I was asked, “Why do you see so many horses while performing liberty work have their ears laid back? They don’t look aggressive, but the body language is confusing.”
There are a few key points to consider when discussing ear pinning in horses.
Firstly, a horse laying its ears back during training is not exclusive to liberty work. You can find horses exhibiting that behaviour in all disciplines. However, it is true that many horses performing at liberty exude multiple expressions of troubled emotions, including ear pinning. In my experience, it’s more than a few. But the cause of ear pinning with a horse working at liberty are the same causes that contribute to ear pinning in other types of training.
Many people believe that liberty training is one of the best indicators of a happy horse because they believe the lack of equipment is proof that a horse is performing out of choice and not coercion. But this is not true. Just because a horse is obediently does the work does not mean it is happy to do the work.
Remember, training for liberty does not start with liberty training. It begins with the same basic training that we all do with our horses. It also begins using the same basic equipment, such as halters, whips, flags, spurs, bridles, lariats, food treats, and fenced arenas and round yards, among others. Liberty training all starts with non-liberty training. So, the way a horse feels about working with equipment is carried over into how it feels when we begin working without equipment. But also, there is no such thing as true liberty training. In the process of training at liberty, we impose restrictions that favour the choices we want a horse to make with the aid of fences, whips, food, etc. There is no such thing as true liberty.
The second thing to consider is the concept of driving pressure and directing pressure. If you watch demonstrations of unhappy horses (liberty or not), you’ll see trainers mostly using driving pressure.
I have talked about driving and directing pressure in some detail in previous posts, but let me define the difference once again.
Driving Pressure = pressure that causes the horse to move in one way, but its thoughts are going somewhere else. For example, when lunging, many people use a whip to send the horse forward. When it is driving pressure, the horse’s thoughts are on the whip, but its feet are moving away or fleeing from the whip.
Directing Pressure - this is pressure that directs the horse’s thoughts to do something, and its feet go with those thoughts (the same direction as the pressure, not away). For example, when lunging, the trainer might pick up their energy in the direction of the circle, and the horse moves its feet to go with the energy rather than flee it.
When it comes to liberty work, it is most common to use driving pressure to create the movement. As a result, a horse is moving away from pressure. The horse’s attention is on the source of the pressure, and its feet are trying to run from the source. This creates some degree of anxiety in a horse. A horse always prefers to go towards something, so when we use driving pressure to send a horse away from something, trouble builds inside the horse.
Most liberty training relies on driving pressure to create movement. I believe even more so than normal training because the lack of equipment makes it even more difficult to use pressure that directs a horse’s thoughts.
The ear pinning behaviour is just one common response in horses working at liberty There are others. But it is not a problem exclusive to liberty training. A lot of horses from all disciplines, where driving pressure is the main training tool, exhibit behaviours stemming from troubled emotions.
However, I do believe that liberty training results in a bit ear-pinning than some other pursuits because the focus of a lot of liberty training is on creating obedience. There is the “wow’ factor of what we can get our horses to do without gear to impose pressure. Somehow, we think using pressure to create obedience is better than using it with gear that would help us direct a horse rather than drive a horse. It’s easier to use driving pressure than directing pressure when starting a liberty horse, so that’s what most of us resort to using. But sadly, at a price.
I think we would see far less ear pinning if our training focused more on how we can help our horse feel okay and less on what cool movements we can make the horse do.
Video: Some of you may have seen this clip of Riley before. This kind of depicts my liberty work goals fairly well.