Discovering the Communicated Equine
BY:
Kerry M Thomas
Founder of
Thomas Herding Technique
“You must endeavor to understand, before you seek to be understood.”
The ability to communicate, and do it well, is a key ingredient for the success and survival of all living creatures.
If you watch bees working a beehive or a colony of ants gathering food for the colony, one is keenly aware of an unseen, yet highly sophisticated, communication network that governs their actions.
In human endeavors like the business world, successful communicators grow and expand to become corporate giants while the unsuccessful communicators close their doors and go out of business.
In the equine circle, the dynamic of a sophisticated communication network is evident when one observes a herd at rest suddenly begin to move to a new location – be it a new feeding ground or a place where the herd is safe from predators. The herd’s survival depends on communication and horses are good communicators. However, this sophisticated communication network is not easily perceptible by the human eye.
Mother Nature is sneaky when it comes to nurturing survival of the herd and one of the methods she uses to insure that survival is to conceal the communication between the lead horse and other horses in the herd. Why is this so? Because the herd can survive easier if a low or middle-level horse is lost to predators instead of the leader. Thus, nature often conceals the true leader.
Often the lead horse is concealed within the herd when it is at rest. Sometimes the lead horse will also hide within the herd if it feels threatened or there is a communication breakdown among the other horses. However, the lead horse is more discernable when the herd roams across prairies and meadows.
In the domestic environment, the lead horse is also not as recognizable as many herds spend most of their time cooped in stalls – nevertheless, the hierarchy is the same. All of the horses in the barn know the lead horse and, with only subtle persuasion, they give way when it goes to get food and water – and yes, even on the racetrack or in the show ring.
The lead horse is often concealed from the “human predator” and thus quietly hidden before our very eyes and, indeed, overlooked. (This is important to know when pre-purchasing and selecting breeding mates or claiming and training horses.)
How the hierarchy is established and communication is transmitted within the herd is vital for their survival. The ability to comprehend the working of this communication network within the herd is essential for ones success as a trainer because it will allow you to properly communicate your goals or intentions to the horses in your training program.
But how does one bridge the communication gap between human and horse?
The Fabric of the Horse: Body Language & Intent
An Emotional Conformation Profile of the horses in your stable will give a clear picture of where every horse fits into the herd hierarchy. (Emotional Conformation Profiling is a system I developed and use to identify the singular aspects of the horse’s ability to comprehend and communicate environmental stimulus.) The next step is to gain an understanding of the communication dynamics that occur within that herd. When you have that knowledge, then you can establish training protocols that best suit the individual behavioral dynamic of each horse in your stable.
Within any stable or herd one can usually find three behavioral or herd dynamic groups: low, medium or mid-level and high. Communication between those groups is often, but not solely, expressed through body language which is the basic and most universal form of communication used by all horses. However, the use of body language to communicate is primarily expressed by horses in the lower and mid-level behavioral group.
Horses at the lower end or the middle of the herd dynamic express themselves far more overtly to impact their space or command over other horses and even handlers. We may mistake this combative, expressive behavior as a sign that the horse possesses qualities of authority and leadership when most often that is not the case. An immediate reaction of the horse violently pushing you away from their space is a sign of insecurity and reveals that the horse may have had a bad experience from previous handlers or that it is not at all interested in you and your training program. This can also be a clear sign of a communicative breakdown.
Playful engagement is a signature of mid-level Individual Herd Dynamic prevalent in the male. It is fun, easy, endearing of character, and we grow fond of this horse. At times, this overly gregarious form of communication is predominantly found in what I refer to as the adjunct horse who serves as the translator or communicator of information from the lead horse to other horses in the herd. Its body language is expressive but not necessarily combative as this horse has a better ability to gauge the intent of other horses in the herd and it also seeks physical engagement in return. This quality is vital for herd survival as the adjunct horse is the primary source of communication to other horses lower in the hierarchy. As such, in developing your artificial herd environment you’re top two horses are the most important as they act as coaches and are important to help implement your training protocols. Learning is 24/7 for the horse.
