[QUOTE=Abbie.S;8617465]
There’s two reasons I’ve come across that people teach their horses to disengage, and there’s only one I’ve found that actually valid, IMHO.
There’s the “teach your horse to move his butt away because that’s the most dangerous part of him” thinkers, and then there’s the “teach your horse to bring his hind leg under his body and cross over as both an exercise in submission and as his first introduction to engaging his abs and using the inside hind” thinkers. I’ve gone with the latter. It’s a much more useful school of thinking that you build on throughout the horse’s career.
The former was a Parelli idea. We all know how useful Parelli thinking is, and who it tends to be aimed it. Sure, you can move your horse’s butt around all day, but unless it has some deeper purpose, it’s not much of a tool. It’s designed to help scared older women feel more confident about their horse handling, if we’re being honest.
If you look at folks like the Dorrance brothers, Buck, Harry Whitney, Ray Hunt, etc., they only exaggerate the motion when they are teaching the horse and he’s not getting it. Very quickly, the horse is moving off nothing more than a slight lift of the hand or a shift in weight from the handler. And then they move on to building on the request, not sitting there diddling around with disengaging all day.[/QUOTE]
This is a really important distinction. It is the difference between shifting the haunches in a crude way to establish obedience, and shifting the haunches as the start of lateral work, which builds athletic ability.
In the first method: yes, if you take a green horse, especially one that is already a bit “downhill” in his build, and make him shift his haunches abruptly, you do “disengage” him by throwing all his weight on his forehand; he takes a couple of steps sideways, then bulges onto his outside shoulder, collapses onto his forehand and stops. You can see young horses stop this way in turnout: they gallop, reach the fence, plough around on the forehand, stop, rebalance, and gallop off again.
The second method is related to doing shoulder in and other lateral moves in dressage. You are teaching the horse to step under himself in a controlled manner, crossing his hind legs, which builds muscle and athletic ability: in dressage lingo, it “gymnasticizes the horse.” As the horse gets more strength, he is able to do this is a more “collected” fashion. He doesn’t fall over onto his shoulder and stop. Rather, he keeps his shoulders upright, his weight over his haunches, and steps with balance and grace.
When the horse gets to this point, “shifting the haunches” stops working as a disciplinary or “safety” measure. If my mare gets hot in hand, she is perfectly capable of prancing around me in shoulder in, either in a nice passage, or in a canter. Her head is up, and this movement actually gets her hotter.
We do a version of it sometimes at liberty, with a treat, and get moments that look like the start of passage: very slow controlled upright trot.
And if I work her in shoulder-in at the start of the ride, it increases her collection and mobility, rather than throwing her onto the forehand.
I have also noticed that, although I have not been schooling anything very fast or precise at the canter, that her behavior in run and buck turnout has changed. Instead of reaching the fence and plowing to a halt by falling on the forehand and turning, she can do a tidy little barrel racer circle at the fence, stay perfectly balanced, and take off again.
As far as the signal to shift haunches, I’ve never seen anyone use such a large, crude motion as the OP describes. As with anything, you want minimal, controlled, and replicable in the saddle. A touch on the side, finger or whip; a hand gesture; a word command. You want the horse to move only as much as you request, maybe only move one foot.
I think that some of the aspects of NH were derived from thinking about feral, unhandled, horses. Join-up for sure, and round-penning for submission. These may have their place in the first days of working with a BLM mustang. But they don’t seem that useful in working with the average pet horse.
So while the “crouching like a predator” may have some validity way back in working with a feral horse, I don’t see that it is of much use with the pet horse (I am using the word pet here deliberately :), after following the discussions on other threads about pets and livestock).
It isn’t much use because the average pet horse doesn’t see his owner as a predator. He sees his owner as a walking cookie dispenser, and maybe an obstacle in the way of fresh grass, horse social time, and fence-chewing. This is especially true of the sorts of horses that “need groundwork” and push their owners around. And as you school a young horse, a good deal of what you are teaching is in fact “humans are not predators, but you do have to listen to what they say; we won’t hurt you, but we will become your second brain, seamless with you.”
In fact, I sometimes wonder if the average pet horse even sees predators as predators. I’m thinking how calm my mare is around dogs, coyotes, even bears walking by the paddocks at night, or at a distance on the trails (I think a bear at close quarters on the trail might get her attention).
