Like any dance, sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow…
What would a relationship look and feel like with a friend who made 100 % of the decisions all the time? She chose what restaurant to lunch at, where to travel for a getaway weekend, what to talk about and everything in between? I suspect after a short while you would give up attempting to introduce your ideas or opinions even to the point that you simply wouldn’t want to spend time together any longer.
Now switch roles and place the human as the sole decision maker and the horse as the other partner in the relationship. It might be become clear that horses might choose to trot away when they see us coming, knowing their perspective is not considered or even acknowledged.
Over the last 10 years I re-entered the horse world, as an adult, learning the new natural horsemanship methods. I learned that we never let the horse make decisions because they will become dominant and place themselves higher than us in the herd hierarchy. While it is important to have clear and healthy boundaries with our horses, we can still maintain safety while sometimes allowing our horses to make a choice in what they would see as spending valuable time together. This is where the leadership ebbs and flows, like the smooth inter-tangled legs of a tango. Imagine how the relationship would change if we acknowledged their voice and occasionally followed their lead? What a dance that would be……
