Whether you ride the trails, the show ring or the streets, your horse can benefit from the exercises in this new series by building both horse and rider skills and confidence. Call it what you will, bomb-proofing or de-spooking aims to condition a horse to respond “non-instinctively” to frightening objects and also to generalize this response to anything new and potentially frightening.
Generalization is the ability to apply a concept to a situation that is different from the one it was initially learned in. Humans do this quite easily and quite naturally. When you learned to write, for example, you didn’t have to relearn the process when you went from school to home, changed from notebook paper to chalk board, or switched from pencils to ballpoint pens. Generalization is “big picture.” Discrimination, by contrast, is the ability to focus on the smaller picture – the details. Humans generalize more easily than they discriminate. Police officers, for example, spend many hours honing their observation skills to take in important details. Horses, like most animals, are master discriminators.
Generalization is considerably more challenging for horses than humans. They focus largely on the differences between things. Hence, “whoa” may not always mean “stop” to a horse. With improper generalization, it may mean “halt next to me when I stop and pull on your lead line while we are walking together,” but not necessarily “while I am lunging you, or while I am riding you, and not while I am far away from you and don’t have a lead in my hand (or chain over your nose).” In many cases, that may not matter much. But in building a reliable response to stressful situations, you want wide generalization. You don’t want the horse to think, “I am okay with the blue barrel in the corner and the mailbox, but the pile of lumber/plastic bag/white barrel by the fence is different and scary.” The key to generalization is variability and repetition, especially since you are asking the horse to override his instincts.