Without “being there” and observing the interaction, the only thing we can say for sure is that the communication between you and your horse failed. Why it failed is a more complicated issue that frustrates multitudes of riders daily. You are not alone.

Communication can fail because of rider error. It can fail because the horse is not sufficiently far along in its training to understand the shape that the rider’s aids suggest. It can fail because the horse is physically unable to take the shape because of conformation faults, old injuries, lingering soreness from yesterday’s workout, or equipment that restricts or interferes with the shape. It can fail because the horse is mentally burned out. Or the communication can fail because the horse simply has the kind of personality that says that day, “I don’t want to,” or “You can’t make me” or “You didn’t ask the right way so I’m going to ignore that.

You need to examine your particular communication failure from all of those different perspectives in order to figure out why things didn’t go according to your plan. The first thing to ask yourself is whether the horse is capable of understanding your request. Where is he in his training? Is this something he’s just learned or a movement he’s been doing for some time?

Next, ask yourself a few questions about the horse’s body condition. Is this a new horse that might be happier with a different saddle or bit than the ones you have chosen? Could the horse be a little sore from strenuous work his last time out? Are you asking for a movement that might be difficult for this horse given his current level of physical conditioning or his conformation?

Think about the horse’s mental condition. Having you been drilling this or similar movements a great deal recently? Have you just returned from a stressful show or other event? Or has he been confined for several days without any opportunity to play a little before working?

Be honest about your riding skills. Is the movement you asked for something that is relatively new in your riding experience? Is this a movement that other riders can get from this horse easily? Are you completely relaxed, balanced and following the motion of the horse as you apply your aids? Are you applying the correct aids in a coordinated way with the right timing and right degree of pressure?

When you put the answers to all of these questions together, what you need to do next will be much clearer. For example, if the horse is green, he may just need more quiet repetitions of exactly the same aids applied in the same rhythm with exactly the same timing and degree of pressure until the light bulb goes off in his head that this particular set of pressures goes away when he takes the right shape. Until that happens, the rider may be doing everything correctly but the results of the communication will be uneven.

This scenario assumes, of course, that the rider has an independent seat and can apply aids in a way that influences the horse. If not, then there’s the root of the problem. She needs to keep on practicing, using the horse’s response as feedback that helps her learn when she’s got it right. Until the rider gets better, there will be many more times ahead when the communication is less than perfect. That’s alright. Work with a good instructor who can help you through the rough spots as you develop the independent seat you need for clear communication.

If the horse is an old campaigner who absolutely knows what piaffe means or how to do a perfect rollback, then the rider needs to ask if the horse may be hurting physically or a burned out mentally. If the horse is sore or sour, then they should do something else that day until those problems are resolved. If those aren’t issues, then the rider needs to consider the horse’s personality. Is this an animal that sometimes has an attitude or that looks for ways to evade its work? Then you may need to repeat your request, reinforcing it by using a greater degree of the pressures you know the horse understands or even enforcing the aids with the spur or crop.

Depending on your own personality, your first reaction to a communication breakdown may be to blame yourself for being inept or stupid. Or you blame the horse for being stubborn or grouchy. Or you blame the instructor for putting you on a second-rate school horse that’s not much fun to ride. Assigning blame does not fix a problem. Instead, look at the communications failure as an opportunity. The best way to improve your riding is to learn from your mistakes. Just keep riding.

Horses have taught me most of what I know about training horses. This is a secondhand story, but the story and the horse impressed me enough that I never forgot it. If memory serves, the guy who told me the story was Bud Blackburn, one of the first people to bring Quarter horses into our area. Bud had a stallion named Rock and was doing quite a bit of breeding.

One day a guy called Bud and said his mare ready to be bred. Could he bring her over? Sure, Bud says, and pretty soon he sees a flatbed truck (that means it had no sides or back for those of you who aren’t into trucks) coming down his driveway. Bud had to rub his eyes when he saw the payload. The mare was standing in the center of the truck platform looking over the top of the cab. The guy pulled into Bud’s yard and found a bank he could back up to. The mare was wearing a Western saddle. There was a rope running from a stake pocket on one side of the platform, up and around the saddle horn, and down to a stake pocket on the other side.

