11/17/2024
I’m going to share this but I’m not sure I can read it all.
I sped-read through the ‘burning of the donkey’ and I had to quit before I failed.
In my almost 50 years with horses, all over the U.S. and Canada, I’ve seen lots of this.
I took a hiatus from the horse industry.
Recently, upon stepping back in, I see some positive changes and lots of illumination—shining the light, if you will, on various practices via social media.
Back in, early on, I scrolled through a group that showed a foal out on a trail ride who had laid down.
The poster was laughing about what a character the foal was.
The commenters mostly supported this.
I remember thinking that the foal was overwhelmed with too much too soon.
Horses aren’t dogs and they aren’t people.
Context is important. Education is key.
Thanks, Daniel, for continuing to provide both🔦🤔💡
* This article has a part 2, "Flooding" that will go out exclusively to our Bit Course newsletter and email list. If you're not on it...
Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is one of those terms that I’m hearing more often lately in the horse world. Unfortunately, like a lot of words these days, the meaning is getting watered down. This is the farthest of positions of extreme states. I can say with 99% certainty that you’ve never seen a horse in LH. If you have, I offer my sympathies to you. This is a term that is being bastardized, but really shouldn’t ever come up in our talks about horses.
When you see some social media hero trainer talking about the many horses they’ve worked with in LH, that’s a pretty strong indication that they don’t yet know how much they don’t know, and they certainly don’t have enough perspective yet to be responsibly teaching others. Even in true life and death rescue situations, LH isn’t common. Defined by Medical News Today: “In psychology, learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. They believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try, even when opportunities for change are available.”
Learned Helplessness (LH) definitively requires repeated experiences where nothing tried to avoid something worked. It ends up with someone or some animal NEVER TRYING TO AVOID THE THING AGAIN. Extreme nothingness is the result. Absolute lack of try, with the literal meaning of “absolute”, is what LH presents as. They’ll die and not try, at all, to escape. They don’t just try less. They don’t just try less often. They don’t just decide to accept that this situation or scary thing is ok after all. LH is not akin to “desensitizing”.
When I hear/read/watch people talking about learned helplessness, they’re most commonly saying something like, “The horse is in learned helplessness. It’s traumatized and will do anything to avoid the pressure.” While I’d certainly agree that putting a horse in the situation described wouldn’t be a good thing, it’s also certainly NOT what LH is.
These horses aren’t doing anything to avoid pressure/pain. This is a trance like state that they’ll follow into death, if it comes to that. You could set off fireworks, use a cattle prod, whip them, whatever, the result would be no response.
I read a magazine article years ago about a donkey that someone was trying to load to take to the vet. They’d always had trouble loading this donkey and had enough on this day. Their patience ran out. The donkey had sat down at the entrance to the trailer and refused to move in any way (trance state). The person decided to build a fire under said donkey’s belly. Surely that would get a response? The donkey didn’t move, even with the fire, and the person had to put the fire out and then have the vet come out to treat the now severely burned donkey. Wouldn’t you like to hear that phone call to the vet clinic? THAT is Learned Helplessness.
One of the earlier experiments showing learned helplessness was done with a predatory fish. They put it into a tank that was split in half with glass. Bait fish were on the other side of the tank. The predatory fish would try to attack the minnows, hitting the glass instead and failing. This happened repeatedly, every time the fish tried to eat, over weeks, until it stopped trying at all. The researchers then removed the glass separating them and the minnows swam freely around their natural predator. The predatory fish still didn’t try to eat them and starved to death. Again, extreme state right next to death. This is not a topic we should have cause to bring up or be throwing around lightly.
It's a major part of my intention to keep reality at the forefront. It’s not about MY truth or YOUR truth or THE HORSE’S truth. There’s just THE truth. Everything else is perspective, clouded by bias and experience. Without an understanding of unvarnished reality, we cannot have any relative understanding of where this horse is in this moment, thus we cannot develop good judgement or have an ability to recalibrate our perspective more toward THE truth. Extremes are important and terms describing them shouldn’t be hyperbolized to make someone look virtuous, cool, or smart. That’s a selfish abomination and a lack of real stewardship on display.
We’ve all heard of kids that are kidnapped, taken to another state, have their names changed, and then never try to escape. THAT is learned helplessness. It’s severe and disgusting. It should not be trivialized.
The horse that has been properly round penned and learned to choose the easier path of standing still to be caught and saddled, rather than running around, is not in a state of learned helplessness. I don’t care what kind, self-appointed internet guru who uses only “humane and virtuous training methods” tells you that it is. That person is a charlatan or a moron. They either don’t know better, and they should, or they do know better and they’re presenting it this way to manipulate you for their own ends. Either way, their judgement/teaching isn’t to be trusted.
In practice, I don’t ever see people putting pressure on a horse at a 9 out of 10 like it’s nothing. Apparently, as I’m seeing all the time, most traditional trainers are just whaling away at the poor horses with baseball bats with spikes driven through them or whatever… Dominance Theory is completely wrong! I guess despite the fresh bite marks on my mare this morning…
I do commonly see people afraid to go up to a 3 out of 10 on an animal that outweighs them by 850 lbs. because they believe that a 3 is actually a 9 and they’ll traumatize poor Thunder and then Thunder will NEVER like them again. Their dreams of connection and unity will forever be dashed! Someone will call them a meanie on the internet! This is a weekly occurrence. The reality of what a horse is has been chasing these people, yet they have always been faster.
They don’t give out medals for mental gymnastics at the Olympics. Meanings of words matter. Extremes are extremes. They’re not something to normalize and pollute for your own ends. The next article will talk about flooding and what the path to some of this bad stuff might look like in the beginning. I'll share that article exclusively to The Bit Course mailing list, so get on it if you aren't already.
I’ll make you a good deal on some soap. I’ve got a whole box of it to get rid of now.