Intent is a more subtle form of body language expressed by higher herd dynamic horses. Those horses have a presence that allows their intentions to be fully understood and respected with just a look, a twitch of an ear, a brief gesture. High dynamic horses, especially males, have a stealth-like character to them, and this is a positive trait that has to be considered when seeking sires for a breeding program.
Training & Breeding the Character of the Horse
Physical genetics breeds us the horse, behavioral genetics delivers us the athlete. Nature’s design for the horse is to be physically and mentally fit in order to insure survival of the herd and it is important for us caretakers of the horse to implement Nature’s design into our training and breeding program. The most important training program you will ever implement for horses in your stable is the nurturing of their mind.
It is far easier to train for physical fitness than it is to nurture mental ability. Nurturing Emotional Conformation of the horse means operating within their communication dynamic as translator of intent. In order to achieve this while training the athlete to get the most from their natural physical ability, you have to embrace the many pieces of the horse that is in essence their ingredients, or rather their Emotional Conformation.
For training purposes, communication is inherently important because it is what allows the horse to learn, to grow, to move forward, to face challenges, to be nurtured. The ability of you to communicate intent rests squarely on your depth of understanding the communication dynamics of horses in your stable.
As I previously discussed in the research article Training Efficiency of Motion, be it a racehorse, dressage horse, or any equine athlete for that matter, efficiency of movement is the ability to transition properly. This ability to transition while in motion is nurtured within the communication dynamics of the horse. You will advance further, and more consistently, the horse that is able to identify and, at the highest levels, anticipate intent. But this requires the coach (trainer) to properly nurture the mind so that the “communicated” horse, in combination with its physical talent, will be able to reach its true potential. To do so, you need to fully understand before you can expect to be understood. The highest levels of horsemanship lie within the translation of intent rather than the interpretation of body language.
A breakdown of how singular pieces of the horse psyche fit together, communicating the world to them, allows you to begin to identify patterns of behavioral genetics. In the equine athlete we seek patterns of motion and, once we identify these patterns, we can develop a playbook of how to coach the horse forward. In other words, once we understand how the horse is communicating, (communication is the act of both giving and receiving information or stimulus) we open up a whole new world of training the equine athlete.
You don’t want your horse, while running in a race, to react in a way that will compromise its speed and pace and, likewise, you don’t want the ability of a dressage horse to transition from motion to motion to be compromised either. Like the lead horse in the wild, if for some reason your high end equine athlete feels threatened during a competition, for reasons of survival, it will seek safety and withdraw, like a horse melting away from the lead on the racetrack. This is why it is so vitally important to nurture mental fitness in high end horses so that they have a sense of anticipation ahead of them, taking the lead and staying on the lead because their dynamic of intent is to influence what is “just around the bend” (see Training Efficiency of Motion article).
To train for Efficiency of Motion you need to coach, train the horse to anticipate intent. The highest levels of coaching the athlete forward mentally lie within the area of nurturing the high level horse’s ability to anticipate. That can only be accomplished within communication dynamics of the horses in your stable. Without that training, the horses will frequently perform in an inconsistent manner.
Breeding for mental soundness should be one of the primary goals if one hopes to produce a high quality equine athlete. Emotional Conformation trumps physical ability because character traits are what separate herd dynamics within the group – not physical ability. Yet we get so engaged in what we see that we fail to visualize what we feel.
An example of the highest levels of equine communication ability in a Sire can be seen in the behavioral genetics – the Emotional Conformation – of Hat Trick. Hat Trick is a horse who represents one of the highest qualities of Individual Herd Dynamics and character I have seen in a good while. There are others, of course, but unless these horses are as well documented like Zenyatta who is known the world over, they will go under the radar and be underutilized because character and presence are misunderstood qualities hidden within the equine communication dynamic.
We breed the physical, the pushy, the dominant horse, when it is stealth of character that matters most. A proper match in a breeding program should never be focused strictly on physical genetics, on records or on what we see. But, rather, it should be based upon the match of character.
What good is it to breed the physical horse without making an effort to also breed for the “communicated” equine?
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The preceding article is also available as a lecture by founder of THT Kerry M Thomas. If you are interested in receiving a copy of Discovering The Communicated Equine/ The Lecture, topics outline - please send your request via email, regular mail, or by telephoning the THT Offices at 610-593-4889.
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