The guy and the mare were both cool as cucumbers. He untied the rope, unwrapped the horn, and unsaddled the mare. Then he turned her around, walked her to the back of the truck and she jumped down. Off they went to find Rock and get her bred. When the party was over, the guy asked the mare to jump back up on the truck platform and she complied. He tied the mare’s halter rope over the top of the cab and put the saddle back on. Then he ran the rope up from one side of the truck, around the horn, and down to the other side again. The fella paid Bud and off he went with his mare standing on the flatbed, leaving Bud to pick his jaw up off the ground.

The guess the moral of this story is that some horses are so darn good you can get away with anything. We had a horse like that once named Mama. She wasn’t much of a looker but she knew the drill so well that she could make anybody look good in the show ring no matter how bad a rider they were. We used to rent her out at shows so people could go home feeling good because they’d won a ribbon.

If there’s a lesson here, it might be that if you go to someone who calls themselves a trainer, check out the kind of horses they work with first. A good trainer should be able to work with all temperaments, all breeds, all sexes, and all kinds of horses. We get all kinds every year here at Meredith Manor. We get baby horses that have been running wild in a pasture before they arrive. They’re a totally clean slate. We also get a lot of reform school candidates, even a few that have been rejected from clinics by come of the current gurus traveling the country. And we get everything in between.

There’re all OK with us because we want our students to experience what it’s like to work with the hard ones as well as the easy ones. Anybody can be a success with the easy horses. But professional trainers don’t get the easy horses. They get the ones the owners or other trainers have given up on. They can’t depend on the horse’s good nature and willingness to cooperate to get the job done. They have to have a systematic way of putting a foundation on the horse that will eventually allow the horse to specialize in whatever game the owner wants to play.

There’s another lesson. A good natured horse that just goes along with whatever you ask relieves you somewhat from the responsibility of having a training system that can work with any horse playing any game whether that game is dressage or reining or jumping. Some people focus on the game they want to play and all its rules and idiosyncrasies. They build their “training program” around following those rules instead of making sure that the horse progressively develops the rhythm, relaxation, freedom of gaits, acceptance of contact, straightness, balance, impulsion, suppleness, response to the aids, and collection (to whatever degree he’s physically capable) that allow him to play any game.

The nice thing about having a system, whether you’re an amateur rider with one horse or a professional trainer with a barnful of them, is that you’ve always got a place to go to figure out what the horse knows and what he needs to work on. So the horse comes to you with a bad habit or gets confused or cranky somewhere along the way while you’re working with him, you can always back up in the system until you find the hole, fix it, and move forward again. If you’ve got a good system, you’ll never have to worry about being a one-horse wonder.

When new students first arrive here at Meredith Manor, we need to evaluate their current riding capability is so that we can match them up with appropriate horses. So everybody starts out with evaluation rides on our "goldie oldies" to see how they do and moves on to other horses from there.

A "goldie oldie" is a schoolmaster, a horse with a rich and sophisticated vocabulary or understanding of aid pressures. These horses are not the same as " babysitters". A babysitter is a horse that is programmed in a routine and will perform that routine even if its rider asks for it the wrong way. The schoolmaster, by contrast, understands and responds to full range of nuances within a corridor of aids. Since we know that the horse is very knowledgeable, its response to the new student's application of aids tells us volumes about what the rider already knows or still needs to learn at this point.

The "green" horse is the opposite of a goldie oldie. This is a horse that has no vocabulary at all yet or only a limited one. The most sophisticated rider cannot get on a green horse and perform upper level dressage movements or run through a complicated reining pattern. The rider could ask for shapes and movements correctly but the horse, no matter how willing, simply would not understand what was being asked.

