Expectations

Andrew took his new Marsh Tacky stallion out for his first halter training--horse was perfect, don't know how he could have been better.

Andrew was pleased--Said that the horse did better than he expected--asked me if it was better than I expected.

I realized that it was a question that I could not answer--first time that I ever realized that point about where I am with understanding horses. I had to explain, and I fear that I did a poor job of doing so, that I simply had no expectations other than I expected the horse to act like a horse and I expect to deal with any reaction that the horse has with only that expectation in mind.

I do not know the specific point in which I stopped having expectations for horses, but whatever day it was was one of the most important days in my understanding of training.

Because I expect a horse to act like a horse I:

do not get my feelings hurt by the horse's actions;
do not get shocked at a horse's reactions;
do not waste my time trying to spin out scenario's that make sense to a human to explain why a horse acted a given way;
do not pretend that failing to teach a horse shows virtue because I recognize that he merely "needs to go slowly.".

Natural horsemanship students do well to fully understand the concepts that underlie horse behavior instead of merely learning techniques to train a horse. The former is to play music by ear. The latter is to be chained to a sheet of music.

Andrew is doing great at focusing on concepts and realizes that the techniques will fall into place when the concepts are fully understood.