Paula Curtis (00:30)
There's something powerful that happens when science begins to meet feel, when we start to understand not just what our horses are doing, but why. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Steven Peters.
board certified clinical neuropsychologist and equine neuroscientist who has spent decades studying the brain, both horse and human, and translating that understanding into something we can actually feel and apply in our everyday horsemanship.
Today, we're exploring his newest book, A Horse's Life, The Neuroscience of Equine Welfare, where he brings together real life experiences with horses and the deeper science of what's happening inside of them, from stress and learning to safety, environment, and true wellbeing.
If you've ever felt like there's more going on beneath the surface with your horse, this conversation is going to open up a whole new way of seeing, understanding, and connecting. Let's dive in.
Paula Curtis (01:19)
Steve, it's absolutely fantastic to have you here today. And I'm so excited because I was sent your brand new book and I only got it a couple days ago, it's A Horse's Life, the Neuroscience of Equine Welfare. And it's
beautiful because the message really we don't actually need better training or better methods with our horses. We need a deeper understanding and we need to be able to come to our horses being able to actually see them as the unique individual that they are and then to understand the processes going on.
behind how they're showing up today. So some of those things would be its history. Some of those things would be our own internal state, how we are showing up because our horse is going to have that feeling of who we are today. So they're going to reflect that back to us. Their entire environment plays a role, both past environment and current environment and how they're showing up today.
A lot of people feel the pressure that they have to get better at doing the techniques and doing the methods just right. But really,
All we need to do is be better at seeing our horses and understanding them. And once we can understand their nervous system state, now we can start helping them become more regulated. And once they're regulated, things are easy and we can make mistakes and the horses will forgive us and horses are so forgiving. And so I would love to jump in to the piece about
how we understand our horses as individuals because your book's beautiful in the way that there's a lot of story and we're learning about each of these horses as unique individuals. So how do we go to our horses without our preconceived notions and put those on our horse and instead see the horse as they are?
Dr. Stephen Peters (03:34)
Let's talk just a little bit about us and then we'll talk a little bit about the horse. I've probably dissected out hundreds of horse and human brains and I'm struck more by the similarities than I am the differences. One of the differences of course is those horses don't have speech. They don't have language.
So they can't really talk to us. if we had a pyramid, we always seem to want to put ourselves at the very top of this pyramid, that we're the greatest creature on earth. But every one of these creatures on this pyramid
is designed uniquely for their niche. And horses are sensory creatures. They can do things that we cannot. They see things we can't, they hear things we can't. If your listeners know the story of Clever Haunts, Clever Haunts was the horse that everybody thought could count and do math. But what they basically found out was that no, Clever Haunts was actually
reading the professor who was giving him the problems and without noticing it the professor would either slow down his breathing or have some micro movement and Hans would know that that was the end of the question and would stop. So if they are that sensitive and aware then
We can either work with that understanding and that nervous system, or we can work against.
Unfortunately, in a lot of approaches, we've decided we were going to work against it. Not maliciously necessarily, but just thinking that without our understanding, we're just going to make something happen. And certainly you can make horses do all kinds of stuff. But you were right when you introduced us here in the beginning was
The nervous system state is all important. If I'm hyper vigilant, and I have to feel that I have to protect myself, then I'm going to create ⁓ a defensive physiology. I'm going to start having neurochemicals in my system, where even information I have access to, I can't get to it. Because
⁓ I'm feeling I'm feeling threatened what the newest research is showing us is that Where we used to Believe that the brain was a thinking organ. We're finding more so in us and in horses It's a predicting organ so Horses are always predicting Is this going to be okay? Am I going to be safe? What's going to happen to me?
And so if everything is considered a predatory threat in that world, then the onus is on us to allow that horse to be in an environment where they feel safe. And then their prediction becomes, wow, I thought something bad might happen and it didn't. If we can do that, if we can convince that nervous system and talk to that nervous system,
Then the horse feels safe enough to be curious. They feel safe enough to explore. This is where learning excels. And so would you really want to force your horse to do things where they're not holding all the information, where a part of their brain power has to be dedicated to protecting themselves or coming out of their shell and exploring and
taking in the world and the way brains work.
is that they're created by experience. So the more they're designed to help us to deal with our world and make good predictions on how to adapt in the world. So the more safe experiences we have, the more likely it is that we're going to want to explore and grow our world. When you do that, even on a microscopic level, even on a cellular level,
You're creating more axons and dendrites and more connections in the brain. So your horse is becoming more capable. So if we flip it over and say, no, the onus is on you. It can be very empowering because you can make your horse very, very smart. You can set it up so your horse feels comfortable enough to learn all kinds of things. Or you can
drill your horse again and again, can make your horse feel uncomfortable. And what you're actually doing is creating enough stress and cortisol, a stress hormone, creating enough stress that instead of growing dendrites that connect, you prune them. And I've done this with laboratory rats before, where you put them in an environment where they're with other rats.
