I think that this discussion we’re about to have regarding “baby behavior” may be one of the most oft-repeated topics at my clinics. It seems to me that most horse owners are unaware of how the horse is basically designed to move from babyhood to adulthood and the affect that can have on training and horse/human relationships.
Understanding how baby behavior works in horses is really important for a horseman, I think. The great thing about baby behavior is that it is not a permanent character fault and does not mean that a horse is a “bad” horse in any way. He’s just hanging onto some baby behavior. Horses who are hanging on to baby behavior are often called “disrespectful” or are said to “have an attitude” or to be “lazy” or “unpredictable” or “fun loving”. If it’s baby behavior, it doesn’t have to be permanent.
So let’s start at the beginning. Horses are herd animals. Left to their own devices, they’ll live in groups, and in their world, the community is more important than the individual. This is unlike humans, especially here in America, where we tend to value the individual over the community. It’s shocking to us that a feral stallion would kill an ailing or weak baby horse so that the mare would leave it and the group could move on to feed or water or safety together. I think this can be a very fundamental misunderstanding between people and horses.
When a baby horse is born, he can do whatever wants, whenever he wants, pretty much. He can eat whenever he wants, sleep whenever he needs to and he can play however he wants. Babies are allowed to crash into other horses, to put their feet on other horses, to climb on their mothers. There just aren’t a lot of rules, boundaries or limitations early on. Being a baby is great!
So here we have this baby horse who is just having a bang-up time getting into all kinds of cute mischief, and he is mostly being tolerated by those adult horses around him. In a wild or feral horse herd, this would all change at about a year old or when the mother chose to wean her baby. Right then, the baby would become a member of the herd, a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities. In a herd, this transition is done very quickly and with very little drama.
The herd (community) would show the new grown-up horse how to become a functioning member of the herd. He would learn about boundaries. He would fit into a slot in the herd hierarchy and would then be expected to yield to the horses above him in the hierarchy. He would be expected to eat when the others ate, drink when the others drank and to not draw the attention of predators to the group. If he became a liability to the community, he could be ostracized or killed.
The grown-up horse who functions in a community understands how to take direction from others. He feels good about taking direction, and he follows well. He yields when he’s asked to yield and does not draw undue attention to himself with flamboyant or irresponsible behavior. He fits in and blends in.
It is important to understand that the baby horse is supposed to become a grown-up in order to survive. But he is not equipped to do that transition on his own. He is designed to be grown up by the community, by the herd, who shape, modify and model grown up horse behavior. With horses, it does truly “take a village” to grow a baby into an adult horse.
What does this mean for us in a training or relationship context? Well, most of us own domestically-bred and raised horses who were maybe born in a backyard or at a breeding farm. If they were the product of a backyard or small-farm breeding program it’s possible that when the baby was weaned, he went by himself for a while, and then maybe went in with one or two other horses, stayed by himself or maybe even went back in with his mother once her milk dried up. If the baby grew up on a big breeding farm, he might have gone into “the weanling field” with all that year’s weanlings. Then it would become “the yearling field” and then “the two-year old field”.
In neither of these common domestic models is the family unit intact nor is there a sizeable community available to teach, shape and model adult horse behavior to the weanling or young horse.
The upshot of this situation is that by the time training starts, many young horses have had few rules, boundaries, limitations or experiences of yielding their decision making to others. They have not had their community to grow them up, and therefore it’s possible that they’ve just stayed babies. And in a baby’s mind, he can do whatever it wants, whenever he wants. |
