Hi …?
Angry and scared/nervous horse – dismount and go home. It cannot be dealt with.
Nervous horse will not teach you anything and it is not a pleasant ride.
Angry horse is in control, knows what is going on and can teach you many things. I like angry horse because of its heart. Has courage to stand up and complain or defend itself. If you “listen” and observe you will learn a lot from such horse.
I was taught in the school to stand up in the stirrups to
free the horse’s back when going down hill, same way as in jumping. If one
does not have a correct light seat he cannot do it. Also one needs the right
saddle for it. No one teaches that anymore either, they all lean back sitting
into the horse’s back with feet sticking in front, thinking purely about their
own safety and not the horse.
I am not there, hence I do not see, the following is not an
advice only some variables.
You may have angered the horse because you’ve asked him
to do something and then prevented him, or made more difficult on him to execute
it. That will get anyone angry, horse and men alike. If you are sitting in the
horses back, it hurts him, once he feels safe enough, closer to the bottom of
the hill, he’ll take off and then he bucks to free his back that hurts him and
is still tight from it. In addition you have more likely tried to hold him back
when he wanted to go, which again angered him and thus additional reason for a
buck, hence you got few of them. Horses hardly buck to dump the riders; mostly
it is expression of some pain and discomfort. If they want to get you off, it
will more likely happen to most of us.
You must go to basics to understand horses. I will compare
it to computers, since we understand their function. Horses process and act, we
process, think and then act. By the time you get done thinking on the horse the
horse downloaded and installed entire program.
Horses process a man as follows: man cannot see, cannot
smell and cannot hear. Why would the horse go where you want him to go? Would
you go with such man and have him lead you or tell you where to go and what to
do? This is not only against reason and logic it is against the nature and
reality. You cannot ever earn the horse’s trust, it will not happen. In
addition, there is
no trust in nature anyway; it does not get processed, it does not compute, hence
there is no betrayal either. It is all about the predictability by the horse, but
that is another issue about which I will write some day, hopefully. There is no
love in nature, it does not process and does not compute, but pleasure (joy)
does in everything alive as much as pain does. It is not about trust; it is all
about the heart. People think that horses trust us when they appear like it.
They don’t! They process and compute, adjusted to it and live with it. They
have no choices, only we think we have them, again we think. We miss most of the
reality (life) by thinking about it.
You have to learn to stop thinking when on a horse. Let
things just happen and think about them later. It is simple as that.
Horsemanship is not a science, requires very little brains but it requires
immense perception, as well as speed of response. Perceive, process, respond,
store and when you sit at home, be like your cattle, pull it back out and chew
it like a cod, but when on horse you have to shut down your reason in relevance
to him. You can be on top of the horse and day dream, think about anything you
want, but when you start thinking about what is around you, you could have very
worried horse on your hands. In horse’s life perception is life.
Problem with
horses is that their equipment for living in our environments is too refined.
Imagine your eyes can see all around you, you can smell things 100 yards away
and you can hear things from 100 yards, like people talking and such. It is just
too much for the horse to process, he misses too much of it, hence he feels
insecure, often nervous. Sometime they walked by something several times, but it
was never processed. One day it is processed and the horse jumps and we wonder
how come he is afraid of something that he saw before. He never did see it, or
better said he did, but it was not processed, he missed it.
On the plains there
is very little to see, hence he process everything and misses nothing. There is
just too much to see when in our world or in a country side and he cannot
process it (hence the blinders on working horses). On the same note, I ride
horse in the morning on the track and there is one person in the stands, the
horse sees him a half a mile away and is afraid of him, especially when going by
the stands.
The same horse has no problem running in the afternoon when there
are a thousand people, because he cannot process all of it. He starts to focus
on things closest to him and ignores the things in distance, the more to process
the more he focuses on things closer to him. The more he sees the closer he
looks and process.
The less to see the further he looks. Logical, of course, but
that is not a reason, that is reality to be seen and not figured out. We can pull
sense and reason out of the truth and invent various theories, but we cannot
ever pull the truth out of our senses or reason. Truth is something that has to
be seen and perceived, not figured out, especially when dealing with horses.
