21st Century Horsemanship

This is great! Too good not to share.

Horses can’t think like people and that’s okay.

They don’t have the brain anatomy to understand complex human concepts like respect and even if they did — respect as humans views it varies from culture to culture. They cannot possibly begin to understand respect as we define it and it’s unreasonable to expect them to do so.

They can’t willfully recall the past or look into the future like humans can. They do have excellent memories and can retain information but need certain stimuli to trigger previous memories rather than being able to freely recall the past or plot for events in the future. Since they are flight animals, living in the moment is much more advantageous to them.

Why must they need to have similar cognition to humans to be viewed as intelligent animals deserving of our respect?

Why can’t we appreciate them for the creatures they are and learn something from their level of presentness and sensitivity?

It is okay that they can’t think like us. It requires more adaptability on our part and asks us to leave aside the preconceived notions we carry in human society.

Humanizing horses enables us in our lack of desire to adapt for the sake of the horse but it’s damaging to the horses.

When we misrepresent their brain capacity and ability to understand human concepts, we cause harm by allowing people to rationalize high levels of punishment on the basis that the horse can understand how they’re “wronging” their human and is doing it intentionally.

So, we need to stop doing that because we are lying to ourselves to secure our own comfort at the expense of our horses.

The studies on equine brain anatomy and cognition tell us a very clear story.

Our horses’ capacity to learn from trial and error and be taught skills that us humans view to be “manners” or “respect” speaks for their ability to learn but we need to take ownership on our perception of horse behaviour and how it colours our view of them.

Human perception is not everything.

We can be wrong and are frequently.

Equine behavioural science helps to hold us more accountable by seeking to define what is the horses’ perception rather than allowing human bias to run the show. While bias can still exist, there’s more accountability in this than anecdotes.

Horses don’t think like us.

They shouldn’t have to.

A horse is a horse and it will always behave like a horse.
Regardless of how much we think we would like horses to think like humans, they never will. They could only do that if they were human. And we wouldn't like it if they did.
We can't think like horses because we're not horses, but we can learn to understand them. There's no less complicated, simpler species, so this should be an easy task. When we impose human qualities on them, we complicate them and undermine our own ability to understand them and their true nature. When we fail to understand them, we consider them to be stupid. We only believe this because we're expecting them to be something they aren't.
The horse learns faster than any other species. It has to. Its survival as a species has depended on it for millions of years.
Of course, we all want what's best for our horses, so for the sake of the horse, we need to accept them for what they are and stop trying to make them something they're not. When we begin to accept and respect their true nature and behavior, we can begin to truly understand and communicate with them.

Image: Shamaa on Twitter: "Everybody is a #genius. But if you judge a ... Found on Google from twitter.com

No truer words have ever been spoken. We just need to understand how to go about this task.

If the average person disagrees with you, you're probably on the right track.

You can exchange the word dog with horse. It's always easy to blame the other party, but nothing will change until you change.

Horses regularly trained with ground work are more relaxed when ridden A recent study of dressage horses in Germany that looked at rein length and tension revealed a surprising finding: horses who were regularly trained in ground work/in-hand work had lower heart rat…