eahotson
Well-Known Member
Like a lot.Sorry, don't mean to single you out, but I think that your comments are very representative of how a lot of people feel about MR and KM.
I think the main message that people take away from MR and co is that you need to be the horse's "leader" and they should "respect" you. So, people try join up (and that can go badly wrong if you are novice at it anyway, and be a very unpleasant, if not downright dangerous experience for the horse) and/or they put duallys on and do lots of backing up out of their space and generally moving the horse around. So the whole focus is on the holy grail of respect, and leadership - and quite often what they completely fail to do is actually train the horse to do the things they want him to do. For example, the horse may drag them on the leadrope, spook at everything and nap on a ride. The owner believes this is because the horse doesn't respect them, so will spend lots of time doing what is really quite aversive groundwork exercises with the horse in order to gain dominance/respect/leadership (pick your term - I think in a lot of these instances they are pretty much boiling down to the same thing). A more accurate assessment may identify that the horse's management is inappropriate, or there are pain issues, or simply, and very commonly, the horse lacks confidence because they have not been gradually, repeatedly and consistently exposed to all the things they need to deal with, whilst at the same time being taught clearly and fairly how to deal with them. If many "training sessions" involve aversives and the horse being over-faced and/or doing things they find boring or unpleasant the horse will also lack motivation to particpate and interact with the human. People frequently "throw horses in at the deep end" with little preparation and then put the blame on the horse when things go wrong by saying he's dominant, or he doesn't respect them.
So, to me, the whole theory is backwards. Instead of worrying about becoming the leader, I think it would help to just focus on acquiring a really good understanding of how to train horses and how to meet their daily needs as best we can. Good trainers are calm and consistent; they don't get over-emotional, or lose their tempers. If it goes wrong, they take a step back and re-evaluate. Good trainers learn the value of breaking each task down into steps, reinforcing or rewarding every try the horse makes, working at the speed that is correct for that horse and that task. They don't set their horses up to fail, so they don't put the horse in a situation whereby the horse will become too scared or too excited and therefore simply can't respond to the trainer's requests. They expand the horse's comfort zones (and their own) at a pace both can cope with. And they don't blame the horse when it goes wrong. I think if more people focussed on developing these qualities, then the "leadership" and "respect" aspects of the relationship would develop as a natural off-shoot - the horse learns to trust the handler because the handler doesn't do stuff to scare the horse, isn't unpredictably or overly aggressive or aversive to the horse and consistently confirms to the horse when he is doing the right thing. So being a good, thoughtful trainer, I think, would almost automatically make you a good leader - whereas focussing on leadership may well have the outcome of making you a bully in the eyes of the horse - and as Lucy Rees argues, horses don't automatically choose to follow a bully. I don't think, personally, that the way to establish a good relationship with a horse is to get into an enclosed space and act like a predator, or put devices on their heads that are designed to hurt and then use them to make the horse move around. You might see something that looks a bit like "respect" - of course the horse will become much more aware and watchful of the human, but that is because the horse has identified the human as something capable of showing unpredictable, aversive behaviour, and the horse cannot escape from them. Lucy Rees argues that horses naturally avoid, not submit.
What people see when they go to a demo by MR or others is horses being scared - for example with plastic bags, or tarps, or clippers or horse boxes and the horses are being forced to deal with the issue because they are in an enclosed space, with a pressure halter on their head, and have had some pretty strong mind-games played with them before they even confront the thing they fear. Horses can be taught to deal with all those things without force - if MR can speak the language of equus why does he need to keep jerking on a lead rope attached to a dually - horses don't do that to each other! MR and KM go half way there - it's better than a lot of the sheer, obvious violence that a lot of people still resort to but it is in no way as kind as it is made out - and the horses do not have choice. It could be so much better if things were made a bit easier for the horses, and the force was removed. The question is, could they do it without the coercive gadgets they now rely on?