ON GENTLING HORSES

It seems incredible to me that, apart from my own work, no research has been done into communication between horses, of any type, and very little into the central problem of controlling horses: that is, into what is the best form of communication between man and horse. The state of our knowledge of how to communicate even with the horses we ride is very poor indeed: we know that if you hit an animal it will run away; if you pull its mouth will tend to stop; if you pull its head left it will tend to go left, and if you pull its head right it will tend to go right. Modern-day horse­manship is a development of these four facts, together with the refinement that you can teach your horse to respond to a verbal command, if that command is repeated again and again. This is essentially the procedure known as 'training' a horse. This is essentially the procedure known as 'train­ing' a horse. The fact that the early form of training is known as 'breaking' just about sums up man's attitude towards the horse. Breaking a horse is based upon three principles:

(a) That if a horse responds wrongly to a stimulus, he should be punished;

(b) That if he responds correctly to a stimulus he should be rewarded; and

(c) That basically he must be made to do what you want him to do, by force if necessary.

A comparatively few horses have had a considerable amount of time spent on them, using this method of train­ing; and the method, confined as it must be to the few and expensive has been written about at length. But even today the bulk of horses are trained by cruder and cheaper appli­cation of the same principles – a brave and hardy boy sits the horse until he is bucked off again, and the horse is forced to do whalit is told to do until, by trial and error and various rewards and punishments, it has been trained to be ridden or to work in a cart. This system is to my mind entirely without logic, since it is generally assumed that the horse is less intelligent than man (though I admit that at times I doubt this). It seems to me to be obvious that it would be quicker and more efficient for a man to learn the form of communication the horse understands best, rather than to try to teach the less intelligent being the form of communication man knows best.

Our own experience has taught us that it is infinitely easier to train a horse, and you can get some very startling results, when you use equine communication methods. For the past thirty years, first with my father and later on with my wife and daughter, I have been handling and retraining horses that other people had given up as unbreakable and unmanageable. Many of these would otherwise have ended up in tins of cats' meat, or on the slabs of the continental butchers. These have been, generally, of two types. The first type are very intelligent horses who have been fright­ened and brutalised by ill-treatment. In the early days these were much the largest group that we got. Today, most of the horses we get are in the second group – strong horses spoiled by weak handling, often by women for whom the horses are too powerful and too strong. These horses have been retrained by using two qualities, patience and under­standing.

All our reserves of patience were demanded to handle a horse we had not long ago, who could not be haltered or bridled because as soon as you tried to halter or bridle him, he would rear up on his hind legs. There were two prob­lems we had to deal with. First, the rearing had to be cured. And second, the original cause of his trouble had to be identified and remedied. It seemed that at some time or other he had been hurt by someone putting his hands behind his ears, for this was the thing he refused to let you do. You could put a bit into his mouth sometimes, but you could never get the bridle over his head. We could simply have used a leather bridle and put it on from his neck, but this would not have cured the basic trouble, so I simply took him into a loose-box and began running my hand up his shoulder and over his neck. As I got near his head he went up on his hind legs. As soon as he came down again, I put my hand on his shoulder and went up his neck again, then up he went on his hind legs again. After about forty-five minutes I could run my hand up his neck as far as his head, stopping short of his ears. So I began running rny hand up the crest of his mane, until I got behind his ears – up on his hind legs he went. But I persisted, and after about twenty minutes I could run my hand up his neck, over his ears and down his nose. When I got to this stage, my hand went from his nose, rubbing his head, up to his eyes, and as soon as I got near his ears he was up on his hind legs again. But after another five or ten minutes I could actually run my hand up his nose, over his ears and down his neck.

