#my geldings (I say affectionately) would sell me to Satan if he offered them a cookie

[captainderyn]

Ooh can I contribute! I love horse psychology and don’t have a ton to coherently add but two things:

Context: I have a 7 y/o American mustang mare. She was born in the holding pens (aka she didn’t grow up wild) but mostly just sat in a field and was lightly restarted until almost two years ago when I started her as my dressage prospect. For those who don’t know about mustangs, they’re feral/wild horses and (in my opinion) have much stronger instincts and independence than your average domesticated horse. Despite never being truly wild, my mustang has the instincts that tell you she’d have been Boss Mare of her herd. What does that mean? She’s *incredibly* self aware, independent, and has incredible survival instincts for better or worse. If she thinks something poses a “risk” (in horse terms) to her, you have to work your butt off to prove its worth her while.

1) Communication is incredibly important with horses, especially very intelligent ones like my above described mare. When reading a book called “Connection Training” (highly recommend for my horse peeps), there was a section about greeting your horse instead of just pulling them from their field to groom/ride/whatever. They talked about how horses will walk up to each other and bump noses once or twice to start their interaction. So, I tried it with my mare. Walking into her field, holding out my fist. And what do you know, she bumped it! I’d stand for a minute, then try again in a “do you want to engage?” and most of the time she does! There’s a certain excitement to a horse when they realize you attempt to understand them.

2) Fear in horses can also sometimes be a body thing. In some mustangs they’ll be weird about their left side, as that’s the side they’re branded on. For my mare, her right side was very odd. She’d flip her shit if anything happened on that side. Yet, she wasn’t spooky or scared. You could do anything around her, the wind could be gusting (thanks Midwest) and she’d be fine, hell, big planes could fly low overhead to get back to the airport and she’d simply look up at them (first horse I’ve seen do that). But she couldn’t even *look* right despite there being nothing physically wrong. Turns out, for whatever reason, she had little to no bodily awareness on that side. We had to help her “unlock” that part of her body. And that’s been consistent with the rest of her training: everytime we try something new we have to either physically help her put her body there (such as yielding her throat latch) or position her body to where biomechanically she does it without thinking (right lead canter) otherwise, she thinks too hard and can’t do it. After that, permenantly unlocked like she’s done it for years. Biomechanics people, biomechanics!

Secret third thing: no, mares aren’t worse than geldings or more temperamental. They have hormone cycles, so some times of the month they’re more uncomfy, but people project human sexism and stereotypes onto mares an uncomfortable amount. My running theory is: mares historically were meant to take care of their bands and as such they’re independent thinkers and problem solvers and not so much followers. *GENERALLY* speaking, geldings are more eager to please and follow and most people’s issues with mares are because they don’t bother trying to understand equine behavior, communication, or hormone cycles and want to bully their way to what they want and in *my own personal experience* geldings are more yielding to this approach then mares.

Reading Recommendations:

Evidence Based Horsemanship- Martin Black and Stephen Peters (more neurology and biomechanical stuff)

Connection Training: Hannah Weston and Rachel Bedingfield

Me: I'm going to look at horse forums, I bet the drama there is so funny

Me after 4 hours of horse forums: Damn....those people really love and care about their horses...