Can AAoR help a young horse?

The AAoR approaches will help to teach a young horse to learn the human/horse language that will be needed throughout the horse life.

This is achieved slowly and without force, fear or gadgets. The language taught is tailored to be suitable preparation for ridden work, driving, or liberty connections and each of these goals have both differences and shared similarities of communication styles. Tactile cues, finger touches, verbal requests and guidance are designed to enable the young horse to begin understanding not to fear a human interaction and to understand what each communication means. This is not something which can be rushed, and there is no place for shouting metaphorically or literally at the horse if they don’t understand at first.

When teaching another human a new and different language, it is important that the teacher has a good grasp of that language themselves, otherwise the learner will become confused and it is the same with teaching a young horse the horse/human language and it is well documented that confusion can lead to anxiety and frustration behaviours with horses.

First impressions count with a naive young horse and can give the horse a life long view of how working with humans looks like and feels from their point of view. For this reason it is important to make certain that human mistakes are minimised, errorless learning is set up, over trying is limited and an optimistic attitude must be cultivated regarding the horse view of how work, handling and husbandry skills are progressed. The kindest thing you can give to a horse is time. Time to grow, time to understand, time to acclimatise and time to relax with their human.