They figure out mazes. They have what's called an internal locus of control. So they have agency. They have choices that they can make. These brains are heavy brains with lots of neurons in them when we look at them under the microscope. And we can drill rats to learn a task. They don't have an internal locus of control, which means the world is constantly telling them what they have to do and micromanaging them.
Those brains weigh a lot less and the dendrites are actually pruned back. So if you think of yourself as a gardener for your horse's brain and yours too, then how you nurture it is going to determine how well it grows and how it thrives. So I think what we want to do, so you were absolutely right as well. We put so much emphasis on the technique.
or certain trainers will say you have to follow my method and do things A, B, C.
But think of this. Your brain, you're very unique. Your brain is like a snowflake. It's been created by things you listened to, things you read, experiences you had. And so that's created who you are, and there's no one else ever who's had that kind of brain that you have. Horses are the same way.
And that's one of the reasons in this book, and I'll talk a little bit about the book if that's okay. Yeah, so the the new book, A Horse's Life, the neuroscience of equine welfare. I wrote that with Mark Rashid and and Chrissy McDonald, his wife. And we wanted this to be real life, but we wanted you to connect with those horses and we wanted to show you.
Paula Curtis (09:47)
Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Peters (10:07)
Oftentimes, if in a research we do this, and I don't like it, is that we look at one isolated horse. No horses isolated out in the in the world. We are all in a even if they have to interact with you only, that's still a social environment, a social connection. So instead of have an N of one, which would be a nice story.
no matter how well documented, a nice story about one horse. We look at the history of 19 horses and all of these horses are different and they've all had different experiences and all their experiences have had an impact on their nervous systems. And so what we do is we tell you the story and through the eyes of to start with,
Master storytellers, Mark Rashid has ⁓ a whole library full of books that he's written. So he talks about horses that he's known and basically I go in and I write the clinical postscript. I sort of give you a lens to look at what is going on with the horse's nervous system. So you can see it at a deeper level.
Then we talk about how that horse got there and what we might do to help that horse have a better situation. So 19 horses we felt gave us a broad range and there are all kinds of things people talk about because you'll hear all this, a lot of jargon. You you'll hear things like frees and learned helplessness and you know, sometimes they're used so loosely that
we're not really accurate in how we use the terms and it can cause confusion in how we see our horse. So we try to make sure we are really clear on what a freeze response looks like and actually what shutdown looks like and what those horses may look like when they come out of that state as well. So we're trying to clarify.
things with using accurate language and accurate examples. And I do believe, I think it's hard for people who really want to learn.
to not get pulled in different directions because it's so cloudy out there. The information, you know, you can go on the internet and see all kinds of different things. And then people have a bit of information that might be science-based, evidence-based, but then they wrap it up in things that they may want to believe or they don't quite have it. But once everybody jumps on the bandwagon, it becomes myth.
And now it's out there. So there's a lot of pseudoscience out there. And the reason I bring that up is that if we are confused in all the information we have, imagine how confused our horse is going to be when we try to apply that. And when your horse gets confused, it's not an attitude problem. It's a nervous system problem.
And so when they get confused, they'll go to defensive physiology. They'll start to get what we call sympathetically aroused. And when they're there, right on that back edge of fight or flight. they'll self-preservation will kick in when they're confused and we put pressure on. And unfortunately, what we do, we tend to do is if we don't understand the nervous system,
and we don't quite know what to do, we solve the problem with more pressure. When it's just the opposite of really what we want to do, what we want to do is just let the nervous system reset. And the more that we allow our horse to reset, to come back down, to reach something what we call homeostasis, it's our natural balance. So your homeostasis is where your
blood pressure is normal, your heart rate is normal. And that feels comfortable. And so that what we want to do is we can't stay in homeostasis forever, we won't really learn anything in that state. So we have to be challenged. I'm not talking about being scared. I'm not talking about being anxious or stressed. I'm I'm actually talking about having enough arousal so that we can pay attention.
