Training beyond emotion
At the core of this method, horse and trainer learn to control the emotional part of their brain and find relaxation.
Jenku firmly believes that when you’re training your horse, there’s a certain order that you need to do things in.
“You don’t build a house from the roof down, you start with the foundations,” he says. “I believe that the part many people miss out on in our modern-day training methods is relaxation. You need to take time to calm you and your horse’s nervous system and build two healthy, focused brains.
“We don’t focus on this any more — we’re after instant results. You get on your horse, you put him in a frame and ride him forwards. In this way your horse is constantly under pressure to perform. If your horse displays signs of stress — by opening his mouth or sticking out his tongue — we try to suppress this by tightening the noseband. In other words, we are artificially inducing stress into our horse’s nervous system. Your horse needs to lick, chew and swallow to access the rest and digest state, get the blood back to the intestines and release those ‘happy hormones’. If you clamp his mouth shut, he cannot access this state, even if he wants to.” Jenku’s training begins on the ground before progressing to ridden work and focuses on encouraging your horse to relax — whether that’s leading, backing up, lungeing or asking him to lower his head and neck when he’s standing still. The aim is for him to do all of these from a calm, relaxed state of mind. This is done by a feel on the leadrope or headcollar, or a touch from the schooling whip. When your horse shows any sign of lowering his head and neck you mark the desired behaviour with the “Tsk” sound and give him a reward.
Horses learn by repetition
Reinforcement learning is a type of learning that tells your horse he’s made the correct decision or the wrong decision. With enough repetitions your horse will eventually be able to predict the correct outcomes and therefore make the ‘right decision’.
As you learn to focus on what your horse is doing right and rewarding him, rather than focusing on what he’s doing wrong and punishing him, your horse will become more responsive and you will be able to lighten your aids. In time, for example, your horse will learn to lower his head when you simply point your finger at the f loor.