Then came the next stage. I got a rope halter, put it on over his nose, then ran my hand up his nose and over his ears as if I were trying to put the halter on. He reared again so I took the halter off and tried to put it on again. As soon as I had the nose piece on I once more ran my hand up his head and over his ears. After a further five minutes of this I could slip the halter on and off. When he went up on his hind legs I took very little notice. I just went on talking to liim all the time in a soft sing-song voice, and in a very short time, he was beginning to settle. He had ceased to be worried about my hand running over his ears; but at the same time he was damned if he was going to let me do it easily, because he had never let anyone do it. When I could get the halter on and off-without any difficulty, which took about twenty minutes from doing it the first time, I went and got a bridle, put the bit in his mouth with some difficulty, took the bit out of his mouth and put it in again, in and out, in and out until I could slip the bit into his mouth whenever I wanted to. Then I ran the rein up his head and over his ears. Up he went on his hind legs, so off with the reins and out with the bit, then on with the reins, in with the bit, and up with the bridle. I went on doing this for about ten minutes until I could put that bridle on and off whenever I liked. I had been at him for about four hours then, so I gave him a drink and his dinner and went to have my own. It was a very light dinner, it always is when I am handling difficult horses, then I went out again and started all over again. After about an hour going at him a second time, I could put the bridle on and off whenever I wanted to. So I left him for the day.

The next day I had him in again and went though the same procedure, which took me an hour and a half in the morning, half-an-hour in the afternoon and ten minutes in the evening. Within a week he took no notice at all of the bridle being put on and I could do it whenever I liked. It was patience that did the trick, and of course basic understanding of what the problem was. At the same time I had to be confident that I was going to succeed, and never get worried or excited. My attitude the whole time was calm, so that while dealing with his stubbornness I did not have to deal also with a frightened or worried horse.

It must always be remembered of course that if you have a very strong powerful horse, or a very intelligent horse, he will never be a ride for an inexperienced beginner, unless he is well and truly 'broken' – that is to say, unless his spirit is broken entirely. Since there is an endless supply of horses which are neither big and strong nor extremely in­telligent, it is surely much better for the inexperienced or the weak rider to get a horse that suits his temperament, - rather than to try to break a horse of a temperament un­suitable for his purpose. By the same reasoning, when we are expecting a horse to do cross-country work, we select a horse which naturally enjoys jumping and wants to go across country, since it is infinitely easier to get him jump­ing and going across country than the horse that wants neither to jump nor to go out for a walk. Similarly someone who does not want to go out for a walk should get a horse that is the same way inclined, not one that wants to go as soon as its feet touch the grass.

One example of how understanding comes into play when we are retraining a difficult horse is our experience with Jimmy, who came to us very recently. Jimmy had got on top of his owner, and there were a number of things that she could not do with him. To teach Jimmy who was boss, we used pure animal communication. Now if you see a bunch of horses going down the road, the boss horse will be in front. If one of the others in the herd tried to pass the boss, he will say 'go back' by swinging his head round and punching the offender with his teeth. It looks as though he is biting him, but in nine times out of ten he will merely be punching him with his teeth – he will only bite if the horse persists in trying to pass. So I took Jimmy out on a halter and every time Jimmy tried to pass me, I swung my fist round as if to punch him. I never actually connected, but I ' threatened to punch his teeth in if he tried to pass me.

After three or four day& of this Jimmy very clearly understood that he could not pass me no matter how much he wanted to, so he would walk behind rne quietly and obediently. A very difficult and strong horse, who pre­viously dominated'liis owner, thus learnt that I was boss and not he. Jimmy had been taught to obey the orders of the boss of the herd, and because I had used a com­munication method that he understood he was neither frightened nor cowed by it.

It seems to me that the whole essence of getting the maximum of which he is capable out of the horse is com­munication. It is essential for the rider to be able to convey his wishes explicitly to the horse, and for the horse to respond to those wishes, so it is only logical that those wishes should be conveyed in a manner that the horse most easily understands, that is, in the form of com­munication that the horse uses himself. This is where e.s.p. is so important, for by this method the horse can quickly and readily understand your desires rather than your com­mands. For example, a horse should respond when the owner is excited, and he should relax when you are relaxed. When the horse is a sounding board for your own emotions, then that horse will respond in competition or in an emergency instantaneously, and in a far more enthus­iastic and willing way than if he is merely responding to a command. Similarly, a guard sergeant-major can teach a squad of eleven men to play football on command; but that team of footballers would never in this world beat a team of people who play together for the love of doing so, and respect each others wishes.

