I’ve had to handle a few horses who exhibited learned helplessness, they absolutely where not interested in trying to figure out what your question was. They knew the wrong answer got them punished and the right answers reward was just being left alone, until the next request which normally happened about 5 seconds later. That’s not enough reward to get most of us to risk all the negative reinforcement. Everyone of those horses was “trained” by people who proudly told me they followed PP or CA and also had no prior horse experience.
With these horses I go right to clicker training, it really helps teach a horse to want to learn it’s amazing how well it works. But I’ll also admit I’m lazy so I don’t use it with the average horse I have since positive conditioning is enough for the majority. But I don’t hesitate to use or recommend clicker training to anyone
The problem is the people who lump everyone into two boxes - NH and nonNH. It’s like saying you are hard line liberal or hard line conservative, and there is absolutely nothing in the middle.
I refuse to accept a label or to slap a label on anyone. I do know that I grew up riding English, back in the 80s, and the predominant mentality was “try it and see what happens.” There was no logical, methodical method of teaching a horse, that I was exposed to. Very little groundwork whatsoever. Some people might sack a horse out before saddling them for the first time. Mostly it’s “let’s see if he’ll accept a saddle pad, then the saddle, then the girth, etc.” There was no desensitizing to get the horse acclimated to touch and sound and sight sensations before saddling. Need to put a horse on the trailer? Just try to walk him on, and if he won’t load, you get the broom (ack) or the whip (good lord) or the lunge lines. There was no addressing the mental aspects of horse training.
And whether you call it “disengaging” or “untracking” is totally irrelevant. If you think there is a difference, you miss the point completely. And forget the word “submission.” That’s archaic. “Correct riding” means you have the horse between your leg and your hand, round and supple and balanced, listening and responsive and relaxed and willing.
A good training program is humane, logical, methodical and effective. There are probably thousands of variations of programs, so to slap a label on people and speak of them so dismissively is narrow minded.
Bolded mine. The wording is absolutely not irrelevant. Words have meaning. They have to carry weight if anyone is to comprehend what one says. If they do not, then nothing has meaning. If I don’t mean what I say, and choose words that specifically describe what I want or am trying to convey, how is anyone to understand me?
If you think there is no difference, it is you who are missing the point.
I agree with your description of correct riding, but in order for the horse to get there, he must submit to the rider. That is to say he must give up any inclination he had to do something other than what is being asked of him. Until a horse commits to this 100%, he will have a propensity to be dangerous to the degree that he continues to try and push his own agenda. It’s not archaic, nor barbaric, nor unfair or harsh or any other descriptor, it simply is what it is. “Submission” is not a dirty word. The safest horse around is the one that happily submits to his rider not because he was forced to but because his rider has shown him that he will always be guided with a fair hand and will always have his voice heard and safety looked out for. Having gotten familiar with enough of your posts regarding horsemanship, I’m sure you know this.
There is a historical context for why I categorized as I did, if you ever care to look into it. It is certainly not narrow-minded to “slap a label” - the same label - that someone routinely gives themselves, nor is it narrow-minded to see them for what they are, good or bad.
Nope, whether you use the word “yield” or “disengage” or “untrack” or “move,” you are talking about the same thing and working toward the same goal. They might not in the dictionary have the exact same meaning, but they are synonymous. It’s like when you were learning to ride and one trainer says “stick your chest out” and another says “squeeze your shoulder blades together.” You get the same result.
I grew up riding just like you (albeit in the 90s), and we were just taught to grit our teeth and get through it. I can absolutely get on a horse and, with enough finesse, make it look like the horse is learning something. After learning about their mind and how to make my horses safe for anyone to get on, I will never look back.
Good and bad trainers come under all sorts of labels. There are plenty of questionable practices that go on in the name of show hunters or show jumping, and yet no one advocates condemning the entire discipline because of some poor practices. Natural horsemanship, or its related practices that do not use that name, seem to provoke a particular ire on this forum. I wonder why. Sometimes I wonder if because NH seems to attract a less than 1 percent elite financial crowd, and is not about overly conspicuous consumption, and if some of the criticism is not back handed snobbery.
