AVOID THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

Using the whip, spurs or bit improperly creates a vicious circle.

The rider feels the “wrong” response from the horse, so she perhaps uses stronger aids, or gets a stronger bit, or uses leverage devices like draw reins and starts to drill and grind to force “obedience.”

The horse gets more scared and more uncomfortable and resists harder. The rider feels the heightened resistance and uses even more force, which creates more fear, and now the training session has only one way to go: bad, worse, terrible. And the session ends with a tired horse, an exasperated rider, and guess what?

The next training session will probably be just as hard or worse, because it starts with an apprehensive horse and a rider determined to fix the problem.

Force leads to force leads to force—until the whole cycle ends, and the rider either gives up or is replaced by a more educated and sympathetic person, that horse is being driven down a rat hole, and we see this every day, every place where people train horses.