One of the most difficult concepts about training horses to get across to people is that horses do not think like we do. Your horse is a prey animal and you are a predator, which means he sees the world in a completely different way than you do. One of the major differences between us is that prey animals have an ingrained flight or fight response and act first and think later, as opposed to predators, who think first and then act.
You won’t experience any success with horses until you understand how horses perceive the world around them and learn how to communicate with them in a way that they understand. If you don’t understand why your horse does the things that he does, horsemanship is not only frustrating, it can turn dangerous. When you’re working with a 1,000-pound animal, that’s a bad combination.