we can't really focus or pay attention if we don't have some arousal. And sympathetic arousal is not bad. You know, it's people have looked at the autonomic nervous system, where up here is sympathetic arousal, and which we always call a fight or flight. And then parasympathetic, which we've always talked about as to rest and digest. And so you kind of get the connotation that
Wow, sympathetic is not so great. That's where fight or flight is. And parasympathetic is fantastic. That's where you rest and digest. You can't learn in a parasympathetic state. You need some sympathetic arousal. Play is sympathetic arousal. Sex is sympathetic arousal. What would be bad parasympathetic arousal? Well, the freeze response is actually not a sympathetic response.
It's parasympathetic. So the heart rate crashes, blood pressure dives. It's almost like it's in a human, we call that a ⁓ vasovagal response. It's almost like fainting when you get stressed. So that's a parasympathetic response. Our task in learning is to set it up so our horse is challenged but not overwhelmed. And
Once they've completed what it is we've asked in that challenging situation, they need to know, one, that they can reset their nervous system. After being challenged, they can come back down. So that recovery is important. When they're challenged in that sympathetic arousal, at that point, that's when your brain's encoding things. So you're challenged. Wow, I've got your attention.
And there's all kinds of neurochemical changes taking place in you as well. So that when you're there's a neurochemical called norepinephrine that gives you arousal too much gets you too sympathetically aroused then that's fight or flight. But if you get just enough, then you tap into another neurochemical. I don't want to get too technical, but this other neurochemical is called acetylcholine.
And that allows you to focus. can laser focus when you have acetylcholine. If you're parasympathetic, you don't have it. You're worried about grazing. You're hanging out with your friends. You're sitting on your porch and starting to doze off. If you're parasympathetic, you're not going to be taking in a lot of information. So if we can get you aroused and challenged enough that acetylcholine kicks in, that's the sweet spot. And if we can get to that point,
The dopamine hits are the most impactful. That's your biggest dopamine reward when you have that level of arousal. Then what you do is you don't want to put on more arousal because actually you'll interfere with what you're teaching. You'll start to drive them toward fight or flight and then they'll get stressed. But you'll let them do in the literature what's called pendulation. That's like a pendulum. Swings up.
but we have to let it swing back down. When they're in that sweet spot, they're encoding information. When they come back down, they're consolidating it. So it's a two step process. So if we don't give them that, what a lot of people call dwell time, if we don't offer that dwell time, then they're not really doing a good job of consolidating the information. What happens when they're consolidating information?
Well, there's a structure in your brain and in your horse's brain. It's about even with your ears and it's called the hippocampus. And that's responsible for generating memory. If you have Alzheimer's disease, the first place that we'll notice some pathology is in the hippocampus, which makes sense. It's a memory area. What we do know is after you've encoded information,
If we let your nervous system reset and we don't interrupt, the hippocampus will do what we call a hippocampal replay. It'll replay what you just did and that will get locked in.
What if somebody said, well, my horse did something really well and they know they did something really well. I want to do it again. Let's get better at this. Let's do it again. You do it three, four, five times each time you do it, right? You're interrupting with the brain's ability and talent to replay it and lock it in. So it's interfering with that. And each time
you're getting less and less dopamine. It's getting boring. now it's getting agitated. Now I'm, I'm thrashing my tail around because this, this sucks. There's a scientific term for you. So, if indeed our horse is making predictions, we want them to predict either
this is safe, I'm okay, or hey, this is really good. But we don't want them making predictions that this is not so great. If you drill them, that's exactly what you'll do. They won't get dopamine out of it, and if they can't get away, they'll just become robotic. They'll go through those motions, and that will be making the horse, and that will be an external locus of control that's coming from the outside.
and they lose what's called agency. Agency is having some choice. Now don't want everybody to go say, well, Dr. Peters said my horse could just go do whatever they want to do. They can have agency. I'll just throw the reins away altogether.
What agency is really is for the horse to know its behaviors matter.
So if you ask something and your horse does it and you give them relief, then they know that their behavior matters. The definition of learned helplessness is, I can't escape from this no matter what I do. So my behavior doesn't matter. I have no internal locus of control. I can't control it. Everything is external. So what am I going to do? I'm just going to quit.
