What is most important?
Learning to ride and be with horses is challenging in so many different ways. One of the things that trips me up in a myriad of different ways is how to prioritize the factors in any given situation. Yet I’ve also found that prioritizing in a meaningful way can save much heartache and distress along the way. One of the most important priority lists I have is this one:
Your safety
Your horse’s safety
Your happiness
Your horse’s happiness
Why have I organized it this way? While ideally, numbers 1 and 2 would be on an even playing field, as would numbers 3 and 4 (and hopefully we all strive to do this as much as we can), I think it’s reasonable to rank 1 and 3 a bit higher than their counterparts. If you are injured, any number of disastrous things could happen - you could set back your riding and horsemanship by months or years, have a serious short-term or long-term injury, lose your job (and ability to care for a horse), lose your ability to participate in family life, or even lose your life. Any of these things could negatively affect your riding, relationship with your horse, ability to care for and keep your horse, and even your horse’s future. Your safety needs to be your number one priority. When your safety is more secure, then we can secure your horse’s safety.
What does this look like in practice? Here are some scenarios that can help illustrate this idea:
Your horse has gotten spooked on the lunge line and is bolting. The line is getting difficult to hold onto. Rather than holding on and risking an injured shoulder or drag injuries, you let the horse go and then focus on calming your horse down and getting the line back, even if your horse may get tangled in the line along the way. (If you are lunging a horse, that horse should be used to ropes all over their body well before being lunged and should be versed in verbal commands, helping keep the situation safer. You are also likely lunging in an enclosed area, which should keep the horse safer and contained.)
You are getting a horse out of the pasture and are near the gate when some horses come near and start to be aggressive with each other. It is appropriate to remove yourself from the situation as you need to, even if it means the horse you were with is now in a more precarious situation with the aggressive horses or that you have to let go of the horse’s lead rope. Prioritizing your safety in this situation can keep you from getting kicked or run over.
You’re riding your horse who is inattentive after some big distractions and now is bucking at random. Prioritizing your safety might mean hopping off to do some groundwork from a safer position.
Hopefully, most of the time we can keep both us and our horses as safe as possible. Sometimes, when we’re in a tough or high-adrenaline situation, it can be hard to think fast enough to make a good decision. But giving it a little bit of thought in advance can help us make better decisions when we need to.
So what about your happiness over your horse’s happiness? I think this can be a bit more complicated. Sometimes, prioritizing our happiness means putting everyone’s safety first, even if it means the horse is temporarily unhappy about it. When we enter into an athletic partnership with our horse, putting our happiness a bit before our horse’s also means that we recognize we are the initiators of the athletic partnership and have to be the first ones to ask for progress. Here are some examples that come to mind for me:
You’re out on a trail ride and your horse is really eager. She would love to gallop through this field, but you know there is some uneven footing in the middle, so you keep it to a walk, even though she would rather do something else.
You’re walking your horse down the road when she would love to turn left, but in doing so, would move into the path of an oncoming car, so you ask her to stay right instead.
You are asking for a difficult movement and your horse is reluctant to do it. Progress happens by asking for difficult things in small, reasonable, fair ways. While your horse may not be happy to do the movement initially (it is HARD to use my right hind!), by placing your happiness a modicum above your horse’s in that moment, you can achieve clarity, relaxation, and success for your horse as she figures out what you are asking. If we think about what a horse wants, it’s pretty simple: good forage, some friends, a mud puddle, a place out of the elements, some treats. Simply put, they are not interested in human goals. When we work to create a good partnership with a horse, we initiate the work and can continue to lead the relationship; indeed, many horses are happy to have these working relationships and interesting jobs to do, especially when we make it fun for the horse to succeed.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to make priority lists like this. But I think it’s pretty clear at this point in time we are far from an ideal world in a whole number of ways, so we have to update our mental models to accommodate the messiness of the actual world. I hope in your work with horses you can keep everyone safe and happy as much as possible, but when you can’t, I hope these models give you a clearer path forward.