Ep. 25 - The pitfalls of buying a new horse

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 25. In number 24, I told the story of a few people who weren't very good learners. These were issues they didn't know they have. They weren't saying to yeah, I'm not great in a lesson, I just talk all the time. Or I'm not great in a lesson, I just panic. So we have our inadequacies that we don't know we have. We're unconscious of our incompetence in that regard, and we have our perceived inadequacies. And very often we attempt to make up for them in ways that actually become the real problem. We fill in for what we think our problems are and our attempt to solve the problem becomes the real problem. This really is what underlies the philosophy that says, you're already perfect. You just need to realize that you are, or perhaps we should say, you're already perfectly imperfect. So, for instance, when I was a teenager on my first riding holiday, when I first met a jumping grid and the coach talked to us about sitting up and folding up as we go through the grid, I remember thinking to myself, oh my gosh, that looks so hard. I'll never be able to do that. I'll just stay forward all the time. So I thought I was beneath what he was saying rather than above what he was saying. But that was what at the time made me special or made me feel that I was special. And really and truly, ego doesn't care what your claim to fame is, whether it's that you're better than or you're less than. So I tried to fill in for the fact that I thought I was too stupid and inept to be able to do what he was saying. And I can think of many other areas of my life and my riding where that's been true. And of course, so much of riding becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And many of you will have ridden cross country and found yourselves thinking, I hope we don't stop at the ditch. I hope we don't stop at the ditch, I hope we don't stop at the ditch. And guess what's going to happen? You will stop at the ditch and we'll talk more about mental rehearsal in its positive and negative aspects in another podcast. Another version of this is that you get run away with from the moment you decide you're being run away with. That's the moment when you go, ooh, help. Lean back a bit, take a bit of a hold water ski, and your horse goes off in motorboat faster. If you had the courage and the confidence to just stay on the rug, keep breathing, pretend it was your idea, you could probably gradually slow the legs and take a little bit more hold on the rein in a positive way, rather than creating a water ski way. So there are all these ways in which with all our foibles and our life experiences, we create reality. And I just want to do a quick review of polyvagal theory before we leave this subject for the moment. And just make sure you're really clear on the basics of these three main systems and two hybrid systems. Our ideal is the social engagement system, which is run by the newer ventral branch or more forward branch of the vagal nerve. And we find this just in mammals. It's mobility without fear. It enables rest and digest, feed and breed self soothing behaviors. It has the possibility to dampen down the more primitive circuits. And it's very much to do with feeling safe and being able to perceive signals of safety from our group so that we can cooperatively work together as mammals. Mobility with fear is run by the fight or flight circuit, also known as the spinal activation circuit. And when you work well with this, you can get the butterflies to fly in formation and your nerves just give you a little extra edge. For some people though, it's their undoing and they become scared stiff and miscoordinate. I really think though that some horses get this and they get how to be competitive and they get that little edge and they run these circuits in just the right way. Some don't, some do. We have two forms of immobility with fear. We have arrest. That moment where the horses put their head up, prick their ears, look what's doing and just decide on strategy. Do you run for it? Do you, do you stay put? Is it safe? Is it dangerous? So we have a rest. And within that the possibility of the hypervigilant horse and the hypervigilant rider. We also have immobility with fear in that older vagal circuit, the reptilian dorsal vagal circuit, which runs freeze and fold. This is all fine. If you're a reptile that freezes on a rock, you're a hedgehog that folds up. But it's not so great when you're a mammal. And what will happen to people who've been in this state a whole load is that you can think of us, if you think of all of us like a barrel, maybe a wine barrel, and the barrel gets filled up and this is our barrel of tolerance. And if we have some space in that barrel we are pretty resistant and we can tolerate different things happening. But once you're out of tolerance, you're having a hard time emotionally. And this can also show physically because people run by this circuit tend to get the kind of diseases like chronic fatigue that medicine doesn't deal with well. And one of the authors on the subject talks about the heads of the hydra. You deal with one symptom and it pops up somewhere else. You deal with that, it pops up somewhere else. You deal with that, it pops up somewhere else. And for those folks to get themselves back into the social connection system and to health is a big deal. But what better to help you than the right horse? Those are our three main systems. We then have the two hybrid systems. So we can combine danger with safety in the situation of play and competition, where you can have mobility without fear by combining that ventral vagal circuit of the social connection system with the spinal sympathetic circuit, which gives you those butterflies and a bit more get up and go. We can also have immobility without fear in the hybrid state that combines both the dorsal vagal and the ventral vagal circuits. So when the mother cat carries her kittens, they go limp, but I think are not frightened for their lives in intimacy. When we decide to be still and quiet with another person, we're combining those circuits. And within the horse world, the way that horses can be healing for humans in horse assisted learning or psychotherapy, and humans can be healing for horses through the trust technique, utilizing these circuits. So let's look now at what can happen when you buy a new horse. And we're going to start with the idea of buying a schoolmaster. Now, schoolmasters can be the most wonderful horses who have been well trained, well ridden, and need a quieter life. But schoolmaster is also a