We are like windows Vista plugged into 14 K modem. The horse is like
the first computer system with a black screen plugged into a cable. You think
faster, but you process slower on account of your thinking, in addition to it
all your perception is very poor in comparison with the horse. He process
several times faster because he does not think. If he could think only little we
could never ride them.
People say: “If horses would know their strength, we
could not ride them”. It is not the strength, horses do not see sizes, sizes
do not compute. Horses have no idea about them, they do not know how big they
are, and hence the small horse beats a shit out of the big one because he does
not know how small he is, nor the big horse knows how large he is so he runs. That is why I say
it is all about hearts. Horses can see objects but the size does not compute or
better said is not processed. I’ve seen horses in panic trying to get out of a
stall through 12x12 inch feeding hole, or saw a horse trying to jump 12 foot
wire mash fence, the latter died of broken neck.
Rooster attacks a human being,
the size does not compute, he has no idea how small he is. Animals do not have
universal self-awareness as wee do. They do not know they are, we do, hence we
think and they don’t. Besides if horses could think they would have a union by
now.
Go for a ride, not for the sake of it, but because you want
to go somewhere. Your horse may not move in straight line because you are moving
and have no idea where to or why. On top of it all in the mind of the horse you
cannot see, hear or smell. If you like beer and the bar is near by, get on the
horse and go there. You cannot fake it, you really want to go there and have the
beer. Than you go home very happy. Leave the horse alone; just think of where
you are going and what awaits you there. That is if you got the chance to do it.
Simply you are going to meet a joy and then you are going home happy. Give no
rewards to the horse. After few rides tell me what have changed? Be resourceful;
visit neighbors for picnic and such.
Horses do not like to move anymore than I do if there is no
purpose to it. You will not get me move to go for a walk, for a ride in a car or
on the horse. I have to have purpose to move, and so do they, fear or food for
them, or something pleasant or painful. You give it to them and things will
change, for horse will not follow men, but their hearts he may. If the purpose
is in your heart and it is happy one, the horse will take ride with you wile you
on top of him. It is very simple. How do you think horse must feel when he runs
in a circle, how do we get processed in his head? If they could think, they
would think we are idiots, all of us and I am not an exception, but they do not
think.
Horses are like computers that come with a program that is
able to receive data, process them and adjust itself to it. This is mere
comparison of their mentality, they are living creatures and life is something
we do not understand. They have a heart computers do not. Life is plugged into
the universe, computer to an electrical outlet. We give names to things that we
do not see or understand and then we think about them and become confused.
Please do not misunderstand, I am not even remotely
suggesting that one should perceive the horses as computers, that would be an
insult to life as well as to God. On contraire they have huge heart and Great
Spirit, which the mind cannot comprehend, hence the computer cannot have. We
approach them with the mind, hence the comparison for us to understand and deal
with what is going on. This will not help you see, but it will help answer some
questions as you go. You must keep your eyes open though, lest you will trip and
eat some dirt.
We do not want to believe that horses do not think, because
it would mean that we do not matter to them, and we don’t. People just cannot
accept that and I cannot make them.
We do not make sense to a horse, he cannot process why is
he going over jump if there is an easier way to get around it. If he would
think, he would speak and he would ask: “Why do we have to do things the hard
way?” He cannot process why are you going down hill if you can bypass that. He
is an animal of plains. You simply do not fit in his reality; to him you are in
some lala land. Sometimes they will remind you and snap you out of it and
sometime, or better said, most of the time they just don’t care, they adjust
and live in that nonsense. Next time you find a destination on a trail ride let
the horse take you there, and he will if your heart is in it. He will pick the
safest and easiest way to get there, and since it is not about food and no one
will eat it, he will not rush, because that too does not process. Only we rush
to end up in the same place. If we are only surviving, what do we say on our
deathbeds? “I have survived”. It is better if one would say, “I’ve
lived”. So, what’s the rush?
See I wrote in one article: “Nature is about survival”. It is an error, but I had to choose that for that article, for the human reason to understand. The nature is simply about life, not about survival, but then they would not understand, because they do not understand life.
Written by Ludvik K Stanek a.k.a Lee Stanek