Having our horse being able to stay connected to us at a time of high natural instincts like treats and around food is a big deal and the energy around food and treats is a critical part of leadership with your horse.
Co-operation is much more important than leadership, but the right kind of leadership could be very important for those of you who have big dreams.
Getting this “wrong” will cost you leadership and yet, you can’t bully or push this on an unwilling horse either. It’s one of the utterly individual to each horse and each person things that need to be decided on individually – AND be prepared to change what you’re doing in the moment too.
If you’re supporting your horse to live their life free from their fear and yours, then they are MUCH more likely to work with you around increasing your connection together around food and treats.
Did that bit about “living their life free from their fear and yours” land? I once heard a horse describe their owners constantly unresolved and ignored feelings about something as “like barbed wire.” Horses communicate with feelings, so as you work your way through Fast Track, keep in mind that you need to be listening to and acting on both their fear AND yours, for the special result that you’re looking for.
If you have any yucky, pushy energy, any Not Quite Rights from your horse about treats, you might be unsafe – at the very least those yucky feelings are an early warning signal that something is Not Quite Right and you need to figure out what that is and what you need to do about it. Plus those yucky feelings WILL cost you leadership.
Is the treat ADDING to your connection – or is it DISCONNECTING you? If you’re not sure of that, put your hand up in a Live Seminar and we’ll have a feel around that together.
However, a more important issue right now is learning to form your own opinions from your OWN circumstances about issues such as if, when and how you feed your horse treats.
Nobody knows your individual circumstances as well as you do. Nobody will feel your Not Quite Rights and be able to use them as guidance for you and your horse as perfectly as you do.
Strong opinions about treats are pretty common amongst some very great horse people. I know some who never give their horse a treat and others who give heaps with positive effects. So here’s a lesson designed to help you make up YOUR mind about how you want to deal with this potentially thorny issue.
I personally like to give a treat from time to time just because the horses enjoy it and so do I – AND I also use treats to motivate them sometimes. I like to use treats to help me develop an initial willingness to work with high energy work at liberty and I also use them to help to balance the yin and yang that I talked about in Lesson 17.
AND I like to give a treat for no special reason at all.
A very important part of using treats is using Not Quite Right and following the happy feel to set the boundaries. Because boundaries – what is OK for me and OK for my horse – can be a very big deal around treats and these boundaries form one of the very important strands of leadership.
Click here for the alternate recording – Treats
And there are some excellent additional lessons on the forum around treats too, under Extra Lessons from Jenny and under Fast Track Lesson 22 as well. There’s the 24 carrot game which is a great way to help a horse from the other side of the fence when food focus is so strong it’s a disconnect, there’s a comparison between a good clicker training and a less than optimal and more. Use your own name and password for the forum here.
Related Lessons
You may like to reflect on these related lessons:
Using Not Quite Right to establish safety and boundaries around food that suit you.
Written Version of the Audio
My goal is a happy and peaceful relationship and treats have to ADD to that picture, not create a problem with that picture.
If I get a Not Quite Right when I am handing out treats, then like every other Not Quite Right, I have learned to take action on that and from my experience, this is one of the easiest areas of our relationship to get sucked back into old habits of forgetting to listen to Not Quite Rights.
If I get a Not Quite Right, I can back off and take me and my treat away or I can swish my horse away or a combination of both and then I can figure out what that Not Quite Right was REALLY about – without making any assumptions about what the answer is going to be.
And I don’t want to make assumptions, because sooo often, the answers are not what I expect them to be. Well, it stands to reason, if the answer was there in my conscious mind already, i.e. if I already KNEW the answer from thinking, then I wouldn’t have a Not Quite Right in the first place. Does that make sense?
That’s why inner awareness, or a Quiet Mind if I need to, is so valuable in allowing the SUBCONSCIOUS to float up the right answer that will make the Not Quite Right go away.
As far as dealing with treats is concerned, I like Carolyn Resnick’s way of motivating horses with treats that are located in a bucket OUTSIDE of where you are working instead of in your pocket. I still have the occasional treat in my pocket, but I experimented with Carolyn’s bucket-outside-the-working-area and I liked it.
In another use of treats, Carolyn says about the balance of yin and yang – if she has to be really firm about something that is important to her – then she will go over to her treat bucket afterwards and balance that insistence out with a treat.
In some of the upcoming lessons, you will see a way of using treats to get a horse comfortable with higher energy at liberty that is a useful way of using treats.
But here is the down side of treats. What’s NOT so useful about treats is if we use them to cover up other problems.
One day I recognized that Bobby was the only one of my horses allowed to come in repeatedly and ask for a treat – well he’s so special and precious that the rules don’t apply to him. With everyone else, I would give them a treat and once they had it, that was it – there was no point in them hanging around for another one.
I had a bit of an insight (yes some gentle Aussie understatement again – it was one of those HUGE eye openers) when I noticed that I was RELUCTANT to send Bobby away in case that made him not want to be with me any more. Oh dear… And then another flash came to me. About how that reluctance might just be covering up some other “problem”. About how because he still wants to be with me for the treat, that might be enabling me to get away with not attending to that other problem. Ooooo… THAT was a big insight. So I made a commitment to notice what I might be covering up with a treat.
And of course – the biggest incentive of all for a horse to want to do something for us, is for us to be working in their Comfort Zone as much as possible AND for us to be in that place of peace, happiness, excitement or some other emotion positive to them in that moment. We’ll talk about those things many more times no doubt throughout this course.
Enjoy figuring out how you would like to use treats with your horse.
Up Next
The most extraordinary healing can take place in this Program and in your next lesson, we look at what to do if releasing a big trauma triggers your horse to act like a baby horse and what an incredibly special opportunity that is.