There will be times when the horse will feel more pressure than what is being exerted upon him. This horse obviously is not comfortable in a small area with a human. The horse will begin to show signs of being uncomfortable and with those signs, we should back off and allow the horse to realize that we are not going to make him uncomfortable and that we are not threatening to him as a predator. Once the horse has settled down again after our backing up, then we can again advance and try to establish our relationship with the horse. Never should we drive a horse into the flight mode. If the horse is in it all by himself, our primary function should be to do what we need to comfort and soothe that horse. It is "common sense" that a horse that is worried about a predator isn't going to listen to us anyway. Its mind is on survival; not connecting.
Just a little bit of knowledge can pave the way to incredible discoveries about the horse's natural behavior. We have a brain the size of a grapefruit; horse's brains are the size of plums. It stands to reason, common sense, that we should be able to figure out gentle and calm ways to work with a horse in order to become the ultimate partner with that horse. It's not up to the horse to figure this out ... it's up to us. The horse will have other things to figure out once we've established the hierarchy in our herd. That's the horse's job.
Please readers, if you have horses, work with horses, ride horses, train horses, please use some common sense. Common sense tells us that if we use training or handling methods that threaten the horse, the horse will not WANT to be with us. If we exercise our intelligence and figure out ways to communicate with our horses in gentle, comforting, reassuring ways, then the horse will naturally gravitate to us as its leader; ready to protect and serve.
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