I often say things like "the horse said..." or"the horse tells me..." and sometimes, people get confused about what
that means. Do I really think the horse speaks English?

So, let's back up and really take the time to understand theshorthand of that.

There's a progression of learning that goes like this: unconscious incompetence (you don't know that you don't know), conscious incompetence (you know that you don't know, and you can't do it), conscious competence (you have gotten good if you think about it) and unconscious competence (your awesomeness is now a just who you are).

In my experience, there is a similar progression of awareness around behavior and responsibility. Oblivious (you don't know thatthe person or animal is even exhibiting cues), aware (able to recognize things like ears back, or crying, but doesn't relate any of that to themselves), reactive (sees the behavior, and understands you need to respond to it.) and responsible (understand where these things come from and works to minimize the expression in the first place).

Quite a bit if this is controlled by something in the braincalled "reticular activation". Your everyday experience with reticular activation would be like when you start to think about buying a new
car, say a red Toyota, and now you see red Toyotas everywhere when you never noticed them before. Or- I see every horse trailer that is on the road, my husband barely registers them. Horses are very important to me, and not so much for him.

There's an interesting study about reticular activation andthe short version is they put couples with young children up in apartments near a train track. The first couple of nights, both adults were roused when the train went by as expected by how loud it was. But it didn't take long for both adults to no longer be disturbed by the train. Mothers were still roused by their young children, even though their sounds weren't nearly as loud as the train. Fathers were not generally roused by their children. So, the researchers were interested in this, and had the mothers sleep elsewhere for several nights. When mom wasn't there to tend the children, the fathers were perfectly able to be roused and tend to the children.

What the researchers basically concluded was that both adults’reticular activation was able to learn to filter out even quite loud stimulus. The truly interesting part was what happened with the children- the fathers reticular activation system didn't send him the signals to wake up in response to the children if their mother was available to handle it. So it wasn't that he didn't hear them at all, it was that his brain didn't consider the children his responsibility if she was around.

So fascinating!

Back to horses- Let's take biting for example

Oblivious- these people may not even know that horse's bite.They certainly have no idea what the biting cues look like. For many examplesof oblivious people, check out videos online of the King's Guard horses outsideBuckingham Palace.

Aware- These people can at least recognize that the horsemight be pinning his ears, but they really don't know what that means, or that there is something else that is going to happen to them. They may make comments about the horse's grumpy face, but then they are shocked that they were bitten.
Fun fact- When the movie Spirit Wild Stallion of the CImmeron was made, the animators had to give him eyebrows so the audiences could interpret his facial expressions.

Reactive- These people are always on the back end of thebehavior. The horse bites at them, and they do feel an impulse to respond. The horse gets a smack or is shouted at, once the behavior has manifested.

Responsible- These people are aware of what Ray Hunt called"what happens before what happened, happened." Folksthat are aware of that, and take responsibility for what the horse is doing,
and how he feels are intervening then. They aren't waiting for after the fact, they aren't trying to correct behavior that already manifested, they are helping the horse make a different choice before the problem even fully becomes reality.

To get back to the opening premise, I often use the languagelike "your horse says" or "your horse tells me “or "your horse is telling you" because we are attuned to accepting responsibility for something when someone tells us to do it. I want my students to be able to do things when I'm not there, and using language that helps their reticular activation link what the horse is doing to an already well functioning learning pathway in the person. This speeds up the process of those signals from the horse becoming important to their brain. If I frame the actions as coming from me, the instructor,
the students tend to struggle when I'm not there translating for the horse. But using my language to keep the student's brain focused on the horse helps them "get it" faster.