“My treasures do not clink together or glitter; They gleam in the sun and neigh in the night.”
-Arabian Proverb
Effective Communication 1013/17/2023 How to effectively communicate with your horse.In communication, there must be a two-way road of message delivery between sender and receiver. These roles are supposed to be interchangeable —that's when you know the communication is effective. The sender sends an email, the receiver responds and, in turn, becomes a sender. Then the original sender becomes a receiver and then back to a sender again when they respond. Like a ping pong ball. In traditional pressure and release horse training methods, there is often no ping pong ball. There is only a handler sending messages to a horse with a "do not reply to this email" stamped at the bottom. I spent four years studying communications in college where I learned about the power of effective message delivery. One of the first things you learn is the process. You have a sender who has a message that needs to travel through air space and get to a receiver somehow. With today's technology, there are hundreds of vehicles the sender can use to get that message to the receiver. There's email, social media, traditional media like a newspaper, and so on. For the sake of this topic, we'll focus on an email campaign.
Say your company has just launched a new product and you already have potential clients for this product in your database, so you carefully construct a mass email with the intent to garner traffic to this new product's webpage. Your one goal is to get as many potential clients as possible to click that link in your email campaign. You have 300 potential clients and you set your sights on at least half of them clicking on that link and visiting the webpage for at least 1-3 minutes. That's your entire goal here. Fast forward to a week later and you're checking the progress of your email campaign. You're checking the analytics. How many clicks do you get per day? Are they the same clients clicking multiple times? Or are they multiple clients clicking once? Is it a mixture of both? How long are the clients staying on this webpage? You have an entire checklist and you're keeping track of all the data. You're studying how effective your campaign is. Now, you use this data to scrutinize your campaign. Are you getting as many clicks as you need? What part of this campaign do your clients seem to be gravitating towards? What are their actions telling you about this campaign? Is this campaign effective? Is your message getting delivered? If your data isn't looking good, you'll head back to the drawing board. Is it the copy that isn't hitching? Perhaps the design just isn't alluring. The layout could be off, maybe you need to move some things around. You remix your message to better fit your audience using the data you collected and you try again. You'll know when your message was effectively delivered when your receiver provides feedback that coincides with what you are trying to purvey. Now, let's pretend that your audience doesn't speak the same language as you. Your audience isn't even the same species as you. Your audience is a horse. And, unfortunately, in traditional horse training, there is no careful collection of analytics. There is no study of the audience. The message is not altered to fit the specific demographic. The messages are the same old messages passed down from generations of horsemen and women who only work from what's worked in the past. And, more importantly, there is no remixing of the messages to better fit the audience. In communication, there must be a two-way road of message delivery between sender and receiver. These roles are supposed to be interchangeable —that's when you know the communication is effective. The sender sends an email, the receiver responds and, in turn, becomes a sender. Then the original sender becomes a receiver and then back to a sender again when they respond. Like a ping pong ball. In traditional pressure and release horse training methods, there is often no ping pong ball. There is only a handler sending messages to a horse with a "do not reply to this email" stamped at the bottom. Traditional horse training methods say "do this now". A firmer "do this NOW" is administered if there's no desired response. And then they bring out the fancy hardware and unforgiving pieces of tack (e.g. draw reins, harsh bits, spurs, whips, etc.) that give the horse no option but to do the damned thing NOW. This may seem fine on the sender's end, but imagine being that poor receiver. Many handlers don't. The most heartbreaking thing is that the horse is communicating back in its own way, but the handlers just aren't seeing it. They either don't care to see it, or they don't even know that they see it. This is how dangerous horses are created. When a horse learns that the subtle cues it's using to communicate are going blindly ignored, those cues will grow louder until they cannot be ignored by anyone. They'll go from shooting you with a stressed eye or a set of angry pinned ears to rearing, bucking, bolting, and biting all within moments. Your horse will learn what it needs to do to be heard --what it needs to do to get a response-- and these will become habitual and incredibly dangerous for everyone involved. The only way to reverse or prevent this is to start listening to and practicing effective communication with your horse. Learn the many social cues and mannerisms of a stressed or painful horse. Learn to recognize them in your horse. Notice all of their subtle cues (e.g. tensed nostrils, tail wringing, pinned ears, pinched eyes) and catch them before they become louder. Learn how to respond to them accordingly. Treat every response from your horse, no matter how slight, as a scream for you to stop, reaccess, or proceed. To proceed, you can teach your horse a cue for consent. Maybe you teach it to touch your hand or to target a cone and use that signal as a sign for you to continue or to start again. To access, devise a checklist:
The important thing is to collect their feedback. The horse's feedback will dictate how you proceed, or if you proceed. Like the email campaign and all of its intricate analytics, your communication with your horse should be a two-way street. Those messages should be pinging and ponging back and forth between the two of you; otherwise, there will be a lot of very important messages left unread.
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Leave a Reply.About CassidyCassidy Payne is a lifelong equestrian and animal welfare activist. With over 16 years of experience in the equine industry, Cassidy is retired from competing on multiple levels, from A-rated shows to local schooling shows. She is now focusing her efforts on training her horses with the Principles of Learning Theory in Equitation. Archives
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Photos used under Creative Commons from NathalieSt, mikecogh, Joanne Goldby