This is where I think that the modern method of horse-training is wrong, since it is angled towards the dressage arena where anticipation of the rider's wishes is counted as a disobedience. I believe that if you are to get the maximum from a horse, that horse should be trying to anticipate your wishes, to do what you want it to do before you actually ask it. All you have to do is be empathic with your horse, and he will anticipate your wishes, since he will know what you want him to do before you ask him.

Yet the whole art of modern training is to teach the horse to answer commands. The basic commands that you will want to teach him will take up to six months, and the more advanced work two or three years. We on the other hand have found that with gentling we can get a horse to respond within hours. It is extremely easy to get your horse to do what you want him to do when you are trying to get him to want to do what you want him to. And the short­cut to this is via e.s.p. As we have already seen, ever since primitive man first made the discovery that Eohippus had other uses than that of filling an empty belly, man has been using e.s.p. to ride and control his horses, to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the rider and his methods of training; and yet nobody has written about e.s.p. with horses, and there has been no research into the subject whatever. We indeed had been carrying out research into e.s.p. for over ten years before I dared mention it to any­body. And then it happened quite by chance.

My wife wanted to visit her family in Ireland, and since as usual my car had broken down, I asked my friend and neighbour Charles Thurlow Craig to drive her to the station. After seeing her off, we stopped for a drink on the way home. One drink led to another and after the fourth or fifth drink, I happened to mention to Thurlow, who is a very receptive person, that I could communicate mentally with horses and control them by telepathy. I expected him to laugh at me and say I was too drunk to know what I was saying. Instead of which he said 'that's nothing, I can too,' and we discovered that while he could communicate men­tally with Welsh cobs, and not with any other kind of horse, I could get through best to thoroughbreds' and near-thoroughbreds. After an hour-and-a-half we went home.

The following morning ^was troubled by two things: first, by a rather bad hangover, and second, by a somewhat hazy recollection that I had been fool enough to tell Thur­low that I could communicate mentally with horses. So I went up to see him and after we had one or two hairs of the dog, he confirmed that he too could communicate mentally with horses and that he had been doing it for a very long time, but had never mentioned it to anybody until the previous evening. Since he was somewhat unconventional anyway, he did not want to be classed as a raving lunatic.

For the next six or eight months, Thurlow and I talked off and on about mental communication with horses, but I did not mention it to anybody else until I went to the hunt ball that year. And hunt balls being hunt balls, by midnight I was not as sober as I might have been. By this time I happened to be dancing with a very knowledgeable horse­woman I knew, and I mentioned to her this ability to com­municate mentally with horses, and she thought about it and said 'Do you know I can do it with Poodle,' (that was the name of her horse). In the course of the next two or three dances, she came to the conclusion that she had had this ability with three of the horses she had ridden over the previous thirty or forty years.

The point of this story is that the first two horsey people I mentioned the matter to, realised after some thought that they could communicate with horses. Yet the idea that there could be mental communication between man and horse was on the face of it so completely outrageous that I had to be slightly oiled before I could even mention it, and that after ten years of research. After this I mentioned my discoveries to one or two close friends, then slowly to a much wider circle of acquaintances, and I found to my amazement that very nearly without exception they could all communicate mentally with their horses – not with all their horses, but with some of them. This has been going on for some two thousand years, but it has never been written about and there has been no research into the sub­ject whatever.

E.s.p. is the ability to perceive by means other than sight, sound, touch, smell or taste. In actual fact this simply means that you can sense moods and emotions, rather than see or hear them – we know that e.s.p. mainly concerns conveying and receiving moods, emotions, feel­ings and limited ideas. A horse instinctively knows the moods and emotions of its companions. It does not matter whether they are human or animal, they can be animals of the same species or animals of another species. He can of course to a certain extent use his sight and hearing as well, when he senses whether they are angry or frightened, settled or excited. But we know that he can also feel their mood instinctively because we know that he will respond to his companions even if they are out of sight and out of sound.

