It was great to hear that trainers at the Equine Affaire (November, in Springfield, MA) were finally not only referring to their training methods, but also to the integration of the horses personality into the training. The way I see it, for way too long horse training has revolved around the "5 Easy Steps," "7 Stages of Training," or "Training for Dummies" where training techniques were passed along in a cookie-cutter format that left out each horse’s individual nature. While structure and principles of training are important, it appears inevitable that by incorporating the horse’s personality into the mix, the training and personal relationship will be greatly enhanced.

With the cookie-cutter format, many horses and their owners end up in dead end streets where the horse over or under responds to cues and clues, while the owner doesn’t even realize that she or he was giving any of the wrong ones. I once heard that horses in a herd share thousands of signals on a given day. That pretty much shows how many cue opportunities we have, how many we miss, and how many can be misunderstood by the horse.

If we consider and integrate the horse’s personality, the horse will be treated as an individual. That in turn requires a careful selection of lessons and tools appropriate for the individual horse and task at hand.

To give a simple example, in my experience, a less confident horse benefits from repetition, while a secure horse will retain new information faster.

If we don’t offer repetitions to the less confident horse, we will allow for cracks in the foundation. Since a less secure horse usually has a more pronounced flight instinct, it takes more time to process and integrate new exercises and ideas.

If we over-do and over-practice the task at hand with a confident horse, after it successfully followed our direction, we cause confusion. As it did things right the first time, it makes sense for the horse to stop the task. If we don’t stop, the horse will try to offer us other things that might please us, and eventually will become frustrated since it won’t meet our expectations...to repeat what it did right on the first try. At that point, "ending on a good note" becomes a difficult target to reach.

To provide another example, a horse with strong leadership skills might require ongoing reminders of leadership from the human handler in order to respect the human/horse pecking order. A horse that is less confident and less eager to lead might quickly submit itself to the safe-keeping of the human leader. In both cases, the horses have something to offer to us. The first horse invites us to be ever vigilant and aware in our leadership so piece-by-piece, moment-by-moment we are becoming the safe-keeper for the lead horse, which leads to fewer and fewer leadership struggles.

The second horse invites us to think of some confidence building interactions. Those will lead to internal safety, thus a quiet mind, thus a mind that is available to learn new things.

To sum it up, there is no "one method fits all" in horse education.

The more time we spend with and listen to our horses, the more of their individual personality will be revealed. If we then take our cues and clues from those moments, training and teaching become a synergistic experience that benefits horse and owner/trainer equally.