them do it. If you they’re not going to enjoy it and the yes, they’re going to keep saying no over and over again. Now you can choose to override the no and force the worst into compliance, which is a lot of what we do.

All the whips, the bigger bits, the lunging them in circles, even the whole idea of making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard, that can be used to the point of forcing a horse to do something. I want to set my horses up for success so that that they happen to fall into the correct answer that I’m looking for and it would be much harder for them to find the incorrect answer. They have no concept of correct or incorrect when it comes to our objects like pie in the sky ideas. Or if you want me to do what like what is a pee off what? That doesn’t make any sense to horse.

But so I tend to think of it more as I need to set up my antecedents. I need to set up my training everything and start as such a small approximation of what I’m looking for. But the horse gets it right. So that’s how I think of, but a lot of people use that to say we’re going to make it more difficult to be outside of the trailer than inside, right? It’s forcing the horse.

OK, it is. And you’re not listening to a no. So anyway, I could probably go on for another hour about all of the stuff that we do and how what it’s really is for the horse. I just think that we need to, when you think about giving your horse a choice and you’re thinking about listening to them and developing that partnership, it can start as subtle and it’s unobvious, although big, because you’re probably going to have a big emotional reaction to it. Your horse running off and away from you probably cause you to feel a little bit of, at least for me or some people I know, a little bit of doubt in yourself, a little bit of insecurity, maybe a little bit of rejection.

Did I do something wrong? Or this horse, oh, they just need to do it like we just need to. It’s going to cause some sort of emotional reaction, you guys, for the first time when you let your horse say no and you’re going to have to battle with yourself. And then when you win, when you make yourself give that horse a choice, it’s going to feel so much better. Going to your relationship is going to improve dramatically with your horse and you’re going to be so grateful for it later on.

But at first it will be hard. So I’m not going to sugar coat. It’s hard at the beginning. Yeah. So what are some sort of practical daily things that riders can maybe start doing that will strengthen the relationship that they have with their horse?

Yeah, I liked your question about the show Horse World. And I know there’s a tremendous amount of people out there that are competing their horses. And I don’t actively compete now. I used to for a long time. And it’s not that I’m against competing.

I just find that I don’t personally find it very reinforcing anymore and I’d rather just go to something else with my horses. So it’s a personal decision, not that I don’t think it can be done. I think that as far as practical, whether you’re at the show or at home, I think everything we’ve been talking about as far as learning how your horse learns. So that’s a really big step forward. If you can objectively evaluate a situation and recognize what’s reinforcing or what’s punishing or what’s aversive and what’s a petitive in the situation for the horse, what is that learning process looking like and what is it that’s actually being shaped here?

I think that can transform so much. It doesn’t matter if you use positive reinforcement or not. You can continue to use the same pressure release, clicker or not clicker, negative reinforcement, pressure release, all that same stuff you’ve always done. But most of us are not taught what that actually means and like what it is that we’re actually doing. That works.

We play all around until something works and then we’re like, oh, that works. But if you can sit here and think, OK, I want to teach my horse to take a step forward, literally, we need to be able to break it down, not walk forward, not go do that jump, not compete, not these big things. Yes, that’s our related goals. But right now, what is the smallest approximation of, OK, you want to take your horse over a Liverpool jump? I don’t know, that’s your goal.

OK, smallest approximation of that. Let’s say your horse already knows how to walk under shadow. OK, great. Let’s start with tiny little ground pole and can we just walk straight over a ground pole then can we? And how are we going to reinforce this?

So we put the pressure on because we ask them to walk forward, they walk over the ground pole, we take the pressure off, right? We have to learn how these things are actually working at A more. It’s going to feel a little bit more mechanical because it is, it’s very scientific. It’s very black and white there. It’s like A + B = C kind of situation.

We have to learn all that, put that into practical application and then from the field side of things, the relationship, the partnership side of things, we need to Start learning true equine body language. And this is an area that sadly most equestrians are very undereducated in. Some studies show that almost no equestrians know how to accurately read coarse body language. So recognizing things like a triangulated eye or them chin becoming compressed or a head turn, or what a lick and shoe actually means because it doesn’t mean processing and what a tail swish might mean, or like being able to accurately read your horse’s body language. And that’s going to have that back and forth dialogue.

You’re going to enable that back and forth dialogue between your horse so that you can actually acknowledge when they’re saying no and acknowledge when they’re saying yes. We can’t have a real conversation with our horses when we don’t actually understand the language you’re speaking. So learning about body language, learning about how learning works, tying those together to support your horse and to support you. No matter what your training goals are, whether you’re showing or riding at home, or your horse is taking a break out in the pasture for a while, or they’re a companion or you trail ride, these things will serve you no matter what. They just, they will open up so many doors and your horse will thank you because they will go, oh, she’s listening or he’s listening.

Finally they are listening. Finally they can hear me. And that’s my, I guess my practical advice. And I feel it is a lot. It’s not going to be like, OK, I go write a book and I’m done.

It’s something you’re going to study. And it should be as important, if not more important than all the writing lessons, than all of the other stuff that we spend so much time in our equitation lessons or riding lessons in, which are beautiful. We do need to be fit. We do need to learn how to ride, but we don’t spend anywhere near that amount of time actually learning about our courses and how they learn and how they communicate. And I think that’s a tragedy and why we’re in such a sticky situation in the competition world and just the questioning world as a whole, because the science is now finally catching up and showing us where gaping wide holes are in our knowledge, in our application.

And yet all of the training and all of the competing and everything is stuck way back when. And so things need to. How do people find you? Follow along with what you do. All of that good stuff.

Yeah, the best place to start is going to be my website. So the willing equine.com and of course you can find me on social media mostly Instagram is the one I use or Facebook. Those are my dominant ones. And the website has my blog, my podcast, my coaching curriculum and Academy and as well as access to consultations, things like that. So that’s going to be the place to start with the website.

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me. This was great. Thank you for having me.