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Do you have a spooky, reactive horse?
Improving your understanding of the inbuilt instinct for survival in your horse, combined with learning how to “re-wire” your horse’s nervous system, will not only improve your training methods, reducing the instances of injury to you both, you will create a happy, safe horse.
As we all know, once the flight response is engaged, the escape path of a horse can offer unpredictable responses!
This is a conscious decision because the special senses have sent messages calmly relayed to the prefrontal cortex (the reasoning portion of the brain). These thoughts, sensations and emotions use a much faster neurological pathway to alert the horse to move out of the way quickly without first analyzing the extent of the danger.
This process explains why horses’ reactions and behaviors to what we might see as trivial objects, such as a tree stump, or benign sound, trigger a panic state in your horse.
As we also know, every horse is an individual and handles stimuli, stress, and perceived danger differently. While reactions to perceived danger vary and can be extreme, I hope this video helps you understand that no matter how extreme your horse’s spooky tendencies are, there is a way to resolve them.
First, we need to understand the following about our horses:
- Biological psychology and behavior
- Science based evidence - nervous system
- Emotions
- Prefrontal cortex
The fear response arises out of the emotional system which impacts directly on the motor system called the limbic system.
The limbic motor system translates thought, sensation and emotion into movement.
In research, the ‘limbic motor system’ refers to the limbic system impacting on the motor system – that is, when the body translates thought, sensation and emotion into movement.
Fear is a neurophysiological reaction (innate and controlled by the nervous system) to a perceived threat. The horse’s survival relies on his own ability to sense and flee from a predator in a fraction of a second as a way to gain some advantage over the planned attack from that predator.
The limbic system is the part of the brain involved in emotional and behavioral responses, especially when it comes to behaviors for survival, feeding, caring for young, and fight and flight responses.
The limbic system is made up of several structures including the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, hypothalamus and cingulate cortex.
Meet the amygdala
The amygdala is the emotion centre of the brain, while the hippocampus plays an essential role in the formation of new memories about past experiences. The emotional area coupled with the recall of an incident can lead to a jumpy horse.
The amygdala is associated with emotional processing and is the fear generation centre in an animal’s emotions.
Although the prefrontal cortex (the planning and rational decision-making portion of the brain) is smaller in the horse than a human, the amygdala (the emotional and fear centre within the brain) is proportionally larger when anatomically compared with other brain structures and other species.
It would be feasible to assume that because these special senses are fast and hard-wired to the emotional system and transmitted to the leg muscles, the horse could spook when aroused by unknown scary stimulus coming from the rider.
This may be in the form of somato-sensory input (sense of touch) as the rider tenses and applies pressure to the horse (which can be interpreted as potential danger), or when the rider focuses on an object that has presented problems in the past, such as a fence line where dogs have previously ran-to barking aggressively and spooking the horse and rider.
What you need to know about spooky horses…
- The shorter fear response route is faster to react than the longer, rational thinking route.
- Horses are a large flight animal with an anatomically large amygdala that has shortcut circuits from the special senses that alert the emotional system of any imminent or perceived threat of an attack by a predator.
- The limbic system can engage the motor system before the prefrontal cortex has evaluated the threat.
2 ways we can turn a spooky horse into a thinking, calm, safe horse
- Develop a strong and connected relationship first
- Brain games. This is where you develop your horse’s prefrontal cortex (the planning and rational decision-making portion of the brain), teaching them to self-regulate their nervous system, switching from the sympathetic state (instincts) to the parasympathetic state
If you would like to learn more about how, I offer a step-by-step guide in both my Spirituality of Horsemanship Course and MasteryMembership Program. Please click here for details www.taoofhorsemanship.com
