HOW TO FIT THE PERSONALTY OF YOUR HORSE?

As an adult educator, many years ago when I was studying on how to be an effective teacher, I learned that people have different personality types...which effect how they learn, and therefore I needed to adapt my approach to them as their teacher in order to get the best from them.

So there is definitely not a "one size fits all" approach for training people due to this, and it's exactly the same with horses.

The art of being a good horse person is being able to read this info from each individual horse, and tailor your approach to the horses individual requirements to suit his personality, which can still change but this approach works as a very good guideline.

As if you use the wrong approach, for example if you rolled on in with a strong human personality to a more fearful type of horse (right-brained) you would scare him to death, and wreck his confidence, whereas being too timid and of a weak personality with a more confident (left brained) horse is setting yourself up for failure too as they would take advantage and walk all over you.

So how do you know what personality type your horse is ....

To simplify things we divide horses into two initial groups for personality assessment:

1-LEFT BRAINED=these sorts of horses have the following characteristics-calm, brave, thinking, rational, not scared of people, relaxed and unemotional, dominant, pushy, easily bored, intelligent, bold and exuberant

2-RIGHT BRAINED: these horses are the types that are easily scared, worried, emotional, skeptical, mistrusting, spooky, quick to flight or fight, tense, reactive .... freezes, then explodes, stressed, elevated, loyal, benefits from consistency, and one kind handler is best for this kind of horse.

I hope this won't confuse you but ALL horses can get right brained when scared but it’s the horses innate personality type that we are talking about here which can be assessed when they are at home in their safe and familiar surroundings...then ask which of these two categories does your horse fit into?

So, to get the best from a naturally left brained horse you need to be friendly but firm, and persistent....with a lot of variety in your training as they are easily bored.

With a right brained horse you need to be gentle, and slow in all you do with them...so be patient , and wait ..and wait....and then wait some more......they often benefit from repetition in their training so they get more confident from carrying out a familiar pattern of exercise or behaviour...which gives them comfort.

Each horse personality type can significantly improve to have a more well rounded personality if the correct approach for their type is regularly implemented.

We can then split the type further into introvert and extrovert ... But that's a lesson for another session

Showing Max and Otto....

Otto(whiter face) is a bold and brave Left brained horse.

Max (narrow white strip on face) is a big scaredy cat right brain horse.

We love them both but use very different approaches with each horse.

Interestingly Max is the boss of Otto ..... so what type of personality has no reflections in a herd....And Otto used to be more right brained but is now more confident so therefore sways a lot more these days into being a left brained horse.

PS-PLEASE NOTE-the description within this post of left brained or right brained does not refer to the animal only using one side of their brain...we only refer to it like this as it just helps the interpreter to meet the type of behaviour with a appropriate training approach.