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Part 5 - Horse Psychology - How Your Horse Sees The World In Compartments Or
Zones Another little known horse fact is the effect of the way their eyes
and brain are wired up to process the information around them. The
way this works is totally and completely alien to us humans. It is
difficult for us to imagine. Yet it is vitally important to be
aware of when training, and especially when bombproofing, your horse. The horse's eyes work independently to each other. Or to put it
another way, the information from each eye is processed separately,
unlike ours which is composited together into one picture. And
it's not just the two eyes that are processed separately, but
different heights as well. What does this all mean? Essentially
it means that the horse has different compartments or zones around
it, and they are all separate. A horse's mind will not let him carry a single learned lesson to
other parts of the body or other 'zones' around him (high and low,
left and right, front and back, above and underneath etc). This is
why a horse that won't shy at plastic bags on the ground may well
shy at them in the air. Or why being trained to be mounted from one
side does not mean he will let you mount from the other. So, easily
fixed. When introducing a horse to anything new, make sure you have
done it from every conceivable angle! To fully desensitize a horse to an object, you will need to move
that object into each of the zones. You will actually need to
desensitize your horse to the object from scratch in each zone.
Crazy huh? Moving the object into all the different 'zones' around
the horse allows the horse to recognize that the object is harmless
in each area. Horses do not have the capacity to reason that a
person on the ground is harmless therefore a person on a fence is
harmless. They are two completely separate things to a horse. A
person on the ground may be normal, but a person on a fence is
scary. Getting your head around this outlook will prevent a lot of
horse-human miscommunication. Remember, something accepted on the left often has to be proved to
be safe on the right. The same goes for front to back, and from
below to up above. Left, right, front, back, below, above, high
left, high right, high front, high back, low left, low right, low
front, low back. You get the idea. Your next two instalments will cover practical examples of what I
call 'irritant training', which is based on the principle that
horses like comfort. This is not at all a form of cruelty! But it
is an excellent way to teach your horse to pick up his feet and to
discourage a horse that does not like to slow down. More later. Thanks! Phil Tragear
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