I pretty much know what Cindy likes. She tells me.:’) If she sees a baby coming, they don’t get close to her ears. When I expect her to let the little ones learn to be gentle, she sits there and tolerates them, looking at me like, “the things I have to suffer thru” My horses let me know if they don’t like something either. I am just going to have to respectfully disagree with yall. I think you can get an idea if an animal likes something or not.
jc
Well, since everyone has disappeared here, I’m wondering if I’ve insulted or irritated some of you, and the rest is sitting back wondering, OK now what:)
If so, first I want to apologize sincerely. Mostly I was just trying to spark a good lively discussion, on what horses like, dislike, and methods of training. Things get a bit slow here, we’ve cussed and discussed just about everything, so sometimes throwing out a debatable topic can be interesting.
I do believe that asking/questioning training methods are fair questions. I wasn’t the only one that ask “how do they get horses to do that?” IMO, and I’m open minded that my opinion is wrong...the commentators comment was wrong. I don’t believe the horse “liked/enjoyed” doing what was being asked of it. I don’t believe her tail swishing was enjoyment leaking out her tail. She was beautiful and very well trained, as I’m sure the black horse is. I believe it is nieve to think that some trainers because of their desire to win won’t use harsh measures. I do believe as Beaker said, there are probably horses out there who can be trained to do this sort of thing without harsh measures. But I feel certain there are horse that can’t do it, but are pushed till as she said, their brains are fried.
As I mentioned I believe abuse is a subjective thing mostly. IOW’s training methods may seem abusive to one person but not to someone else...
But as a whole abuse was not what I was thinking about, I never said dressage horses are trained by abusive methods, or is abusive in and of itself.
We all make our horses do things they don’t want to do...does that mean we are abusive, I don’t think so. Does that mean the horse dislikes doing the things we make them do, I don’t think so, if they do things willingly does that mean they like it, I don’t think so.
It’s just, IMO, that attributing human traits to horses demeanor is not a true guide to determining what they like and what they don’t like. IMO that romantisizes horses in general, and that puts horses in danger of abuse or at the least contributes to some people handling them wrong and turning them in to misbehaving brats. I just didn’t care for the comment from the commentator. That was it.
Becky