The schoolmaster that understands and responds to fine nuances of aid pressures can help a less sophisticated rider develop better feel and timing. The rider who understands more than the green horse can help that horse develop a richer vocabulary that will enable it to communicate with its riders with more finesse and precision. Most horses and riders fall somewhere between these two extremes. Our challenge, of course, is to match each student with a variety of horses so the student has a chance to both learn and teach.

Sophisticated communication between a horse and rider requires that both develop a rich vocabulary. That is accomplished step by small step with each step building on the ones before. First, both the green horse and green rider need to become mentally and physically relaxed. Then both must develop balance and rhythm. Next, the rider needs to understand what sequences of aid pressures create the feeling of certain shapes in the horse. The horse must develop an understanding that when it feels pressures in a certain sequence and its shapes its body a certain way in response to those pressures, they go away.

These aid pressures form a very basic vocabulary that communicates to the horse what the rider wants. When the horse understands the shapes those aid pressures communicate, their communication moves to another level. Then nuances of aid coordiation and feel within a whole corridor of pressures can be added that alter the meaning of the whole corridor to create new understandings.

Developing relaxation, balance and rhythm is like first learning to talk and say words that someone else can understand. You can think of aid pressures as those words and a sequence or corridor of aid pressures as a sentence made up of those words. The larger the rider's vocabulary and the larger the horse's vocabulary--the more words they know--the more sentences they can build and the more precisely they can communicate specific meanings. Changing nuances like timing, intensity of a pressure, or the co-ordination of aids can then subtly alter the meaning of a rider's communication just as changing the tense of a verb or the declention of a noun can alter the meaning of two sentences built of basically the same words.

You can talk to an adult and to a 2-year-old but the complexity of those conversations is going to be very different because of your different vocabularies and degrees of understanding. Similarly, you may have a fantastic vocabulary in English but if you learn to speak Spanish or French, your communication will be much more limited because you lack the same richness of vocabulary.

Understanding the differences or similarities between a horse's vocabulary and that of its rider is important in understanding how to react to a given training situation. If a sophisticated rider is on a green horse, for example, the rider will make allowances for the horse's limited vocabulary. If the horse doesn't respond to a sequence of aids, the rider may simply reapply those aids and quietly reapply those aids again until a light bulb goes off in the horse's head.

If that same rider was on a goldie oldie, however, and the horse didn't respond as they expected, the rider would consider the horse's feedback and decide if they had co-ordinated the aids imprecisely or whether the horse's understanding needed to be reinforced by intensifying some part of the corridor of aids.

Developing and using a rich riding vocabularly takes time. A horse doesn't go from green to goldie oldie overnight. A rider doesn't go from beginner to expert overnight, either. A rider can't apply the aids with real sophistication until he or she has learned how to ride in a relaxed way, in rhythm with the horse, with an independent seat. Even then, a rider cannot ask the horse to perform at the upper levels until the rider has the strength and fitness to apply the aids correclty with the proper nuances of vocabulary

Pattern-istic pressures build horse logically on what a horse already knows. The trainer puts a mental or physical pressure on the horse and releases that pressure when the horse takes the shape that the trainer wants. The horse associates the feeling of a particular shape with relief from a particular pressure. When the trainer asks for something new using a similar pressure, the horse doesn’t get excited. He says, “I know the answer to that.”

It’s the trainer’s job to make sure that each new thing is just one step, just a small nuance, away from what the horse already understands so it never raises the horse’s excitement level. Any pressure that raises the horse’s excitement level is either too far away from what he already knows or is being applied with too much force. The trainer wants the horse to perceive him as the safest, most comfortable place to be, not as a predator to be obeyed out of fear of consequences (that’s human logic, not horse logic).

Let’s take a look at one example of how horse logic works. At one point in our ground work with a baby horse, we’re going to find ourselves standing facing the horse’s shoulder and scratching. We’re imitating the grooming that horses do for one another in a herd. In a herd situation, some horses are only allowed to groom certain other horses or they are expected to groom other ones. So depending on where this particular horse perceives his herd status he may be more or less anxious to be groomed and more or less anxious to return the favor.

