You may have heard the saying “reward the smallest try”. It is a great concept and works well in training. However, the effectiveness of this concept depends on people being able to recognize a “try”.
There are a lot of different clues that a horse gives off to indicate their ever-changing focus. The most common and easily identifiable are the eyes and the ears. But others include posture, movements of feet, flexion, etc.
I think true kindness is an expression of our humanity and it is not dependent on receiving any gain from it. Kindness is not limited to just people and animals we care about.
I sometimes explain to students that the simple difference between me as their teacher and them as the student is that I have spent a few more thousand hours working a few more thousand horses and making a few more thousand mistakes.
It really is just common sense that we should do our best to prepare a horse for what is ahead. I don’t understand the dogma of leaving horses virtually untouched until we are ready to put them to work. We send our children to school before we send them into the workforce.