euphemism for a horse who's reached the end of his competitive potential, basically because he hasn't been well ridden. Maybe he's experienced stop and go at the same time, which puts a horse in a real bind. Maybe he had a rider who was determined to win, but not remotely interested in mastery. And actually, I was delighted to read an article by Carl Hester recently in our British publication, Horse and Hound, where he was talking about how much he was enjoying riding during lockdown and how he had a new lease of life with it without having to worry about competition. And. And really what he was saying, although he didn't say this in so many words, was that he was absolutely revelling being able to just work with mastery and not having to take time out of that to plaster over the tracks for competition. So you may have bought a schoolmaster horse who really is what you wanted, and you may have bought a schoolmaster horse who really was not going to do better in the situation he was in. And you've bought yourself a horse with a whole load of baggage. But let's imagine now that you've bought a really lovely one. And we're going to draw an analogy here between riding and training and a couple's dance form. So the rider leads the dance, ideally, at least. So the rider is like the man in a ballroom dancing, jazz dance, salsa kind of situation. Any couple's dance form who leads the dance. Now, I hope you've had the experience at some point of dancing with a really good guy. And you go away and you come together and you twirl and you do this and you do that. And you really don't need to know the steps because you are danced and you have a blast. And then let's suppose you sit out the next dance and then you dance with another guy next time, and you find yourself going, I'm pushing, he's pulling. What are we doing? Help. No, I don't know the steps. And you actually can't wait for that dance to end. So let's imagine now that you're a horse ridden by a really good rider. You are danced. You do your shoulder in, you do your half pass, you do your serpentines, you do your changes, maybe you even do your piafre, your passage. You're danced by this really good rider, and actually you don't need to know the steps. Then you're sold and you find yourself with this new rider. And this new rider is much more inept. And suddenly it's like they're pushing and you're pulling and here and there and you're going, ah, I don't know the steps as the rider. You bought this horse and it's starting to go pear shaped. But you're there thinking, I paid a lot of money for this horse, damn it, it's a schoolmaster. It's supposed to be trained. Well, go back to the dance analogy. If one of your friends said to I'll pay you £1,000 or $1,000 if you could dance with the second guy like you danced with the first guy, it wouldn't matter how much money they offered you, you couldn't do it. And it doesn't matter how many carrots you tangle in front of your horse, your horse couldn't possibly do it. So I'm going to Tell you my two most profound stories of this situation. One was a woman I used to teach in Australia. She was a very smart, bright woman, an upper level rider. She was a vet. She bought a Grand Prix dressage horse out of Germany. Now, admittedly, she bought it on video. She didn't go and see it. I never actually got to see the video. So I didn't get to make my own assessment of his state before she bought him. But she thought he'd been well ridden and well trained and he cost a substantial amount of money, I'm sure you can imagine, especially by the time he got to Australia. I met her about three years after she bought this horse. It had its ears back, it didn't want to go, it was really miserable and we had a very big hole to try and dig them out of. But she was able to smile at me and say, and this is a quote, it was worth it. For the first three weeks, somebody else I know here in the UK bought an event horse from a very well known international name event rider, or more likely actually from his sponsors. The horse had won a big event below the level of Badminton and Burghley, but a big one that was part of the trajectory to that top level. The horse, again, costs a lot of money and the dressage started going downhill and then the horse started stopping cross country and then the horse started stopping show jumping. And when I met the person involved, he was less into this spiral than the woman from Australia, but it was still obviously hugely disappointing. But he was able to smile at me. And this is a quote he said to me it was worth it for the first three weeks. Now, personally, if that had happened to me with an immense sum of money and all the expectation and all the hopes, I think I'd have been suicidal, but I would have realized my part in it in a way that perhaps those guys didn't until we really got to work on digging them out of the hole they were in. So whenever you buy a horse, whether it is a schoolmaster or whether it's a young horse with potential and talent, or even just another four legged backyard horse, there are a whole number of pitfalls and I'm going to run through some of them. So it may be that you keep your horse in a livery yard or as you say in the US a boarding barn, where the prevailing culture is a fixed mindset and you have friends and we're going to put that in inverted commas, who want to be one up, so they want you to stay one down and secretly they want you to fail. I have a suspicion, and perhaps I'm being unkind and unfair here, but I really do think I've seen this happen, especially in America, that sometimes there's a trainer involved with this purchase and the trainer's thinking, yeah, I'll have fun riding this horse when she gets scared of it, or I'm going to really enjoy competing this at the higher levels while she's floundering around at first level. I'm sorry to say it, but I think that really does happen. It's. And you really want to be sure that that trainer is buying a horse for you and not themselves. Here's another pitfall which can happen across the board. When you get your horse home, it very likely isn't the horse you thought it was. This happens so often. I mean, have I ever bought a horse and it was really the horse I thought it was? Maybe kinda. I can think of one very good example. I'll tell you later. But often it wasn't quite the horse I thought it was. And the truth is that environment makes a huge difference, not just to horses, but also to humans. And there's science on this now because a few years ago our genes were supposed to control everything and our destiny was determined by our genes. Well, nowadays we have the science of