I'm just going to shut down and quit. And if you force me through force, I'll go through the motions, but I'll be somewhere else. I'll be dissociated to protect myself from this. And actually, even though the horse may look calmer to you, wow, look at this. My horse is calmer. It's cruel because what happens on the inside is incredible stress. You've actually created a system, a situation where
You've turned that cortisol spigot on and it won't turn off. And your horse is always under that cortisol flood and their immune systems get compromised. And think about it, if you're always jazzed up and you're always way up here, the wear and tear on your nervous system from having that. But if you pendulate, you actually strengthen the nervous system.
You make the nervous system more resilient to stress because the horse feels safe and is able to go out there and meet challenges and they'll hunt for challenges. Why? That felt great. That's where the biggest dopamine hit was. So those horses after a while say, what do you got for me next?
Paula Curtis (21:15)
that's so cool when they become an active participant in the training process. They want it so bad and they're interested and they're looking to you and they're calm and they're confident, but they're very curious about what's next and what probably, what equation do I get to solve? And your idea of us focusing always on performance first or not us, but like,
In general, you see a lot of the focus being put on the performance of the horse. But in reality, that's the end result. That's what happens after you regulate the nervous system. You get your horse to understand. You're putting them in this learning state. And now the performance is the outcome. So how can people
watch because people need to be educated and that's what your book does through the telling of story which is such a great way for us to learn because we come from tribes where we are sitting around a campfire and that's how lessons were passed on from generation to generation so story really helps us tune in and grab the information and so is there a story maybe or is there even
some ideas you can share around how can we recognize when a horse is just being asked to perform, which looks different and their facial expressions will be different and their muscle tone and their body and the way they're carrying themselves will look very different from a horse that's regulated, but yet they're still sympathetic. They still have energy and they're enthusiastic and they want to perform and they're ready to go do something.
But inside, there's a very different sort of thing going on inside when the horse is wanting and eager, even though the energy is high, versus a horse that's running on high cortisol and they're agitated and they're stressed and they know they have to do something, but maybe they're not in a nervous system state that we really would want our horses in when we're working with them.
Dr. Stephen Peters (23:22)
Yeah, instead of looking so much at tasks because we get so ego driven sometimes that we think we're teaching, we have to teach the horse everything. But if you went out just down the road from me about eight miles to Mesa Verde, there's still some wild horses out there. I hate to break it to you, but
They're not saying, I hope a human comes and teaches me how to trot, how to figure out this terrain, teach me how to gallop, teach me where the water is. They're brilliant in their niche at finding that out. What we do in our work with them is we want to help shape their brain.
so that they are resilient to stress. What we want to do is work with their nervous system. So the pendulation that I talked about, the more we do that, Martin Black, who wrote Evidence-Based Horsemanship with me,
And using this type of approach, he has said to me, I have what's called my special forces horses. These are horses that I don't know what I could do to ever get them to panic. Now, they've pendulated so much and have gotten so confident. the idea, you can start looking for it. It's that barrel racing horse.
that walks off the trailer, that walks up to the starting spot, that when it's time to go, they dial it up, they can internally bring up their own, and that's called allostasis. It's where homeostasis is just that balance. Allostasis is what your nervous system's going to need to meet the demand.
So if the horse has an internal locus of control, and so we don't have to jab them and spur them like you're sticking a frog with a stick, right? So if we don't have to do that, and our horse can create what they'll need to meet that allostatic demand. So you'll see that horse dial it up, run through those barrels. And then once they're finished and they cross that finish line,
They're the horses that you watch dial it down. Because all the practice has been at regulating their nervous system. Those horses that come out all over the place, know, people strap their 12 year old daughter on like a monkey on a rocket. Off it goes. Right. Then it finishes the race. It's now all sweaty. Its eyes are huge. Nobody can get it back on the trailer.
Then of course everybody decides they're going to help. So they get butt ropes and you get total chaos where you get humans with nervous system arousal that's over the top mixed with horses and they're so sensitive, they're going to play off that. And then the horse gets blamed. If we work with the nervous system, that's where the horse feels comfortable. I'll give you an example in terms of performance where
we can really work with the horse.
Horses, they're very much like us, but in one of the areas where they're hardwired is in how quickly their motor system develops. So when they're first born, there's a process called myelination. So when the horse moves, any way, neurons will fire. And if they start to fire in a repetitive pattern, those neurons will bind together.
