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Post by jimmy on Dec 29, 2016 16:43:05 GMT
"Force and fear have no place in training..."
The horse comes with his own fear. We can add to it, or try and alleviate it.
Define force. Hard to go through life without some sort of force. May the force be with you! etc.
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Post by rideanotherday on Dec 29, 2016 17:40:48 GMT
"Force and fear have no place in training..." The horse comes with his own fear. We can add to it, or try and alleviate it. Define force. Hard to go through life without some sort of force. May the force be with you! etc. Horses do come with fear. We should not add to it. "Force" in physics is mass x acceleration. In the case of horses, using "force" comes with negative connotations. Why not present things in such a manner that the horse performs / executes a maneuver without stress or upset?
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Post by jimmy on Dec 29, 2016 18:18:16 GMT
I wish I could emphatically say that force has no place in training, and say that I have never used force at one time or another in the course of training. I can't.The horse certainly uses force. The pragmatic reality of working with hundreds of horses, is that an application of force of some kind comes into play.
I agree that you cannot force a horse to do anything. But that is force, as in making him do something. And I agree that we want the horse to willing comply without undue stress or trouble. IF WE CAN.
Force is not necessarily a negative, and I disagree that it always comes with negative connotations. Force can be quite effective. it is, as you say, how we present things. Giving to a pressure, for instance, is a response to a pressure of some kind, which is force. The round pen is a force. The flag is a force. People might say, why are you forcing that horse to do such and such. I may not be forcing him to do anything, But I may be using force so that he chooses another thing to do. And then you say, good boy, that's what I was looking for.
It may take some kind of action, which is some kind of force, to bring about a change of thought in the horse, at which point, he willingly takes another option. I don't mean to parse words. There are all kinds of degrees and grey areas here.
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Post by horseguy on Dec 30, 2016 15:23:32 GMT
Horse trainers hardly ever get "the easy ones". People breed or buy a prospect and they start them themselves, and if it goes well I never see the horse. If it goes poorly, chances are the prospect will end up with me or another trainer with a predetermined budget from the owner. If I think the budget is too little to create positive change, I won't take the horse, but if it appears to be reasonable, then I will. Once committed, the clock starts and the clock is a main decision reference point on the kinds of questions raised here.
A few times people have left horses with me with no limit on training costs. They wanted a result and had the money to allow for the kind of training that has no time constraints whatsoever. But that's rare.
So, there I am with the clock ticking, feeling if I fail the horse will likely bounce around from back yard to auction, on and on, never really finding a job and a home. A trainer can feel very responsible for the horse's future. I think this is where force, which is distinct from fear, enters the process. A trainer can be the horse's last hope and the time can get short, then what do you do?
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Post by horseguy on Dec 30, 2016 15:59:09 GMT
"There are all kinds of degrees and grey areas here"
That's why I started this topic. It's not simple at all and strict axioms don't help in the discovery of solutions. When people say that "X" is wrong in training, I think of the auction horse I bought that turned out to be a 17H striker. He'd rock back on his hind so quickly and come at me with both forefeet without obvious provocation. He was saying, "stay the heck away from me". He got me a couple times but not with full power. I always wondered if he had been beaten because he was so large. This was Riley. I swung to his side when he rocked back on his hind and I struck him in the belly with a 4' piece of plastic EMT conduit. He stopped exposing his belly. He was never afraid. In the end, he was maybe the best hunt horse I ever had.
Riley with his Ohio Huntsman who appreciated him as much as I did.
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Post by jimmy on Dec 30, 2016 19:54:08 GMT
Another thing I like to say to people, out of my own little brain,and this pertains to this topic
There are some horses that are too much for people.
But there are many people who are too much people for the horse.
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Post by jimmy on Dec 30, 2016 20:02:16 GMT
As to the clock ticking, that is the unfortunate aspect of being a professional trainer. There is an exchange of money within a time frame. The best I can do under those circumstance is do put the time in I was paid for. I cannot guarantee results, or the quality of the results, or the duration of the effects. I put as much quality as I can. Some horses have come to me that were all ready started, but it was what I call a negative 30 days. It's going to take me that long to get to a place I can start.
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Post by horseguy on Dec 31, 2016 14:51:21 GMT
As to the clock ticking, that is the unfortunate aspect of being a professional trainer. There is an exchange of money within a time frame. The best I can do under those circumstance is do put the time in I was paid for. I cannot guarantee results, or the quality of the results, or the duration of the effects. I put as much quality as I can. Some horses have come to me that were all ready started, but it was what I call a negative 30 days. It's going to take me that long to get to a place I can start. I'd estimate that 75% to 80% of the horses I worked with in training horses involved the undoing of previous training or experiences the horse came to me with, and people do not want to pay for that. Instead they want you to go forward from where the horse is. Even with the prospect I am working with now, and he is basically "untouched", there are these kinds of issues. This 2 1/2 year old was bred and raised in a domesticated setting. He had human contact but remember, his owner was ill and could only do things minimally. He lived in a very limited context, safe, quiet, environment and his human contact was brief and undemanding. He got fed, that's about it. The simple artificialness of his environment gave him such a limited range of experience that nothing is "old hat" to him. I was working with him on the ground in the huge arena warm up area, which is behind a wall from the actual arena. The maintenance guy came into the arena and started the tractor and began dragging the footing on the other side of the wall. You'd have thought we were being invaded from outer space. What 2 1/2 year old growing up on a horse farm has not become used to the sound of a tractor? This prospect grew up in a safe kind of wildness, a contradiction, and that has to be undone. I think the only truly "wild" horse I ever got as a young prospect was from an Amish fellow how had a great deal of land. He had a lot of horses and one spring morning a draft mare in his pasture was nursing a new foal. Turned out that his Morgan stud somehow had gotten to her and he was unaware of her condition until that morning. He told me he was in a hurry that morning and grabbed the mare, and put her in a pasture with her foal that had a pond he once used for cows, which he no longer had . He told me he'd never touched the foal, only looked out at her from his porch to check on her since her birth. It was nearly winter and he didn't want to deal with the filly through the cold season ahead. He brought the mare to the barn and into a stall, the filly following, and he proceeded to try to put a halter on her so I could take her home with me. That haltering process would have made a youtube hit video. Once the halter was on (and what an introduction to humans that was) the two of us pretty much picked her up and put her in my stock trailer. When I got back to my farm, I backed my trailer into the barn aisle and slowly herded her off the trailer and into a stall. This was Angie, for those who knew her. What followed was a beautiful series of experiences. I taught her to pick up her feet for cleaning and the day after I did that, I went into her stall to change a bucket and she stood alone and lifted up a front foot, across the stall from me, just as I taught her the day before. "Note to self - human comes in stall, lift up foot." What a treat that was. There was no negative 30 days on this horse, maybe a negative 10 minutes with the first halter stuff, but this horse was untouched, literally. So when people post or say that they would not want to use force or anything close to the edge of fear, it is this kind of prospect that I think of. Training this horse was almost a romantic experience. When I took her on her first fox hunt three years later, she was perfect except she hunted so hard that she blew all her energy in the first chase, but by her fifth hunt she knew we might be out there for a while and to hold some energy in reserve. Training Angie was like a PBS special i.e. Cloud - Stallion of the Rockies. It was idyllic. But most of the work training horses begins with undoing what came before in the horse's life, and that is often dealing with their experience of force and fear. The clock ticks, the budget gets spent and the owner/client wants results, and as often as not, the expected result is unrealistic. Send me a steady unending stream of Angie type prospects and every sensitive, caring person who loves horses will love me as a trainer. But that ain't gonna happen.
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