Now if the trainer was smart, before she started working with this baby, she put on a dropped noseband to stabilize his jaw so that the most he can groom with is his lips. And she’s not afraid of being injured by his lips. However, she doesn’t want the horse to get in the habit of reaching around and nibbling his handler anytime he’s being groomed or saddled or otherwise handled.

She also doesn’t want to make the baby horse afraid of her. She wants him to feel completely safe and comfortable with her. So when he reaches around to offer some mutual grooming, she does not slap his nose or shove it or make a startling gesture with her hand or elbow or anything else. Instead, she just takes the hand closest to his head, scratches her way up his neck and puts her fingers in the groove where his jowl meets his throatlatch. That makes it uncomfortable to turn his head toward her so he eventually gives up on the idea of mutual grooming.

Later when she has the baby on a lead line, he may be so convinced she’s the best place to be that he starts to crowd her. She can just scratch her way up his neck, put her fingers behind the jowl again and hold some pressure there until he moves away. When she wants to cross his primary line and turn him away from her, he may not understand what she is showing him at first. Rather than pushing or pulling his head over with the lead rope, she can use that finger pressure behind the jowl again. This time, she’ll increase the pressure just enough that the horse has to turn his head off his primary line in the direction she wants him to go before getting relief from it.

Now our baby horse is learning that moving his head off his primary line and taking a particular shape (the turn) relieves pressure. He also finds out that when he moves his head off his primary line, he has to do something to readjust his balance. So he learns to move the foot on that side over just a little each time he picks it up and puts it back down.

When the trainer puts the horse under saddle, she’s going to build on what the horse learned on the ground. Initially, she’s just going to ask the horse for forward motion and take what she gets as he learns to carry her weight on his back. As he gets comfortable with that, she can start asking for turns by putting just a little more weight on her inside seat bone. Now the horse gets the feeling of a shape similar to the one he took when he turned on the ground. He moves his inside foot over just a little each time he picks it up and puts it back down and he’s now moving on a circle. As he gets comfortable with this step, she’ll gradually add more nuances of leg and rein pressures until the horse has a full vocabulary of pressures that enable them to play any game they want.

Each new thing she shows the horse will just be one tiny step away from something he already knows. Easy for him to figure out. No big surprises. No increase in excitement level. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating. Good training is awfully boring to watch.

A cue is a signal that the horse associates with a particular response. Whenever the trainer signals “A,” the horse responds with “B” and the pressure goes away. The problem with cues is that they cannot be modified. Doing more or less of “A” does not get more or less of “B” from the horse. An example is the rider who bumps her horse’s inside shoulder to cue the canter. The horse associates the bump with a canter of a particular shape (lead) at a particular speed in the direction they are already going. But bumping a little harder or a little softer does not modify the horse’s shape or speed or direction.

For example, a horse might stand quietly next to the mounting block at the barn but go to pieces if the rider tries to mount from a big rock alongside the trail. The mounting block back at the barn is part of a routine he’s comfortable with but his rider has not developed patterns of rhythm and relaxation and camaraderie that enable him to stand comfortably alongside whatever rock or log or stump she would like to stand on to mount.

A cue is a signal that the horse associates with a particular response. Whenever the trainer does A, the horse responds with B and the pressure goes away. The problem with cues is that they cannot be modified. Doing more or less of A does not get more or less of B from the horse. An example is the rider who bumps her horse’s inside shoulder to cue the canter. The horse associates the bump with a canter of a particular shape (lead) at a particular speed in the direction they are already going. But bumping a little harder or a little softer does not modify the horse’s shape or speed or direction.

A pattern of pressures that build horse logically can be modified to use under any circumstances or for any riding discipline. When the horse understands them, they can be enforced without raising the horse’s excitement level. They form the basis of a communication system between the horse and rider that enables them to do and enjoy whatever they want.