No less a personage than George Morris recommends being able to ride and train in a variety of styles, and himself encourages people to learn what Buck Brannaman does.
Of course personal anecdote does not a case make, but for myself, use of what some might call ( or condemn as ) NH techniques have got my OTTB OFF his forehand, built his topline, made him supple and quiet and responsive and calm in a way nothing else has. He is an absolute joy to ride and to handle. This was the horse that was anything but when I got him a few years ago. Is he happy within himself and thriving? Yes. I might not myself have first thought of using these approaches, but having tried it, and seen the results in my horse, well, that was all I needed to see. I have made a lot of choices around horse keeping and horse training based on what works for this horse, which were not at all the things I would have been inclined to do it initially. But I see what works, and at the end of the day, if my horse is happy, calm, and comfortable, I know I have made the right choices for us.
It is all a journey.
But it is a bit discouraging to see the ire directed at NH, or NH type approaches as a blanket condemnnation.
Flame suit zipped on, I know this may bring some counter responses. Whatever.
No.
Different words have different meanings for a reason. They might be synonyms, but there is a reason why they were created : subtilities. Which are quite important for comprehension.
We might try to say the same thing, but if we don’t agree on the meanings of terms, then we won’t understand each others.
« Stick your chest out » and « squeeze your shoulder blades together » won’t be told to fix the same problems to the same person. (and to me, those two aren’t really good phrases to fix position problems as it gets riders to become stiff.)
If you are going to be that picky about “subtilties” as least spell it right. Or are you talking about “subtitles?” It’s important for comprehension.
And really? You think that all those people at clinics trying to get help with their horses are going to do one thing if the clinician uses the word “disengage” and something completely different if he or she uses the word “untrack?” No, they are all doing the same exact thing. And it all starts at the stand still, so how many of those horses are “engaged” or “tracked” to begin with? You don’t get to that point for a while past the point that the maneuver is learned (I had to look up the spelling of maneuver so you would not make fun of me. Or maybe I should use the term “poke” for comprehension?).
I’m French. I made a spelling error.
Clinicians usually explain most terms they are using and do a little demo.
And yes, people might do different things.
I wouldn’t even know what to do if someone told me to « untrack » my horse. What does that mean?
Tracking and engaging, to me, mean two different things.
A horse can be well engaged and not tracking up (collected gait) and vice versa.
Nb: Best way not to be made fun of is to not make fun of others. Just sayin’
Do you understand the context in which the terms are being used? It’s taught with the rider on the ground.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t carry “ire” towards NH practitioners.
And I absolutely agree that not all folks who place themselves under this category are cut from the same cloth. The problem over the years has been that NH has become a marketing cash cow - it’s filled with big names who promote their particular wares, DVDs and more importantly a methodology of training horses. I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in methods (and again, this seems to come down to the meaning and application of words, a topic some feel is not important when it comes to this discussion). Methods have no place in horsemanship, for the very meaning of the word removes from any situation the fact that you are not working with a logical, linear program, you’re working with a sentient being that has its own thoughts, desires and needs. You cannot apply method to that. The vast majority of those who proudly call themselves NH practitioners sell a method, and so I have absolutely zero interest in them.
But methods sell, and quite easily - if you can package up horsemanship in nice, neat, sequential way of doing things, then anyone can replicate it at home with their horse, right? It’s this marketing ploy that is a large part of the problem - horsemanship is not neat, it is rarely sequential and it’s far from linear. Marketing in this way, again, removes from the story the fact that no horse is the same, and it often entirely alleviates the human of having to change something within themselves to help the horse.
“Untracking” here means to get a horse moving that “parked” itself, like one that saw something scary and is not budging.
You have to be careful how you “untrack” a horse, he may just “blow up” on you.
Some use “disengaging” to “untrack” a horse, asking it to scoot it’s hind end around only, or using a “one rein stop”.
“Disengaging” here means a horse that for some strange reason someone wants to get the front and back end not working together.
Maybe the horse is ready to “blow up” and they want to avoid that by getting the hind end scooting away and so maybe losing the power to move quickly.