That there is e.s.p. between animals of different species is difficult to prove, but our own observations tend to confirm it. We once, for instance, had a bull and a gander who were absolutely inseparable. Even if the gander was out of sight of the bull, when the bull moved from one field to the next the gander would leave what he was doing immediately, and go straight to where the bull was. He always knew where the bull had gone, even though he could not see him. The bull was running out with the cows and would come in and out with them night and morning, lying down in the yard while the cows were being milked. Sometimes the gander woilkl sit on top of him or beside him, and sometimes lie would go off and mind his own business. On one occasion he got shut into the feeding house, and when the cattle were turned out he was left behind. It so happened on this occasion the cattle were turned into a different field, about a quarter of a mile from where they had been grazing" previously. When the gander was let out we thought that he would go straight to the normal field. Instead he ran out of the feeding house and took wing and flew straight to the new field where the cattle were grazing. This could have been coincidence. The explanation could have been that the gander flew at sufficient height to see where the cattle were. But it is within the boundary of probability that some sense told him that things were different, that there was some form of mental communication between the bull and the gander.

In another case there was avery close friendship between a cow and a pony. The odd thing about this was that the cow would know when the pony mare was horseing, and would mount the pony as one cow would mount another when she was bullying. Now there could have been no sexual smell from the pony that the cow would understand, and it is probable that there were no signs. Normally one pony mare will not mount another, so the behaviour pat­tern was strange to the pony and accordingly no sign would be likely to be given. Yet the cow would know instinctively when the pony was horseing. We believe that this very strong affinity between the cow and the pony caused a behaviour response that was natural to the cow and not to the pony.

Cork Beg had a very great attachment to a Friesian bull that we had, and they would stand together for hours on end. When the bull lay down Cork Beg would stand over­turn, and when the flies were bad they would stand head-to-tail flicking each other. The bull would use his rough tongue to scratch Cork Beg. At times they would play together: Cork Beg would stand on his back legs and strike out at the bull with his forelegs, the then the bull would charge him, appearing to be hooking him with his horns. The first time we saw this, we fully expected Cork Beg to be damaged, but the bull each time he charged, would stop far enough from Cork Beg not to touch him. They would go on like this for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at a time, Cork Beg pretending to strike the bull with his front legs and the bull pretending to hook Cork Beg's intestines out with his horns, until one or the other would get tired. Either the bull would roar, as if he were going to charge, and Cork Beg would gallop away with the bull in pursuit; or Cork Beg would dodge the bull as he charged and land two well-shod heels in his ribs, though without really hurt­ing him. Then after five or ten minutes they would make it up and stand flicking flies off each other again. Now the curious thing about this was that the bull would know where Cork Beg was itching. If Cork Beg had an itch above his hip bone, the bull would lick there. If Cork Beg had an itch behind his ear, the bull would lick behind his ears. There was no way that we could see that Cork Beg could make the bull lick him. Further, this behaviour pattern was normal neither to Cork Beg nor to the bull, since it is unusual for cattle to lick one another, except for a cow to lick a calf, and certainly it is not usual for a bull to lick a cow except as a sexual stimulus. Equally it is unusual for one horse to lick another, though he may nip, or bite another horse to relieve an itch. Again we think that the two animals must have been communicating by e.s.p. But I would emphasise that this belief is based on observation and not on any real proof.

Two horses may or may not be emotionally or mentally in communication. We say that horses can think in different or similar thought patterns, and to some extent patterns tend to go with breeds. A thoroughbred will tend to have a thought pattern different from that of a Welsh Cob, and a Welsh Cob will have a different thought pattern from that of a pony, but there are Welsh Cobs who think as ponies, and thoroughbreds who think as Welsh Cobs. Of course these thought and emotional patterns are not static. If two horses have thought patterns that are mainly unalike but have certain similarities., close companionship will tend to increase the similarities, so that they will become closer and closer to each other mentally. We say that the thought patterns change and become similar. Again among a group of horses, those with similar thought patterns will tend to associate with each other, and their patterns will become increasingly alike. Hence in a bunch of horses, including, let us say, Welsh Cobs and crossbred thoroughbreds, the Welsh -Cobs will tend to associate together and the thoroughbreds will tend to form a separate group. But they would also learn the thought patterns of each other. If a thoroughbred and a small pony are kept together, out of contact with other horses, they will have no emotional con­tact to begin with, but after a period of time, the two horses will develop an affinity and their thought patterns will become more similar. If, however, after a period of time other thoroughbreds and ponies are introduced to the orig­inal pair, the pony will tend to go back to its original thought pattern and the thoroughbred to his thoroughbred thought pattern. Thus horses of different breeds can learn by association to communicate with horses of different breeds, and with horses and animals of different thought patterns; but they will still be able to communicate most easily with animals who think in the same thought pattern as they do themselves.

