A foal is born - learning to learn

06/06/09
Copyright © Lif Strand for Spiritual Horsemanship





If I was really good at the Law of Attraction, I wouldn’t get frustrated and irritated by some of the garbage that is put forth about horses*, but I still do. I am getting better at catching myself, but it still happens.

I got ranting the other day about that imprinting nonsense. Imprinting is an automatic (involuntary) psycho-physiological process, not a learning process, and it is hard-wired into the brain. Imprinting is a survival mechanism for certain critters (birds are all I know of) that triggers species specific patterns of behavior. This is because critters that can imprint need to get the information they need for survival fast – they can’t afford the time to learn it.

I'm not sure any mammal can imprint. However, while equines don't acquire all their species-specific behavior patterns when they are first handled by humans or nuzzled by their mothers in the moments and hours after birth, the initial information taken in by a foal during that time period “sticks” more readily than it does at almost any other time in a horse’s life.

That’s because the slate is clean. The storehouse of experience is empty. A foal has nothing else to compare to, to judge by, in order to choose. A foal will choose most anything it experiences at that point if it doesn’t hurt – but that is not imprinting.

In the wild, of course, there are no humans around to provide input of any kind at in a foal’s first hours and days. The input the foal receives is either provided directly (mom’s presence, her smell and voice, are security and nurture; a cactus smells a certain way and hurts when your nose investigates closer; the lead mare is not to be approached or touched unless she invites you) or indirectly (the herd members all snort at and skitter away from a coiled thing that buzzes and hisses – so the foal does too; the herd runs from a pack of wolves – so the foal does too; the lead mare avoids going down that canyon, and no one else, including the foal, does either). All learning is accepted because it is provided within the frame of every-day living and is demonstrated and reinforced every moment by mom and every member of the herd. And, of course, whatever is taught within that framework is going to be “natural” behavior for the foal - it is well within the range of horse-abilities and horse-proclivities. At that point, the foal will choose whatever is given to it by its mom and the herd. There’s no reason for the foal not to.

Horses are born wanting to do the things that the rest of the horses in the herd are doing. They will of course test the boundaries as they grow – that’s the nature of a being that has free-will, and it gives rise to a changing herd dynamic and thereby ultimately to the genetic diversity that would not exist if everything was always the same.

For most domesticated horses, however, things are different. Humans don’t look like horses. They don’t sound or smell like horses. They sure don’t act like horses – and the communication most humans offer isn’t even in the language of Horse. Most horses don’t get to be born or raised in a natural environment, they don’t get to live in a herd, they only get input on how to be a proper horse from their moms for a few months, and after then from other horses over fences and in passing. Yet humans expect horses to overcome all of this to learn how to not only be good horses, but to be horses that do what humans want – and by and large, horses manage to do just that.

However good horses are at overcoming the obstacles necessary for success in the human world, it’s a measure of the faultiness of the usual approach to human/horse interaction that almost always there is a point (or a number of points) in the relationship when the horse isn’t responding the way the human wants – that is, the horse is “choosing” something “wrong”. Generally this is considered to be a problem with the horse. I submit it is always a problem with the human.

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* Throughout my writing when I say horses, you can probably include any equines – however I want to note that I have worked very little with non-horse equines, so maybe I’m wrong in this assumption.


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