I just attended an amazing clinic on emotional fitness with
Linda Parelli and Jenny Susser. Comfort and discomfort were definitely central
themes as Jenny taught us to embrace discomfort in ourselves as an opportunity
for growth and as Linda talked about how to help our horses find comfort. But that’s
not why I’ve titled this entry “Comfort & Discomfort.”
Instead, today I want to muse on a very
specific comment that Linda made. She was talking about how the heart of
horsemanship lies in figuring out what your horse needs, and about looking for
ways to help him be calm, connected, and responsive. At one point she added quite
intriguingly that the comfort/discomfort model is, by current standards, “caveman
horsemanship.”
She was referring primarily to the way that, for instance,
in the past Pat would work on trailer loading a horse by making the area outside of the
trailer uncomfortable (via movement, noise, pressure, etc.) so that the horse
started hunting the inside of trailer as the place where all of that pressure
was removed. Now, however, Linda said Pat will instead think about what that
individual horse needs in order to be able to get on the trailer.
Most people who practice or teach natural horsemanship are
familiar with the idea of making the desirable behavior easy (or comfortable) and
the undesirable behavior difficult (or uncomfortable). Just this morning in my
news feed I found this quote from Buck Brannaman: “As a
rider, you must slowly & methodically show your horse what is appropriate.
You also have to discourage what is inappropriate, not by making the
inappropriate impossible, but by making it difficult so that the horse himself
chooses appropriate behavior. You can't choose it for him; you can only make it
difficult for him to make the wrong choices.”
As Buck implies here, the appealing idea behind the comfort/discomfort model is
that you don’t take away the horse’s ability to choose; instead, you guide him
toward making “better” choices. Or, in Pat’s terms, you “cause” your horse to
want to do something rather than “make” him do it. In an ideal scenario, then,
you are empowering your horse while simultaneously getting the result you are
looking for.
This is, undeniably, a step above just making your horse do
what you want without caring whether he is on board with your plan or not. On
reflection, however, it does seem that the horse must feel as if he is simply being
channeled between banks of discomfort when he’s with his human.
For example, say that we want our horse to go in a straight
line. When he’s on the line, we leave him alone. When he goes off it, we get
busy with our aides (rein, leg, stick, what have you). Again, this is a step up
from just micro-managing the whole time because there is a reward (being left
alone) when he’s doing what we want. But it seems to me that the horse’s main
perception would be that, when he’s with his human, there’s a lot of discomfort
that he has to find his way to avoiding.
What’s good is that we have provided a way for him to do
this—it is no longer a lose-lose situation for the horse as it is when the human continues to pressure the horse even when he's on focus. But nonetheless, it seems like the best deal the human is
offering is a cessation of discomfort.
Now, many people agree that this is pretty dang motivating
for horses. While other species, like dogs, are motivated by praise, horses
really are motivated simply by being left alone. But they have that already when the
human isn’t there. So what are we adding, then, that will cause them to really
want to be with us? Just a lack of being an asshole means that they’ll like us
okay, but as Linda said, we want our horses to be passionate about being with
us—to love being with us. What would inspire them to feel that way?
I’m thinking today that the real limitation of the
comfort/discomfort model is that, traditionally, our focus has been much more on
the discomfort side. Sure, we are careful to offer, in Buck Brannaman’s terms,
“the good deal”—which is to say that we start with just our focus and an invitation
for the horse to follow it. But most of our effort and attention then goes into
creating the appropriate level of discomfort to inspire our horse to accept
that good deal. Hence, we focus on a line for the horse to follow, then pick up
the rein, stick, etc., then tap with a rope, stick, etc., then tap harder,
etc., until the horse finds our focus and we quit. Most of the process has to
do with discomfort.
What if, instead, we put more of our effort and intention
into the comfort side? What if we made that focus delicious for the horse to
follow by being positive and enthusiastic about it ourselves? What if we worked
on tuning all of the static out of our focus by having a clear idea and not
getting sucked into distractions so that it’s easy for the horse to see it? What
if we softened our focus by asking with relaxation and mental lightness rather than determination and direct-line thinking? What if we
envisioned the good feeling of harmony with our horse and invited them to join
us out of that space?
What if we asked our horses, “Can you do this with me?” instead of “Can you do
this?” What if, while asking our horse, we also radiated gratitude for all that
our horse has already done?
I’m not suggesting that we focus exclusively on comfort, and
I don’t espouse the “positive reinforcement only” model of horsemanship; sometimes you need to apply some form of pressure. But I
think we’ve let our obsession with how and when and how much to apply pressure and when to
stop applying pressure hijack the other side of the equation. I think there’s a
space for positivity, not only in our release, reward, and gratitude when the
horse does the right thing, but in the way we ask in the first place.
If we put half or more of our attention on envisioning the
different kinds of comfort our horses need, then we’ve begun to balance the
equation. What does comfort mean to your horse? Is it really just a lack of
pressure? Or is it having a companion who speaks his language, understands his
needs, seeks to create harmony, and helps him feel better mentally,
emotionally, and physically? And how can we help our
horses with all of these things?
These are the kinds of questions that, I think, will bring
the comfort/discomfort model from a “caveman” level to a level that is present,
immediate, and highly relevant to our larger horsemanship goal, not of
getting our horse to do—or even to want to do—what we want, but of getting
truly in harmony with our horse.
First, I’d like to give a big thank you to
Mark Rashid, who has done a lot of thinking, writing, and teaching about
softness and harmony with horses. (See, for example, Mark’s excellent new
blog: Considering the Horse).
Second, I am excited that Parelli seems to be evolving in
the direction of really emphasizing the comfort side of the equation and all of
the things we can do to be positive presences in our horses’ lives. That
element has always been in Parelli—in fact, “putting the relationship first”
is, as any Parelli student knows, a central tenet of Parelli. But it’s a
concept that needs a lot of fleshing out for people to be able to practice it
successfully.
The good news is that, based on the things Linda and Jenny talked about this weekend, I believe the methods for doing so are
about to come much more into the foreground, and I can’t wait!