epigenetics which shows that genes are turned on or off according to the environment. Here's an example. A friend of mine, again a known name, with a stallion that was in a very professional yard, that was sold from that yard, went to somewhere else and having been angelic to handle in the original setting, became stalliony and difficult and the original yard owner, where it was said to me, I never ever imagined that would happen. He was just so straightforward. That's happened to many people who've bought stallions and it can happen in many different ways. And horses have emotions. They can't think about their emotions or contemplate them or have emotions about their emotions. They can't wind up that screw as far as we can. But they have the same brain chemicals and neuropeptides as we do that generate emotions. Many years ago I had a stand up argument with a vet. This was the early 90s and we had two cats that were brothers and one of them died and the other one went physically downhill. He lost weight, he got really weak, he had diarrhoea, he looked awful, he acted so miserable. And when I suggested he was perhaps mourning and missing his brother, the vet was, oh, don't be ridiculous. Well, nowadays that vet I think would not have a leg to stand on. Animal emotions might be much more simple than ours, but they're there and they're run by the same biochemistry. And even the UK Parliament has voted that animals are sentient beings. This is a good thing. Here's another pitfall. Your quiet horse deemed suitable for a rosebud rider is actually a horse in that dorsal vagal state of learned helplessness. And perhaps he begins to come out of it in this new environment and he might possibly become far from quiet. Another pitfall is that you really, as in the story of the stallion, sometimes just don't foresee where the cracks are going to appear. When a less skilled rider gets on this horse, rarely is she straight in the flow channel. Do you remember the flow channel where we were plotting the skills against challenges? And when they're a good match and the skills increase as the challenges increase up you go through the flow channel and you have a wonderful time. But when the challenges are too big for your skills, you could be in anxiety or frustration. When the challenges are too low, you're going to be in boredom. But that's not likely with your new horse. You're more likely that this is pushing your skill level. There's a skill gap for what you really need to write in. Well, and finding your way into the flow channel could take some doing and it really can be hard to predict where the cracks will appear. Things that could be taken for granted with a certain rider and a certain environment cannot be taken for granted with a new rider and a new environment. And of course, if you think of the flow channel in relation to tennis, it's not so hard to change your tennis partner. If your tennis partner is really just too good for you and it's becoming demoralising, you don't have to sell your tennis partner or rehome her, but you do have to sell or re home your horse. Many people, I see this especially in America, but it's true here too, and more true where people have more disposable income. Many people will buy a young horse and have the riding equivalent of eyes bigger than their stomach, which is eyes bigger than their ability to match and organize the forces of of this young horse which has potential. And I guess I'm old fashioned because I love to see ordinary horses working well. But that's not what's fashionable. What's fashionable is the wizzy wonder horse that actually the rider does not have the skills to be able to deal with. And it's rare. It's a small percentage of horses that Just raise or lower their energy level, depending on the rider. And that horse is. Is a gem. I'm thinking of a pony once that a friend and I found and bought for a child we coached. I was a university student at the time, and the pony had been out in a field, and it was very fat, and the child was really quite nervous and small, and it started fairly well. And the child got a bit braver and a bit bigger, and the pony got a bit thinner and fitter, and the child got braver and bigger, and the pony got thinner and fitter, and it became a wonderful jumping pony. And it used to win Chase Me Charlie's, which is everybody going around who can jump the highest jump. It won so much, and it was Palomino and Gorgeous and her best friend, and she had that pony until she and the pony were both in their twenties. The horse that ups or lowers its energy level kind of goes, okay, so where are you here? 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three. You're a three out of ten rider. Okay, then we'll do three out of ten. And if you went 10, nine, eight, it would go, ooh, an eight out of ten rider. That's fun. So that horse is very easy to impress. One of my colleagues in the States once famously said, yes, stallions are much harder to impress. And a horse that is tricky for you will be a horse who's not impressed by your skills. So just to review quickly, to give you the idea with your new dancing partner, what's your dancing partner hold like compared to the dancing partner hold of his previous rider? If it was a guy with 35% higher tone than the average woman, he's going to be, where are you? Where are you? You're absent. You're not really here. Can you match the forces well enough? Are you water skiing? Is the horse dragging you along? Are you the water skier to his motorboat? Have you got the handbrake on all the time? If you're a bit absent, how does he fill in for you? Because usually somebody is filling in the gaps for somebody's absence. Does he fill in for you in a sweet, kind way which will make everything work out, or does he fill in with a little bit more cleverness? You probably have way less brain space than his original rider. Do you bombard him with busyness? Do you wiggle and jiggle and have him thinking, what the heck's going on up there? Do you lack authority? Remember, in the face of incongruity, warmbloods go autistic and thoroughbreds go ballistic. He can only go in the way that he is danced. You may well detrain him down to the level. You basically know how to ride. I think most of us, many professionals have done that at some stage. So buying a new horse is incredibly exciting, but also very tricky in the bathroom. In my riding centre in the uk, we have a whole load of laminates and one of them is a card which says, congratulations on your new horse. And the next line says, you must be bonkers. So, wishing you well and fun with your horses and I'll be back with you soon.