Learning From Elsa

I'm a novice horse handler. I will admit to that. I grew up in suburbia, I rarely got to interact with horses throughout my childhood. I took lessons, but even those are limited. I hope to take lessons again here soon with my oldest daughter though. In the meantime though, I'm stuck trying to figure things out on my own, which I am actually quite well at doing.....mostly.

Elsa came trained to lead, and that's about it. You really can't teach a yearling a whole lot more than that, except maybe some tricks. You can however do good ground work and desensitizing. So shortly after getting Elsa, and settling into our new place ourselves, I started working with Elsa on some ground work. I thought I knew how to lunge a horse, but I didn't, and she taught me how to do it. (Let me take a second to say I really need new photos but my phone is currently broke. I will add photos as soon as I can!) As I started lunging Elsa, she became confused as to what I was asking. I couldn't understand how something so simple was causing her so much trouble. She'd miss cues, shake her head, and even pull back on the rope. There were distractions about, but that shouldn't matter. There are always going to be distractions. What was going wrong? It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize that I was sending her mixed signals. I knew that when changing directions that I needed to step in front of her, point, change hands with the rope and whip, and send her the other direction. Sounds so simple (and mind you I was doing this on a lunge line, not in a pen, so it should have been all the more clear as to what I wanted). So as I stood there with an increasingly frustrated horse, I got to thinking about just what I was doing. After all, if your horse doesn't understand, it's 99% of the time going to be something you're doing wrong.

So as I again asked her to change direction in the lunging circle, she responded perfectly and turned and went on her way. I stood there, wondering just what was different from that time compared to the previous ones. And then I figured it out. While I was pointing and telling her to go in one direction, my shoulders were facing the other direction, except that last time, they were facing the direction I wanted her to go in. So, I tried it again, facing my shoulders in the direction I wanted her to go in. Again, she turned perfectly. I'd been sending her mixed signals the entire time. I was telling her to go one way with my hand and whip while the rest of my body told her to go the other way. This was never something I'd heard people bring up while explaining how to lunge. We ended soon after that. Repetitive small circles aren't good for a young horse's joints. But I walked away having learned something from my time with Elsa. It wasn't supposed to be a learning time for me, but it turned out to be one. I learned something about handling and training a horse, and a horse is who taught me. Now this isn't to say that you should always do as your horse says, no, that way you'll just end up with a spoilt horse who is likely highly dangerous. What I mean to say, is that if your horse is sending you signals that something is wrong like Elsa was sending me, take a minute to think on just what it might be. If it's that they think you're too close for their current preference, well then you can tell them to shove it, you'll stand where you darn well please. But if it's "I'm frustrated and I don't understand." take a minute to figure out why that might be the case. You might very well end up learning something new.