Horses are creatures of habit. And the habits they learn can be good ones or bad ones depending on who’s handling them. And whatever habits or patterns they have when they come to you can be changed if you go about it in a methodical, horse-logical way. If memory serves, one of the horses that taught me this was a Morgan stallion that belonged to a friend of mine. This was back in the ‘60s and I don’t remember the horse’s registered name but we called him Little Brother.

Now my friend Ray was raising a few Morgans and when breeding time rolled around, he’d call me to help him handle the stallion. Little Brother was always very, very easy to handle. He had a favorite wife named Quaint. When she was in season and ready to breed, my buddy would hold Quaint on a lead line out in the pasture. I’d go to barn and bring Little Brother along. The stallion would nuzzle and tease and do his job then I’d take him back up to the barn. I never needed a chain shank or anything. Little Brother knew Quaint, she knew him, they liked each other and there was never any fuss.

One year Ray fell off another horse, broke his leg, and decided to skip breeding that spring while he healed. Somebody asked him about leasing Little Brother to use on his mares and that sounded like a reasonable idea to Ray, given the circumstances and all. Little Brother was leased to this other guy and, at end of breeding season, he came back home again.

The next spring Ray’s leg was fine, Quaint came into season, Ray took her took her to field, and I went and got Little Brother. This time, however, instead of going to nipping and loving her, he started eating grass. Quaint let Little Brother know in every way she could that she was interested in him but he just ignored her. Ray was pretty upset. He figured the stallion was ruined. But I was at the beginning of thinking about training from the horse’s point of view and I thought I knew what might be wrong. So I took Little Brother back to his stall.

When I got Little Brother back to his stall, I put chain under his chin and picked up a whip. I slapped and jerked and screamed and made a huge fuss. Sure enough, Little Brother got all excited and in no time at all, he was ready to breed Quaint before he even got out of stall door. So I took him back to the pasture, he served mare and then he went back to eating grass.

Now, in those days, everybody knew that every stallion in any barn was just naturally mean and ornery. If you didn’t knock ‘em around and show ‘em who was boss right from the get go, you were sure to get hurt. So I figured this other guy had probably handled Little Brother like he was afraid of him. I figured that he’d probably fought with the stallion to show his who was boss before he took him to breed. So the fellow taught Little Brother that a big fuss, there was going to be a party. But, horse-logically, Little Brother had also concluded that if there was no fuss, there wasn’t going to be a party. So each year we did a little less fussing in the stall and in a couple years, Little Brother was back to being the laid back breeding stallion he’d been before.

Horses are so very pattern-istic. The patterns or habits that they learn can work for you or against you. So it’s important to think through what you’re teaching a horse from the horse’s viewpoint. You can try to physically dominate a horse to control him or you can psychologically control him by becoming the safest, most comfortable place for him to be. One big difference between the two systems is going to be how events unfold when something physically scarier than you comes along.

When things get scary or confusing, you want a horse that responds to a familiar pattern that creates a feel of a safe place that he can go to rather than fleeing or fighting. That’s why we start our training out on the ground and under saddle using rhythmic exercises that create relaxation in the horse. When rhythm habitually creates a feel of relaxation in the horse, a rhythmic pattern becomes a safe place for both the horse and rider to go to whenever things start falling apart. Then the horse gets excited or upset and the rider goes to any exercise that reestablishes rhythm, habit will help the horse relax so he can listen to the next thing the rider asks.

This makes a lot more sense than using big bits and sharp spurs and going back to fighting over who’s the boss. But it took me a few years and a few horses before I unlearned my old habits of loud and startling communication with horses and learned a better way. If you or your horse have poor communication habits, be sure to allow yourself plenty of time to learn some new ones.

1997-2004 Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre. All rights reserved. Instructor and trainer <a href="http://www.meredithmanor.com/about/staff.asp#ron"> Ron Meredith</a> has refined his "horse logical" methods for communicating with equines for over 30 years as president of <a href="http://www.meredithmanor.com/"> Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre</a>, an ACCET accredited equestrian educational institution.
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