Get Your Lobes Straight

I was at the barn once, brushing Spicy down in the aisle after our ride. There was another woman at the barn who had ridden with me, and her horse was (in my opinion), very well behaved if not a bit tight through the back.

we know tight.

She was untacking when her horse pissed an absolute river right in the middle of the aisle. Already frustrated with her ride, she had an outburst about what an asshole he was for peeing in the aisle on purpose. I'm old enough now that I've learned to at least try to keep my nose out of other people's business, mostly because they're not going to change so why should I waste my breath. I could not let this one go, though.

"I think he just had to pee," I said, interrupting her string of frustration. Maybe it was the tone of my voice, or the fact that I said anything at all, but she finished cleaning up the mess in silence.

I see it happen more than a few times in blogging and on social media as well. People attribute bad rides, injuries and undesirable behaviors to 'my horse was pissed at me for x, so he did y'. This might come as something of a shock to those people, but: horses do not do things out of vengeance and spite.

Actually, let me rephrase. Horses cannot act out of vengeance and spite.

don't bring them down to our level
they're better than us.

There have been countless articles, studies, research, books, etc, explaining the why's of how a horse's brain works, and why horses cannot act out of spite.

The short version is: horses do not have a frontal lobe like humans do. For those of us who are not science minded, the frontal lobe is responsible for the the most human-y parts of humans. That means horses do not plan for the future or have human depth of faculty. Their memories are untainted with emotion or bias.

They don't lay awake at night, worrying about that thing that happened fifteen years ago.

The most difficult aspect of horse training is the constant struggle to understand how they are thinking and what they need to learn. All we know is being human. Trying to consider how a horse's memory works is like trying to imagine what life is like after death; your brain can't conceptualize not existing so you just get stuck in a loop of contradicting yourself. It's hard for a human to envision memories being simple and untainted by emotion, but that's how horses live. A horse doesn't worry about what's coming up next month or next year. It doesn't think about job fulfillment as a definition of self or societal demands resulting in its own popularity.

If your horse isn't doing what you want, you can distill the behavior down to two causes:

1.  The horse was not taught how you want it to behave.
2.  The horse is physically incapable of behaving how you want it to behave.

That's it. I challenge you to find a problem that, at its root, wasn't one of these two issues. In the case of my anecdote above, you could argue the horse was not trained not to piss in the aisle. Ideally you'd see the horse drop, go 'oh, he's waving the pee flag (literally) in my face', and chuck him in a stall to do his business.

I know Spicy doesn't do things out of spite, but I've taken to pausing and asking myself those two questions when things aren't going as I want. Is my horse physically capable? Have I actually trained my horse to complete the task that I am asking? I usually find that the answer to one or both of those questions is no, otherwise I wouldn't be asking them. Taking that gentle pause ends up in a healthier relationship, for as 'inadequate' (by human standards) as their frontal lobes may be, a horse's memory is far better than ours will ever be. Untainted by the lens of being human, a horse will only remember exactly what happened, exactly as it happened.

When you get angry at his 'vengeful' behavior, all he will remember is that you were unfair and inconsistent, and his learning of that will be far more detrimental than spite.