Monitor Your Horse's Stress Levels, For Best Results in Training

Description

Horses become incapable of learning when they go past a certain level of fear, anxiety, or stress. This means that if you keep hammering away at the horse, trying to teach them something when they are currently overwhelmed with stress, it will not work. The only thing that you will be able to teach them by putting more pressure on them while they are in that condition is that their job is not enjoyable, and that you cannot be trusted.

Yet I often see people handling and riding horses who appear to be giving very little thought to what their horse's current level of stress is at. If the horse is not behaving or performing correctly, they keep adding more and more pressure on the horse to attempt to force it to do what they want. In scenarios like this, the results will be FAR more successful if the human is able to monitor the horse's stress levels, and make an attempt to lower those levels before adding more pressure.