Accepting the horses ideas

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Horses all have individual personalities and often incredible ideas, if you allow it. Much training based on obedience eliminate those ideas, but I find it much more usefull to accept them. Who cares about an obedient horse, if you can get the benefits from self expression?

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What it gives

Accepting and encouraging the horses ideas give a lot, many things I find important. Things such as self confidence, feeling heard and even more creativity and ideas from the horses side. When they get told their ideas are good, even if it's not always what you want, they will become happy, willing to work and start to believe in themselves. As the human, you may also appreciate the better relationship you get with your horse when they feel they can truly be themselves around you. It just really benefit the horse mentally and can help a shut down horse get life back to them, or a happy horse become even more happy, proud and confident.

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How do you encourage it?

I find the easiest way to encourage the horse to come with more ideas is to use R+ and reward their idea. Set up a criteria that say, maybe, any movement. Reward any movement, no matter what it is, see what the horse come up with. Pawing, trotting, bucking, head throwing? Who knows! You can also do it in general training by simply going with the horses idea, rewarding it if you want, just going along is also a good thing. Try to avoid punishment of all forms, as that can make your horse believe they're not allowed to express how they feel. - sometimes what they feel isn't positive, and that's alright too. Just make sure to always ackknowledge what they tell you, even if you make the decision not to follow along with their ideas.

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What if I want my horse to do what *i* ask now?

This is quite easy for me, but I see why some may see it as a problem. Personally, i have no problem with my horses not doing as told. I use R+ which mean my horses want to work with me, as they gain something, so they often do as I ask, even when they have the choice not to. Because of that, i have zero problems with my horses not listening. If they don't, i simply need to motivate them more. But if you have problems with your horse showing too much behavior when not asked for, you can start with checking for food anxiety. If it's not that, you can work on reinforcing standing still and being calm, which is the opposite of offering behavior. In general, i have never experienced a problem that came from letting my horse offer behavior, as I find it quite easy to "fix" any problems that may arise with it, but that may be due to what i want in training. If you have or can think of things that may be problematic when encouraging your horse to offer their own ideas, please comment

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My experience

I wanted to talk about this as yesterday, while feeding Sofie, i did a bit of training. I asked her to back up, pushing a bit as she was really motivated. When we got slightly out of line, my signal changing due to it, she very confidently striked out with her front leg. High and proud, full control over the movement. No one ever asked this of her, but she was so confident in trying that I couldn't help but reward and afterwards you could see her almost glowing with confidence. I could ask her to do it again, she proudly showed off. That's what inspired me to write this, but I can also tell what it did for Ronja.

For Ronja, it not only made her happier and more willing to move, it made her move better, made her enjoy movement instead of hate it. She's almost a completely different horse, showing way more personality and acting younger. Her stiffness, lameness and potential pain have disappeared as she got to explore movement and just have fun.

Because of these things, i believe everyone should listen to their horse and encourage their ideas, even if you limit it to at liberty in the pasture, just set up clear frames and let your horse explore, give them choice and encourage whatever they want to try.

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