(“If you’re nuts, you’ll make your horse nuts.”)
People who immerse themselves in their (a) vocation—of itself often a good trait—have been known to lose perspective. Everybody knows that old line: “If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Horse people are not immune to this malady.
It is only reasonable to expect any practitioner to bring his own area of expertise to a problem. Is a surgeon’s first thought acupuncture? Does the acupuncturist suggest massage? Does the massage therapist send you to the chiropractor or the hypnotist? Even within a discipline, an individual may point you towards his own specialty. I know a vet who thinks everything is “hocks” and another one who has never met a back that doesn’t need to be injected. Saddle fitters, nutritionists, the list of culprits is nearly endless. This is not to denigrate any of those modalities, but merely to remind you that the “magic bullet du jour” or a “one-size-fits-all” approach to a horse’s problem doesn’t do him (or you) justice.
An overly limited perspective can easily cramp a judge’s or trainer’s ability to analyze a situation as well. It does not surprise me, for instance, that a judge who is having trouble in her own riding with bending sees bending problems in all the horses she judges.
Another extrapolation of the data to fit someone’s own reality? Try this one: On FaceBook I encountered a woman who has made the study of “breathing” her life’s work. A quote: “The wave of a breath creates . . . the most profound form of communication between humans and horses. Horses respond to subtle changes in energy and breathing. When we understand the signals we give, we can connect on a deeper level. This will begin as we walk in through the stable door and through all your training. If you are at a competition surrounded by distractions, your horse will be reassured by your steady, rhythmical breathing.”
A more pedestrian way to say this is “If you’re nuts, you’ll make your horse nuts. If you convey calm and self assuredness, he’ll pick up on that instead.” Do you need a conscious awareness of breath control to achieve this? Well no, but if breathing is the lens through which you view all behaviors, adjusting it to suit the situation seems perfectly logical. If your mind is ordered a different way, thinking about breathing itself will probably just be a distraction to you.
A favorite computer story of mine harkens back to the day of gigantic mainframes like UNIVAC and ENIAC- school bus sized behemoths built with 20,000 vacuum tubes and miles of copper wire that weighed in at 30 tons. As the story goes, one of these first commercially owned machines was malfunctioning. An expert from the Rand Corporation was called in to consult. The “repair man” looked over the room-sized monstrosity and announced that his fee to fix it would be $50,000. At wits end, the owners agreed to his terms. At that, the expert picked up a hammer, marched over to the computer, and gave the machine one resounding thwack after which it began to work perfectly.
The owners were incensed. “How can you dare to charge us $50,000 for one swing of a hammer?” they demanded. The consultant was said to reply, “It only cost you a dollar for me to swing the hammer. The rest of my fee was because I knew where I should hit the machine.”
As a horse owner and rider, one of your jobs is to develop a repertory of skills–a whole toolbox of fine tweezers, jeweler’s screwdrivers and even hammers and chisels— in addition to a Rolodex of trustworthy experts to call upon and then not to become mesmerized by any one technique or beguiled by any single guru.
As George Washington (or was it Jerry Garcia?) warned our young country, concurrence does not imply causation—advice which applies to your decisions around the barn and in the arena (as well as to how you should react to the stuff that gets posted on Facebook).
A hammer has its uses, but among your best tools will always be common sense, skepticism, and perspective!