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The Round Pen
"A Powerful Tool"
"Get respect, gain control and achieve confidence"
The round pen is where I introduce myself to the horse. It is a place to listen and to communicate. It is a place to develop a leadership role, gain mutual respect and establish control. All without force, bad attitudes or impatience. This allows the horse to stay emotionally and mentally relaxed so he can keep his attention focused on me. This is how I get the horse to learn how to learn! Horses are prey animals and their strongest survival instinct is to run for their lives from fear - at any cost! When horses enter into this “life-threatening zone”, risk of physical injury to both you and the horse are at it’s highest! We must give them something better to deal with their fears than their natural instinct of “flight”.
We are a completely different species than horses. We are predators. We are direct line thinkers that focus in on what we want and then we go get it. Our instinctive behavior is to contain, hold down, and out power that person or animal until it becomes submissive – no more struggling, no more resistance, no more movement.
Restriction of movement, in effect, stops the horse from acting naturally to a stressful situation. In other words, if we do not give the horse a place to go or allow movement, he has no choice but to feel threatened, fearful, trapped, resistant or defensive.
Three steps for gaining respect and control:
- Cause movement
- Control the direction of movement
- Control the speed of movement
I cause movement by driving or herding the horse just like another dominant horse would. My goal is to prove that I am the strongest, fastest, smartest horse and that I am his leader. By causing movement – forwards, backwards, left and right - and rewarding the slightest try - I can earn a horse’s respect.
The more I can get a horse to move out of my personal space or “circle of life” the stronger leader I become. This is important because, disrespect is the monster that causes so many people to lose their confidence while working with or handling horses. Be their leader, earn their respect and watch how your confidence grows!
Secondly, I always want to be in control of the direction of movement. If a horse changes directions on his own, I simply get him to change back to the direction he was going. This will give me yet another opportunity to prove that I am dominant and that I deserve some respect.
When I ask for a change of direction, I like the horse to roll-in off the round pen fence towards me. If he were to change directions by turning into the fence, he would be telling me that if the fence wasn’t there, neither would he. What he would be offering me is a disrespectful hindquarter. In other words he would not be interested in offering me his attention, focus or co-operation.
Thirdly, I want to control the speed of movement. This is where I like to work on speed transitions, both up and down. Also, within each of the three gaits of walk, trot and canter/lope I like to focus on establishing a rhythm or a cadence in the stride. Not only is this is a great exercise for getting the horse to work off of the hindquarters, but again we add another level of control in our quest for leadership.
Whether we are desensitizing a horse to a scary object, or driving him forward to cause movement, we are raising his fear level. So, when adding pressure we should always start as light as possible and increase our pressure in a progressive rhythm. I like to think of it as turning up the volume on a radio dial, “smoothly and slowly”! The secret to all of this is to be “consistent” and always reward the slightest try with a release of pressure.
Horses don’t lie; a horse is not going to put his ears forward and pretend he’s, happy if he’s not. A horse’s mind and body are connected to the point of being “one”! By reading a horse’s body language we are literally reading his mind. Horses are constantly giving us signals of how they are feeling both physically and emotionally. Their actions are actually re-actions to how we move and work around them. Our actions cause “re-actions”. Move in a slow rhythm!
Once we have established a pattern of respect and control, we need to expand the comfort zone. We do this by adding fears in a controlled setting and letting the horse deal with them one by one. Anytime the horse chooses to stay with us, we reward him with a release of pressure. Anytime the horse decides to leave, we make it our idea by driving him out of the herd figuratively speaking.
By allowing the horse to deal with his fears one at a time when he is with us, and driving him out of the herd if he chooses to leave, the horse learns it’s more comfortable to stay than to go. This is the way we become his comfort zone and this is the way we form our connection.
By allowing the horse his freedom to run, he will learn that running away will not be as good as staying. In effect we will be giving him something better than his natural instinct for dealing with fear. US! Pretty powerful don’t you think? Be a champion, be their leader and make a connection with your horse that will form a partnership for life!
Remember – “Success with horses, starts with us”!