A “disengaged” horse may scoot around discombobulated, different parts moving awkwardly, not nicely collected as one.
In some disciplines, where an engaged and collected horse is prized, the purists don’t like any kind of “disengaging”, consider that teaching a horse something we never want the horse to learn.
Even when “untracking” a horse, you can do that without “disengaging” any part of it, with other skills to keep control of that horse, so it doesn’t “blow up”, the one reason “disengaging” is practiced by some.
One example, the spanish walk, an ultimate disengagement movement, that purist dressage trainers don’t want their horses to learn, as it promotes, according to them, a motor memory that permits a horse to “disengage”.
Clear as mud?
Yes. I do.
They have their horses move their haunches in some ways.
Still, it’s not clear.
Would « turn on the forehand » works too?
Tracking and untracking, to me, means the horse is moving forward… so has nothing to do with the «standstill move your haunches » exercice.
One of the biggest difficulty in learning anything is the language used. That’s why it’s important to be precise.
You will notice that at the top of any sport/discipline, there is less confusion about terms. I’ve been able to take lessons from different FEI coaches and judges, and it’s easier to really understand what they mean because they kind of agreed on the same terms.
Anyway. Let’s bring back this thread to it’s original purpose.
@alibi_18 (and anyone else), if it helps at all, I also asked about the particular use of the word “untrack” in this case versus “disengage” when I was first learning from my mentor many years ago. The difference, she explained, was that “untrack” was a direct description of what the horse was doing when you break it down to the most simple purpose: instead of continuing (or even starting) on a “track”, i.e forward motion with any given leg, you were asking the horse to bring the inside hind deep and obliquely under the navel so as to elicit the horse to step over with the hind end while keeping the front still. Literally, “un-track”, “coming off the track”.
But you didn’t stop there, because it was never taught to be just a movement, it was setting the horse up to get really clear about how he was to use that inside hind. So you taught him on the ground first, then you got him good about untracking under saddle with no forward movement. Then you started using it to teach him how to “drift” with his hind end, on a figure-8 sort of pattern, so he “untracked” at the top and bottom of the 8, and then you got more precise about just how much he was to ENGAGE his inside hind on the figure-8 until he was actually working from curve to straight to curve on the figure-8 with no drift.
The understanding I came to have was that untracking was to literally teach the horse how to engage his hind end, which is why the word “disengage” is so obviously flawed, because the focus is often simply on just the fact that the horse does move his hind end and how quickly, not the manner in which he does it. I don’t know any rider who really wants to teach a horse to not use his hind end, and I cannot tell you how hard it is to re-teach a horse to actually step over and under with the hind end when he’s simply been taught to literally jump his butt sideways. The lack of higher purpose is what makes the practice both useless and an obvious misinterpretation of the teaching.
That doesn’t mean there might not be an instance where I do need a horse to move his hind end over either for safety purposes or some other reason unrelated to his education, but I get the benefit of him being able to do that just as well having taught him the way I described versus just teaching him to “disengage”.
I think all this arguing over semantic is silly. Abbie makes multiple very good points, although I don’t know anyone who teaches a horse to jump it’s butt sideways. Everyone I know wants the horse to step the hind leg underneath and move in a stepping motion, not a jumping motion.
I think the word “engaged” is used in the context where the horse is getting ready to do something bad, like rear, bolt, spin, etc. The horse must have his hind end engaged to do any of those. If you can get him to step his hind leg underneath himself, you’ve interrupted that process because you’ve “disengaged” the hindquarters.
Whatever you want to call the maneuver, it’s taught on the ground and done over and over and over and over until the horse is perfect at it. Then you do it under saddle with your leg, etc. Then you move onto higher processes where you need the horse to know how to step underneath with the hind leg. So yes, now the horse is “untracking” since he is moving on more than 2 tracks on purpose.
I use it on a daily basis every time I need to catch or halter a horse. When I enter a stall or approach a horse that is turned out, I get that hind end to step over away from me and have the horse face me.
