Re-training
Filed in: training
Training and Re-Training – What’s The Difference?
I was recently reminded how people viewed horses with problems as being different from horses with no training. It is a really common perception that horses that have been trained yet have behaviours that we don’t like are very different from horses that just haven’t been taught in the first place.
All horses that have had any experience with people come with training. Even if they are foals that have not yet been haltered, they have experience of people that leaves an impression on them. If they have only seen people from the other side of the fence they have formed an opinion, which has taught them something about humans.
If what they have learned about us is not what we want them to learn, they already have baggage that will impact on our relationship and how our training progresses.
Michele and I use to work with a lot of foals. Every year we handled a stack of them. Teaching them to pick up their feet and hold them quietly for the farrier was always on the list of things to do. We always started with getting them comfortable with having their feet touched, then progressed to getting them to shift their weight to the opposite leg and then having them lift their foot off the ground when we cued them. Pretty soon they would quietly lift their leg and hold it up while we tapped their hoof and pretended to rasp around it. At each step we ensured the horse was soft and feeling okay before moving onto the next phase. The job was not to make the foal lift his leg for the farrier. The job was to stay focused and soft for every part of the process. If we did that, the foal was automatically ready for the farrier.
I recently worked with a horse that was prone to kicking the farrier. He was an 8-year-old Australian Stock Horse. The owner told me he was always bad about having his feet done ever since they bought him as a broken in 3 year old. Another trainer had used leg ropes to teach him to lift his leg and be shod. Even then he would fight a lot, but they could shoe him.
The horse had been this way for at least 5 years and had been shod a lot in his time. But he still argued about it and even kicked a person or two.
I started with getting him okay with me touching his leg and running my hand up and down it. At first he lifted his leg in the air, like it was a reflex. But I kept rubbing until he lowered it back down again. When he got really good at the rubbing part, I rubbed his inside tendon with my thumb to irritate him enough he would think about lifting his leg to move away from my thumb. The instant he shifted weight to the opposite leg, I stopped. I kept this up until he just lifted his leg. At first he would lifted it very abruptly and with tension, but I did not accept that and kept asking for the leg to come up and down again until there was some relaxation in the way he did it. I built on this approach until he could lift his legs and leave his hoof relaxed in my hand while I rubbed and tapped it and could put it softly back on the ground. If he became tense and tried to pull away or kick out, I persisted until a moment of relaxation came back.
In other words, I re-trained the horse in exactly the same way I would have trained a foal to lift its leg for the first time.
My experience has taught me that in the majority of cases, retraining is the same process as training for the first time. Why is this?
It’s because in both cases the problem is that the basics are either missing or have been corrupted in allowing bad feelings to creep into the horse’s thoughts. Whether a horse has learned bad habits or just doesn’t know how to respond, the problem lies in reprogramming the basics. It’s no different in my eyes.
I have said this before and I’ll say it again. In the past, people have asked me about buying a young, untrained horse to avoid buying something that already has problems. I tell them that if you don’t know enough to fix problems in a horse that already exist, then you don’t know enough to ensure you don’t put problems in a horse. The skills needed to train a green horse are the same skills needed to fix a spoiled horse.
If you have a horse that has a problem, you don’t need to go looking for a trainer with a bag of magic tricks for fixing problems. You just need to go back to the beginning and fill in the holes that were left by the early training.
I was recently reminded how people viewed horses with problems as being different from horses with no training. It is a really common perception that horses that have been trained yet have behaviours that we don’t like are very different from horses that just haven’t been taught in the first place.
All horses that have had any experience with people come with training. Even if they are foals that have not yet been haltered, they have experience of people that leaves an impression on them. If they have only seen people from the other side of the fence they have formed an opinion, which has taught them something about humans.
If what they have learned about us is not what we want them to learn, they already have baggage that will impact on our relationship and how our training progresses.
I recently worked with a horse that was prone to kicking the farrier. He was an 8-year-old Australian Stock Horse. The owner told me he was always bad about having his feet done ever since they bought him as a broken in 3 year old. Another trainer had used leg ropes to teach him to lift his leg and be shod. Even then he would fight a lot, but they could shoe him.
The horse had been this way for at least 5 years and had been shod a lot in his time. But he still argued about it and even kicked a person or two.
I started with getting him okay with me touching his leg and running my hand up and down it. At first he lifted his leg in the air, like it was a reflex. But I kept rubbing until he lowered it back down again. When he got really good at the rubbing part, I rubbed his inside tendon with my thumb to irritate him enough he would think about lifting his leg to move away from my thumb. The instant he shifted weight to the opposite leg, I stopped. I kept this up until he just lifted his leg. At first he would lifted it very abruptly and with tension, but I did not accept that and kept asking for the leg to come up and down again until there was some relaxation in the way he did it. I built on this approach until he could lift his legs and leave his hoof relaxed in my hand while I rubbed and tapped it and could put it softly back on the ground. If he became tense and tried to pull away or kick out, I persisted until a moment of relaxation came back.
In other words, I re-trained the horse in exactly the same way I would have trained a foal to lift its leg for the first time.
My experience has taught me that in the majority of cases, retraining is the same process as training for the first time. Why is this?
It’s because in both cases the problem is that the basics are either missing or have been corrupted in allowing bad feelings to creep into the horse’s thoughts. Whether a horse has learned bad habits or just doesn’t know how to respond, the problem lies in reprogramming the basics. It’s no different in my eyes.
I have said this before and I’ll say it again. In the past, people have asked me about buying a young, untrained horse to avoid buying something that already has problems. I tell them that if you don’t know enough to fix problems in a horse that already exist, then you don’t know enough to ensure you don’t put problems in a horse. The skills needed to train a green horse are the same skills needed to fix a spoiled horse.
If you have a horse that has a problem, you don’t need to go looking for a trainer with a bag of magic tricks for fixing problems. You just need to go back to the beginning and fill in the holes that were left by the early training.