Learning and Choices: How To Charm The Snake

It’s evening and the horses are eating their dinners. The sky is gorgeous with clouds still rosy from sunset, their glow almost obscuring a thin crescent moon. The bay and chestnut and gray noses are buried in green alfalfa hay, the sounds of contented munching audible from where I stand. Suddenly all the horses’ heads rise in unison at a noise from the scraggly, stunted juniper tree nearby. Something is in there!

Foxy twirls and bolts away, snorting and wide-eyed. Koko takes a few steps towards the bush, his nostrils flared. The other horses, all well away from the action, stand like statues, watching the juniper intently.

Jess, in her pen closest to the monster, spins to run but she has nowhere to go. She heads away at full speed towards the steel fence panel and I hold my breath, but she slides to a stop and rolls back to her pile of hay, then back to the fence again. The colt, head held up high, nose in the air, runs mindlessly next to his foster mother – he’s going wherever she goes, just as fast, just as far. Jess finally slides to a stop and freezes in place, muscles quivering, her attention focused totally on the bush, to the spot where the monster will burst from.

My dog, Hobo, steps out of the bush, panting, a smile on his face. He’s missed catching the pesky ground squirrel, but I can see he thinks it was by just a whisker. I shake my head, glad I wasn’t sitting on Jess or Foxy when Hobo went hunting.

The Reptile Mind is a good thing for a horse, in that it automatically and instantly takes control of his thinking mind and his body when immediate response can literally make the difference between life and death – those times when pausing for thought can get a horse eaten. However, when working with your horse, sometimes the things his Reptile Mind reacts to may not really be a danger at all. The result can be a very bad thing, indeed.

The simplest incidents can trigger a horse’s Reptile Mind – it could be the flapping of a loose piece of plastic, putting on a raincoat, a log alongside the trail, a dog running out from under a bush. Obviously, not everything that sets off Reptile Mind is sudden – a horse can panic just from being pushed to get in a trailer, or, in the colt’s case the other week, needing to jump out of the one that he walked into himself.

The same incident can elicit different reactions in the horses. In the case of Hobo in the bush, Koko, by biology, cannot just turn and run away – it is his job as a stallion to defend the mares. Foxy, timid and reactive by nature, is the first to flee and to go the farthest. The other mares stand and wait because their lead mare, Su, is unconcerned. Jess is closest to the juniper tree where the monster is, and, new to the herd and separated from them at dinner time, can’t rely on the lead mare. She’s trapped and wants to escape, like Foxy. The colt has no choice – he is young enough that he must follow his foster mother when it comes to things like danger.

To flee or not to flee…

We all know our minds operate on the conscious as well as the unconscious level. Fear experienced on the conscious level is learned fear. For example, you fear putting your finger in a flame because you’ve learned by sorry experience that it will hurt a lot. Your conscious mind has accessed memories of the pain from being burned in the past, along with the negative emotions the pain elicited. The negative emotions elicit fear. Now your fear keeps you from putting your finger in the flame so you won’t be hurt again.

The unconscious mind is the province of the Reptile Mind (limbic system), which causes you to jerk your finger out of the flame when you feel pain - an involuntary physiological reaction. In addition to jerking your finger from the pain source, your limbic system also stores the negative emotion associated with the memory of experience you just had. Your thinking mind will use this in the future in the form of fear.

For horses, anything that is unknown or unidentifiable must be considered dangerous and therefore fearsome – this is a hard-wired survival strategy for prey animals that keeps them alive. And of course, situations that remind a horse of those that have been dangerous in the past are fearful, as well. Sufficient fear triggers the Reptile Mind, involuntarily throwing the body into immediate reaction so it will survive the danger – even when the danger is not identified (or identifiable).

Yet the same danger may not trigger a reflex survival response in different horses, or even the same horse at different times. This is because of differing fear thresholds in each horse - a kind of biological set-point beyond which a system cannot handle any further input. On one side of the set-point the conscious mind operates, on the other, the reflex or Reptile Mind. The threshold or sensitivity of the set-point is dependent upon experience/memory, hardwiring, hormones, excitatory or calming chemicals, and various other factors present in the body.

When your horse’s Reptile Mind reacts to a situation, certain physiological events occur, e.g. freezing in place, rapid heartbeat, increased respiration. Stress hormones and other chemicals flood the body and the horse is propelled, willy-nilly, to action. The set-point for initiation of flight-or-fight behavior has been triggered. It is important to remember that once the limbic system takes over, the reasoning, rational mind does not function. There is no choice when it comes to survival response.

The memory of a situation coupled with negative emotion (fear) will cause the same physical response in the body as actual danger – the same rapid heartbeat, increased respiration, etc. Reptile Mind, with no direct connection to the world (the sensory input of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch are not available to the limbic system) cannot differentiate between actual danger and the negative emotion associated with memory of danger (fear), but it will still trigger to the physical fear response, the raised heartbeat and respiration, the flood of chemicals in the body. Fear is no different to Reptile Mind than the real deal so that the end result is the same – the set-point of the fear threshold is tipped.

Charming the Reptile Mind

Ideally you want your horse to have more positive emotions (since they do not rouse the snake) and fewer unknowns to deal with in his daily experience. But in fact, you cannot guarantee that ideal environment for your horse. In real life, the snake is charmed – Reptile Mind is kept out of the picture - by raising the fear threshold, that is, changing the sensitivity of the set-point so that it takes a higher level of stress (physical or emotional input) to create the triggering fear.

The two systems – the unconscious mind (Reptile Mind) and the conscious (thinking) mind work as an efficient either-or system. The unconscious mind takes care of imminent danger, the conscious mind everything else involving voluntary actions. Although the Reptile mind cannot be contacted directly, the conscious mind can have an effect on it. If this wasn’t possible, we all would be at the mercy of the Reptile Mind at all times – we could never learn the difference between what is safe and what is truly dangerous because our Reptile Mind would be “on” most of the time, meaning we’d have no time for conscious mind to operate – to think!.

Learning is the key to keeping the Reptile Mind from taking over. A horse can learn to tolerate almost anything that would normally trigger Reptile Mind. Horses can be used reliably on the battlefield even with the smell of blood, the sounds of explosions and the pain of being wounded, and they can enthusiastically chase after a polo ball even with polo sticks swinging around their faces and occasionally smacking their bodies and legs. Buggy horses in cities ignore honking horns, squealing brakes, speeding vehicles, pedestrians that may dart in front of their faces. This is simply because familiarity, just as with positive emotion, does not cause the stress response in the body and the Reptile Mind response is not triggered.

A horse will learn from everything around it – from his mother, his immediate herd, other horses, his environment and from the humans he interacts with. He has no reason not to want to accept anything a human offers – as long as the Reptile Mind is not roused.

Early handling of foals works because a foal’s conscious mind is essentially a tabula rasa – a blank slate – that you can put anything you want in because nothing, other than instinct, is in there yet. Teach a foal early and work with him often and he is trained for life – for good or bad.

Older horses can be taught anything as well, but if they have low fear thresholds, their set-points must be raised, and this must be done while avoiding rousing the Reptile Mind. Older horses have established memories that will have been learned from all the same sources as a foal, but these memories, older and now established over time, will have more potency.

Charming the Reptile Mind involves both proactive measures and remedial ones in your horse’s life. Proactive measures keep your horse’s experiences positive and avoid the unexpected whenever possible. Remedial measures raise his set-point when the Reptile Mind has reacted, as it inevitably will. Charming the Reptile Mind is actually simple, but it isn’t necessarily easy to implement - particularly if some of the essential factors are not considered.

Next: Herd dynamics, for better or worse.