This difference in thought patterns between horse and horse explains why a human being can get through to one horse and not another. It explains why one particular horse will do anything for you and you get an automatic response to any request, while another horse, even occasionally of the same breed, type and temperament will do the exact opposite no matter what you ask him to do.

Last spring I had two Cob-cross Welsh pony brothers to gentle.They were both by aWelshCob stallion called Rhys-ted Prince, and a pony mare, and they were about twelve hands high, three and four years old, and strawberry roans. They looked almost identical, but one of those ponies, no matter what I asked him to do, would fight and fight me; while the other pony did whatever I asked him to do as if he were an old horse and had been ridden all his life. Yet when those two ponies went back to their owners, the one I could do anything with had the owner's son off as often as he liked to get on; but his brother with whom I had had such a lot of trouble, never put a foot wrong. It is the same with human beings; you meet some people with whom you are immediately in sympathy, and others who make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as soon as you meet them. The French have a term for this: they say that two people are sympatique or not sympatique.

In our field of work on horses, the horses with which we have an affinity are those from whom we can get the great­est response. But we can on the other hand sometimes build and develop affinities by working at it when we are doing experiments between horse and man. I, for instance, have always been able to get through to thoroughbreds and near-thoroughbreds. No matter how difficult or awkward they are., they will always go sweetly for me, and I can very often get more out of them in a race than anybody else. But for a very long time, until seven or eight years ago in fact, I had no feeling at all for other breeds of horses, and my ability to ride or handle them would depend entirely upon my horsemanship and not on the horse. Over the years however I have developed an ability to switch wavelength to that of the horse I am riding. Even now I have no empathy at all with small ponies, and this I see as a weak­ness on my part, which I am hoping to overcome with perseverance and time. If you cannot get through to a particular breed of horse, you may find by working at it that you will be able to get through to one member of that breed, then to two, then three and so on, until with time you will be able to get through to most horses.

Over the last four years I have had the use, off and on, of a fourteen-two Welsh Cob, Trefais Comet, some of whose exploits I have already described. Now he is the most way­ward bloody-minded little individual in the world at times. But I can get through to him, and he will always go for me, and if I am competing he gives every ounce of his ability and he is keener to win than I am. In fact he is probably the only Welsh Cob living who has consistently beaten thoroughbreds in cross-country competitions. He was second in a one-day event last autumn, beaten because he did a diabolical dressage with a score of a hundred and nine penalty points; but the cross-country course was extremely stiff and he was one of only three horses that went round clear, half-a-minute faster than the next horse and a minute-and-a-half faster than the rest of the field.

Being mentally in tune with a horse can have its draw­backs at times, however. I bought a grey thoroughbred gelding called Costa Clyde because I got through to him, and he was being outrageously cocky as he went round the ring: 'I am the best horse here, there is nothing else that can compare with me.' He turned out to be the most shameless liar in the world. Only after I bought him did I discover that he was always full of himself and his own importance, but he never made a racehorse and never won a race. But I was very fond of him and I used to love riding him, because of his supreme self-assurance and confidence. Even when he came back from a race, trailing in last, he would still be full of himself, and always have fright-stories to tell about why he had not won.

But it must also be remembered that by human stan­dards the horse is of comparatively low intellect – its range of understanding is probably roughly comparable with that of a child of about eight. And it is the super-intelligent horses that are the most difficult to handle: they are the ones that often become unbreakable through mis­handling, and get on top of their owners. On the race course they quickly learn that there is no profit in racing, especially in the tight finish, when they will get a hiding, and so they pack in racing and become dogs. But these are the horses we like, and these are the horses we get most response from with our gentling treatment.

CHAPTER NINE

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 779