My Horse is a parcelmouth!

"How many languages do you speak?"

I first asked the question 'How do horses know what we want and mean them to do?' when I was 14 and taking riding lessons.  It amazed me then, and still today, how a horse understood that when I slightly moved one of my legs back a bit the horse knew it meant to canter. It blew my mind away.

The awe I felt then (and still remember feeling 35 years on) hasn't died with age, years or experience.  Thank goodness!

This weekend a friend and I spent time lunging our respective horses and coaching ourselves through it. I was explaining how Grace understands two different "languages on the lunge".  First is the more 'traditional BHS language of whip, triangle position and tone of voice'.  The second language is the Parelli language of 'chi, no voice, levels of asking and lots of hind quarter yields', (as examples). 

A 'parcelmouth' speaks snake!

Having decided to use the BHS approach with Grace on Sunday, the significance of having a choice of which language to use when working with her, and what I was therefore saying, was clear: Grace is multi-lingual! 

To me it is pretty impressive that horses can retain and recognise two different languages, when used separately or in combination,  and not appear to get confused.  As a contrast I used to speak fluent French and Spanish in my teens and twenties.  Nowadays, I get my tongue tied and end up saying things that I don't even think are legitimate words, and can't remember if they're French or Spanish!  (To think my mum had her heart set on my being a tri-lingual interpreter in Brussels for a living)! 

What's even more great about the language of lunging is that you are only limited by your imagination.

I shared with my friend how my horses and I have been developing our fluency levels in both languages:

Step 1 : Was to find the voice commands and tone of voice I would use consistently, for signalling faster, slower etc

Step 2: Was to coordinate voice and whip so that the horses will respond off either

Step 3: Was to rely less on voice and whip and to substitute both with my body language and how to use both it and the space between me and the horse with differing effects

Step 4: Was to introduce breath based commands - taking a few lessons from Jenny Rolfe and others who connect with their horse through breath control - inhalations and exhalations

This is the Step where Grace and I have currently reached.

 Step 5:  Will be to move from breath commands to intention.  Meaning I want to start changing my horses gait by thinking it - nothing more! No voice, body, whip, back up!  To just send out the intention of walk, trot, halt etc.

Step 6:  Will be..... I don't know yet!  When we get to step 5 maybe step 6 will emerge..... that's what I mean by we are limited only by our imagination.

As most of us Harry Potter fans will know - being able to speak parseltongue makes you a parcelmouth which although normally entails lots of hissing like sounds, absent from my horses most of the time thank goodness, working with them does feel a kin to magic and wizardry!

I'm not sure if my carrot stick or lunge whip is quite as potent as Hermione's wand but I am convinced that horses are bright, quick to learn and fluent translators.  All we have to do is communicate clearly, be it in one or two tongues and our horse will compute and conform. 

It has me spell bound every time!

 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

 

- Albert Einstein

Nature AND Nurture - can we have both?

In the wild horses don't chose to be busy! 

W...They epitomise a sedentary life style.

Obvious isn't it?  When somebody puts it in writing (even though we all know) but despite that - "busy" is often what we make our horses lives. We know the reasons why - training, travelling, competing, hacking, washing, grooming, trimming, plaiting, clipping, shoeing, health checks, dentist visits, back checks, tack checks, physio, chiropractic appointments - the list goes on.

During my Parelli lesson today I apologised to Grace for not knowing 6 months ago what I know today.  I often feel guilty that at 8 years of age her life isn't more interesting and varied (aka busy)!

Our Parelli trainer said that she believes horses know when we have a good  intention in our heart and they can forgive us for what we know, and how much we still don't know! (Another reminder that our horses have much to teach us if we are willing to learn).

I hope she is right!

It's easy to beat ourselves up for not always getting it right with our horses and for making their lives so unnatural for them, but why do we do it?

Being a predator partly explains it.  It is in our nature to 'get after' somebody or something if they don't do as we want.  It's in our nature to get stern, turn up the heat, or even use force. We do it to ourselves (in our self talk) and we do it in our human to human relationships.  We read books or go to classes to improve our skills of assertion, influence and negotiation; all very predatory.

Horses learn none of this.  This is not the language of the prey animal.

So to connect with our horses and understand them it helps to remember how differently we think, in order to find a way forward, that honours the two different ways of being: predator and prey (remembering that both have their uses).

"A predator typically victimizes, plunders, or destroys, especially for their own gain." 

A little extreme maybe, but the above goes some way in explaining how some traditional training methods e.g breaking horses in - now viewed as cruel, once took hold.  Being told as a child rider 'not to let him or her get away with something' or 'make them more scared of you ...' etc made sense to us - it is a natural way of thinking for a predator.  When someone or something disappoints us we automatically try to 'teach them a lesson' believing we know best.  We see this play out on a daily basis in how horses are treated and so quickly reprimanded for being 'naughty, arrogant, disobedient' etc, forgetting to consider it may be their prey nature in operation.

Can we un-learn what is in our nature?  Can we un-learn how to be predatory?  With the work of natural horsemanship, Monty Roberts, Parelli, Animal Communicators, Equinicity, and so on, new and different ways of 'being with horses' open up to us.  Each of which takes us a little further away from our predatory nature, to embrace something we can develop and nurture, to sit alongside.

After all, there are many ways to skin a cat and many ways of 'being' with our horse. 

If we stay unconsciously operating at our true (nature) level -  we permit our  predatory behaviour  to rule the roost.  This will keep us disconnected from our horses, at odds, and often feeling like giving up.  In circumstances of high adrenalin the horse needs us to be the leader and we want to be trusted  to be it!  These moments of truth are were our nature will kick in if we haven't been nurturing other options to draw from.

If we embrace the corporate Leadership Model that "Leaders are both born and developed" then we should be actively nurturing the prey way of being along side our predatory nature so that we have both in our tool kit.

This means connecting with like minded folk, reading books or attending courses and demonstrations that feature 'compassion', 'dominion', 'thinking through stress versus emotionally reacting to it'....  

The new agenda of the future with it's  Must Know set of skills for horsemen and women should bridge the 'predator : prey' gap, it must build on the strengths of our human nature, AND nurture the prey qualities of the horse's nature.  

Then our horses can truly partner with us, seeing more of what they like and understand, in their interaction with us.  

Who knows we may even have fewer guilt trips because our horses aren't 'busy'!