Your horse is not a bicycle

I say this in lessons more than almost anything else, usually to a rider who is frustrated, and usually about a horse who has just declined to do something he did perfectly well last Tuesday.

If you get on a bicycle and turn the handlebars, it turns. Every time, the same amount, regardless of how the bicycle is feeling about it, what happened to it yesterday, or whether it likes you. That is a machine, and a machine is a wonderful thing.

It is also not what you have got.

The thing riders are quietly hoping for

I think a lot of frustration in riding comes from a hope nobody says out loud: that with enough practice, the horse will become reliable in the way equipment is reliable. Press the button, get the answer. Same input, same output.

He will get more consistent. A well-schooled horse who trusts his rider is a remarkably dependable animal. But he will never be predictable in the way a machine is predictable, because he has a body that feels different on different days, a memory, a mood, and a set of opinions about wind, plastic bags and being asked to leave his friends.

Hoping otherwise sets you up to read every disagreement as a failure. Yours or his.

What the opinions are actually for

Here is the part worth sitting with. The opinions are not the price of riding. They are the point of it.

If he had no view, there would be nothing to build. No trust to earn, because trust only means something from someone who could have declined. No partnership, because a partnership needs two parties. You would be operating equipment, which is a perfectly good hobby, and you would not need me.

Every rider I know who has stayed with horses for decades stayed for that. Not for the technical riding, though that is satisfying. For the fact that something large and quick and entirely capable of leaving decided, repeatedly, to go along with what you asked. That is worth something precisely because it was never guaranteed.

Which does not mean anything goes

I am not making an argument for letting a horse do as he likes. That is not kindness and it is not safe.

Boundaries matter and horses are far happier with them than without. What I am saying is narrower: when he disagrees, treat it as information rather than defiance. Something has changed, or he does not understand, or he is worried, or he hurts. Those have different answers, and none of the answers is "insist harder". See will not, or cannot? for the one that matters most.

The rider who says "he is being difficult" has usually stopped asking why. The rider who says "something is different today" is already halfway to sorting it.

The horses who taught me most

Not the easy ones. I have ridden some genuinely lovely, generous horses and I remember them fondly and learned very little from them.

I learned from the ones who would not, and made me work out what I was actually asking. The ones who were fine for somebody else, which is a humbling thing to watch. The ones where the answer turned out to be nothing to do with training at all.

Every one of those cost me some pride and taught me something I still use. A bicycle has never done that for anybody.

So when he says no

Take a breath, and go through it in order.

Is he sore? Is the tack right? Did I ask clearly, or did I ask the way I ask when I am tired and in a hurry? Is he actually able to do this today, in this ground, in this heat? Has something changed since the last time this went well?

Then, only then, is it a training question.

That order is the whole of what I am trying to teach, and it is the difference between a rider who gets more out of a horse each year and one who slowly runs out of patience with an animal who was trying to tell them something.