It’s official – horses DO learn by watching other horses
It’s official – horses DO learn by watching other horses. And horses can release resistance and trauma by watching another horse.
Last January, we had some stuff that happened in a clinic here, where it appeared that the horses in the clinic learned something simply by watching another horse doing it.
We were doing a saddling demonstration with young Boots and two of the horses watching, appeared to be experiencing huge trauma release about their own saddles. Afterwards, both horses were hugely more relaxed. One of those horses (who had had extensive de-traumatising work before this saddling demonstration) went back to being a clean slate, like a baby foal who had had no trauma.
So off I went to investigate if this was re-producable and if it was consistent. And da daaa…. Drum roll please…. It was and it is reproducible and pretty consistent.
….IF they and the horse they are watching is in their comfort zone. That is the key – IF they and the horse they are watching is in their comfort zone.
Think about it. All those times and all those people who say that this is impossible and it simply doesn’t happen, that horses do not learn by watching. Why would a horse or anybody else for that matter, want to learn anything from another horse who was frightened and reactive and in their “oh shit I’m dead zone”? Why would they want to learn how to be afraid and how to be miserable like that other horse?
We’ve seen it in clinic after clinic now, horse after horse. I’ve used this concept now to get all my horses in their comfort zones about their feet. Some of them are in their deep comfort zones now without any work having been done on them at all. We’ve used it for teaching comfort in float loading. And we’re expanding the use of this approach all the time.
Try it for yourself and report back here with your findings. Use the de-traumatising approach in Zen Connection with Horses to get one horse picking feet up ion their comfort zone and have a bunch of other horses standing around nearby who can benefit from the work.
Or get one horse who is being generous about loading into the horse float, but is not completely in their comfort zone about it yet and have the other horses in a place where they can see you patiently lay in the comfort zone on the one horse about loading onto the float.
Come back and report to us about how these other horses reacted when they had their feet picked up with the same consideration as the horse that you were working on. Or report how these other horses behaved when you loaded them on the float with the same consideration as you did the first horse. Did they take heaps less time to “teach”? Were some of them even completely in their comfort zones with no work at all?
Were these other horses as dramatically changed as our horses were?
Maybe even get some friends together and experiment with this if you only have one horse.
