Spook Season

Ever heard the saying, "Horses are only afraid of two things, those that move and those that don't"?  As humans, we have the ability to ponder and process. A lot of the time we think before reacting. Horses, on the other hand, are wired to react first, think after. Being prey animals, their survival depends on quick reactions. They don’t have the time to stop and think when a predator is chasing them - they need to run for their lives.

Photo Credit: A Sharper Image Photography

Have you ever called a horse “dumb” for spooking at something you considered to be harmless? Or been exasperated by how long it can take them to walk past something frightening? I think most riders have at some point, especially in our early years with horses.

Before we learn how their brains, senses, and instincts work, it is easy to think of horses’ reactions as silly or stupid. A jump standard might be put away at a slightly different angle, and your horse suddenly is scared to walk past the corner. Or the mounting block gets moved to a different corner and your horse turns into a fire-breathing dragon.

Have you ever said to your horse, “You’ve seen that 1000 times before!”?  Until I read Janet L. Jones’ book Horse Brain, Human Brain, I didn’t fully understand why a horse would be petrified of the same object every time it was in a new location. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

In her book, Jones explains that horses don’t have categorical perception, which means they don’t recognize objects when they move to a new location. The same old mounting block in a new corner is a whole new object to a horse.

To be fully empathetic, we need to place ourselves in their shoes and think about what it would be like to live in a world where there were seemingly so many new and scary things. Then on top of that, we must remember that anything unfamiliar could potentially be life-threatening in a horse’s eyes.

Often, someone will say, “He’s just being naughty,” when in reality the horse is probably trigger stacking beyond what the person is able to recognize. I would go as far as to suggest that in many cases, the human’s ability to recognize what the horse is feeling in those instances is about as good as the horse’s ability to recognize an object in a foreign area.

Sure, there are clever horses and ponies out there who spook to get out of working. But we should be asking ourselves, why doesn’t that horse or pony want to work?

Carrying beginners is one of the toughest jobs a horse can have. They are often subject to discomforts such as poor balance, rough hands, or someone bouncing on their back, to name a few. Then there are the emotions they have to deal with, such as fear, frustration, sorrow, or hyperactivity.

Intermediate and advanced riders aren’t always the easiest to deal with, either. They may have issues such as stress from work they bring to the barn, body asymmetry, or lofty goals coupled with perfectionism. A horse that spooks to avoid work might actually just be reacting to the physical or emotional pressure they feel from the human they’re carrying.

Sometimes spooky horses are the anxious, reactive types. With those types, we aren’t usually as surprised by a spook. But a lazy or mellow horse can be equally frightened by something, seemingly out of the blue. Lacey, for example, can go through an entire 15-minute warmup without noticing a blanket hanging over a chair in the arena, and then suddenly stop dead or shy away from it.

Why did she not notice it until then? Usually what’s changed is I’ve shortened my reins and put her to work. This is where it would be easy for someone to say she’s spooking to get out of work, but I know my horse and she doesn’t do that. What’s actually happened is one or more of the following:

·      She was so relaxed and mellow in her warmup she wasn’t actually paying attention to her surroundings

·      Her head height changed when I shortened the reins, so she’s seeing it from a different perspective

·      I’ve changed my line of travel such as to ride a leg-yield so again, she’s seeing it from a different perspective

In all the above instances, she’s usually more scared than she would have been if she’d noticed it when she first walked into the arena because to her it wasn’t there for the first 15 minutes, then it “suddenly appeared out of nowhere!”

I can’t blame her for being petrified of something that seemingly teleported into the arena, but I have definitely laughed at her and told her she’d die in the wild due to her poor powers of observation! That being said, I’m very glad she’s so confident and relaxed in her environment that she can be that zoned out and zen.

When we went to our first show and did a walk-trot test, she was looking at everything. As she was focused on the flowers at B, the show photographer snapped a picture (see above). Lacey heard the camera click and thought that the clicking came from the flowers she was looking at and stopped dead.

The association she made of the noise with the flowers rattled her completely. She was so scared after that that she proceeded to halt repeatedly throughout the test to stare at everything from traffic in the distance to the judge’s truck to other flowers. Her fear was genuine, and any sort of discipline would have made her more scared of the object – and scared of me. I just waited it out, and each time she stopped to stare at something I gently encouraged her forward with soft leg and voice until she was ready to walk on again.  

Now for the big question: how do we help our horses to become less spooky? There are several key things. First, empathize with your horse. Try to put yourself in their shoes and see the world how they’re seeing it.

Second, look for the why behind the spook. Not every horse is the same, nor is every spook. Some come from genuine fear of an object, some come from trigger stacking, some come from having extra energy such as at this time of year when the weather is cooling off and the horses are feeling fresh. Your horse could also be reading your emotions or body language and reacting to that.

Third, look for potential solutions. Be open-minded and creative. Not every tactic works for every horse. Sometimes we have to go through a lot of trial and error to figure out how to overcome spooking.

Lacey was genuinely afraid of many things when she was young. She wasn’t a bold horse; she would rather look the other way and go in a different direction. I used to dismount and lead her up to everything she balked at approaching, and eventually she learned that I wouldn’t ask her to go up to anything that I wasn’t willing to go up to. The process made her much braver as well as more trusting of me. Now I can ride her up to most things that spook her.

The more you work with your horse, treat them as an individual, and honour their feelings, the better able you’ll be to help them through their insecurities. One day I’ll write about ways to deal with spooking, but for now go out, have fun, and explore new ways to deal with things while looking at them from your horse’s perspective. Happy Halloween!