Pressure and comfort zones

During the last few months I’ve been thinking about pressure from the viewpoint of humans and horses. For this to make any sense, it might be useful to define what pressure is. Is it a symbol that stays constant or does it increase, and if it does, then why, at what rate etc?

I remember learning myself, years ago, that the basic definition of pressure is that everything that affects the horse is pressure. Either making it move or stay still. Thinking like this, even everything unrelated to humans is pressure. An example of this could be a situation where the horse is startled by a passing car or a dog running through the corral, and as result of being startled the horse flees. On the other hand, horses are taught to yield to the leg and to the whip, and then to face the pressure by staying put. Hmmm…..

When pressure is used in training a horse or communicating with a horse, many other things besides the signal itself affect how it is received and responded to. I’ve noted that many methods teach that the human should rev up and get worked up if the horse doesn’t “obey” a slight pressure. This certainly does work, since the horse is constantly learning, but at the same time it has given something new to think about.

My own preferred way of thinking and working is that the best thing that the human can do is to create the best possible circumstances for the horse to learn in. An essential part of this is that the horse won’t need to learn through mistakes, to do things wrong first in order to succeed or to be punished. A well executed learning situation doesn’t stress or scare the horse, but rather creates an optimal situation for the horse, so it can always respond correctly.

So what does responding mean? The way I see it, training a horse is, to a great extent, basically like playing the age old warmer-colder guessing game. The horse gets a hint from the human, and with correct timing the human rewards the horse for a reaction that resembles the correct one, little by little. This requires that the human has an understanding of the chain of events that leads to performing a single task or an entire series of movements.

But to get back to pressure, it would appear that humans do not perceive the side effects of increasing pressure very well. The horse will certainly become obedient,but at the same time it gets more cautious, and at worst the feelings it goes through in the learning situation become fixed, and the result might be that when too much pressure (in the horse’s opinion) is used, it learns that the human’s own emotions are a part of the learning situation.

So how could signals or pressure be used kindly at all, or in a way that doesn’t transmit the human’s emotions into the horse? In all its simplicity and ease, if you actually need to increase pressure, you can do it without getting angry, worked up or frustrated. How to increase pressure in a way that doesn’t affect the human him- or herself?

When humans end up in a situation where, for instance, the horse doesn’t understand what is required from it, they can easily get frustrated. When this happens, they can easily get taken away from their comfort zone. However, when we feel success it’s like a drug, we want to experience it again and again. One more time… if we turn this on its head and consider how the horse feels like outside of its comfort zone and how success feels to it, it cannot be hard to imagine that the horse would prefer to spend most of the time over at the better side of success.

Learning new things often involves a certain amount of stress and discomfort. Then again, discomfort can motivate us in our pursuit to reach a better state. When we’re justifying the discomfort caused to a horse, it might be a good idea to stop for a moment and to think how we would feel if someone else was in control of the situation….

The essential part, in the end, is motivation. What motivates us to learn new things? If motivation is born out of fear or pain, the learning situation is bound to be more uncomfortable than a situation where the reward is clear and easily understandable. And most importantly, learning is constructed logically so that new things are taught on top of the old and already learned.