@Palm Beach, perhaps we’ll just have to agree to disagree, but from the point of view of someone who teaches this stuff, it’s not semantics. The words I use and the context I ascribe to those words have huge implications for how my students apply the teachings with their horses, so the words DO carry significant meaning.
From your point of view, as someone who understands the deeper purpose, it doesn’t matter to you, and that’s fine.
But since we were talking about teachers of horsemanship, I think it’s fair to say that clarity and context are of the utmost importance, in which case I do pay very close attention to what kind of language is used because it gives good insight into where the teacher is coming from.
Abbie, we are going to have to agree to disagree on whether or not horsemanship of any stripe uses a method or methodology. To me, a method or methodology is an over all plan and process for how the horse is trained. It is applied according to whatever the horse needs—or perhaps inflexibly if being used by someone who does not want to vary their approach. I have yet to say I have run into any one, NH or otherwise, that says you never vary what you do. Much the opposite-- expressed sometimes as “you ride the horse that comes out of the barn that day”, recognizing that horses ARE sentient beings and have different moods, states of mind, etc, that impact how you work with them and how they respond to things.
Cadre Noir has a method of training. The Spanish Riding School has a method of training. Top hunter and jumper and dressage and eventing trainers have methods of training. So called NH has methods of training.
Some NH ( so called) people have marketed to a certain segment of the population with DVDs, etc. Other trainers market to other segments of the market with programs that require the owner to basically cede all decision making to a trainer, buy things in certain brands and colors, etc. Marketing methods do not dictate whether the method that underlies any approach is good or bad, objectionable or not.
Anyone who thinks that a simple DVD and no more will set them up for working with their horse, and nothing more is needed, will soon learn otherwise. Whether it is a DVD on NH, dressage, driving, whatever.
Back in the day I had a brilliant but difficult horse. I was at the end of my tether in what to do with him. I had only had him a short time. It was suggested to me to get a hold of an “old cowboy” in the area, who had success with troubled horses. I had never heard of NH at the time. I doubt the old cowboy had either. A few sessions with him, ( the horse and I together) and we never looked back-- the horse was brilliant but not difficult. The old cowboy did things like round pen the horse, shake a rope in his face to back him up, use a whip with a plastic bag on it… Done effectively and with a purpose, well, those things seemed to work. The old cowboy had been doing them all his life. He was not hawking DVDs (which were not yet invented probably) or selling products, or whatever… he was an old cowboy living a simple life, having worked on a ranch for most of it. The end.
What good is the exercise of “disengaging” the hind quarters? or whatever term you prefer? Well, in my experience, it makes my horse very responsive to leg and hand, and legs move the hind half, hands the fore half, and THAT kind of responsiveness is very valuable on a jumper course, or in making a horse super adjustable. Just my experience, an anecdote does not prove a claim.
Not all NH is about selling DVDS or whatever, just as not all show hunters are about stuffing the horse with tubes of Perfect Prep or lunging the horse to death. Is the horse owner that turns a blind eye to Perfect Prepping ( or worse) any less objectionable to one that buys a DVD and tries to do groundwork?
As I said in my first post in this thread, NH seems to attract a particular ire on this forum…
The problem is the trainers don’t want their clients to realize that just about anyone can train a horse. You don’t need to be an experienced rider or bronc buster or super brave or a cowboy. You can be Backyard Betty and if you understand how to get your horse calm and listening then you’ll have a good ride. Poor trainer now doesn’t have to ride the horse 3x a week or school the horse before the show or jump him around the Low Hunters before the client does a division with the horse.
Many moons ago, when I saw someone riding a horse that was pitching a fit or being really fractious or whatever at a show I’d admire the skills of the rider. Now I wonder why the heck don’t they get the horse trained up so it doesn’t act like that and they can enjoy the ride.
What a load of you know what PB. It’s internet experts like you who get unsuspecting new horse owners hurt. A horse is not a Labrador retriever.
As a trainer I resent that.
If there is out there a horse trainer that wants helpless clients, well, the problem is not being a horse trainer, but being a crook.
To say that all horse trainers are crooks, as above?
Sorry, that doesn’t fly.