When they start to bind together, here's your $10 word for the day, oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes get excited. They rush down there and they begin to wrap myelin around the neurons. Well, myelin is like paving a road. these messages become very efficient and very fast. An unmyelinated neuron probably
sends information about two miles an hour. And some of that leaks away. A myelinated neuron sends information about 200 miles an hour, and it doesn't lose its signal along the way. So in that movement, the horse gets a, in the first 45 days of life, and in fact, hours after they're born, watch how quickly they're on their feet. They have to be. So that's where they're different than
than we are in that myelinating process. But when we work with horses, we have to be aware that if we're sending messages and those messages aren't clear or we're sloppy in our signals,
that in our horses confused, then those neuronal connections won't be as precise. The better your timing, the clearer that you are, then the more precise will be that those connections. Now, horses, because they're built to quickly myelinate the motor system and move
together and watch how quickly that foal moves with the mare. Pretty darn quickly, they're almost in step. Let 50 horses go free. Just open a gate and let them run. Watch how many are on the same footfall. Watch, you know, they're almost like a flock of birds. It's not like, the horses, okay, in three steps, we're taking a left. One, two, three, and everybody takes off to the left.
So this synchrony of movement, which is a survival type of component to their nervous system, is built in.
And horses feel comfortable when they're in synchrony. So if you can get, you can connect with your horse and your horse feels comfortable enough that they move naturally, you can get in synchrony with them and their movement. That feels incredibly safe. There's a neurochemical called serotonin that's related to emotional balance.
And so almost like a dancer, if you have a dancer who's got all, it's all external locus of control, they've grabbed onto you and they're manhandling you in the dance. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't look good. If you've got somebody who's timing's bad. So they're often in the way and they're, they're getting their balance by holding onto the reins. Then they throw the horse.
off balance, so we're not in synchrony. But if you give the horse a chance, you'll notice that they're always trying to get in sync with you. And if you sort of practice staying out of the way, then you can give them more of an internal locus of control. And people who are listening who know what I'm talking about, it almost feels telepathic.
It almost feels like two beings become one. That's not magic. That's actually the neurology. And when you start to ride like that, you can perform. when people talk about performance, it's paradoxical because the more you try to micromanage that, then the more you tend to get in the way of that natural synchrony.
a relaxed horse is going to perform better. In fact, Ty Murray, do know Ty Murray, the rodeo? Rough stock cowboys? One year, he and Martin Black and I, we decided no spectators. What we're going to do is the three of us are just going to get together at Martin's ranch, Fly, and we're just going to talk about
Paula Curtis (30:23)
Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Peters (30:38)
horses, we're going to share information. There's going to be colt starting, but there's nobody around. So we just rode together. And Ty brought some films, rodeo films, and he said, Look at this.
Where do you think the horse understands that they need to be coming to a stop? When are they putting their rear in under them? It's microseconds because they know what's going to be asked of them before somebody's yanking those reins. They already know. But now look, that horse is gapping its mouth and it's wide open and it's feeling the pain. When does that horse know that it needs to bring up that allostatic
meet that allostatic demand and move out. Well look, it happens here before that spur ever touches that horse. So when we really slowed it down and looked, even when the horse knew, somehow we felt we had to create something that's sometimes pain inducing. And when somebody wins doing that, everybody sees the smiling person, but the horse with a
gapping mouth and the head way up above the withers and it gets to be normalized. But that's not normal. That's working against the nervous system. And how much better would your horse be able to perform using its brain if it didn't have to also worry that the hammer's gonna drop? I know the spurs are coming. I know I'm gonna get my mouth yanked. And I think
that if we start to give the horse a chance to learn and work with their nervous system, and we think in terms of a dialogue versus a monologue, if we think in terms of let's work together, because believe me, maybe it's not that way for everyone, but I've had horses get me out of trouble and understand what they needed to do far better than I did, and sort of getting out of the way and trusting in them.
And they'll know if you trust in them, then they'll meet that trust.
Paula Curtis (32:38)
Yeah, exactly. And you're covering so much as you're talking, but you look at that horse that's anticipating the spur or anticipating the correction, they're carrying around such a high cortisol load as they're going around. So now we're not creating a learning environment and we're actually creating an environment where there's pruning going on.
we are taking away that horse's internal locus of control. So now we're even creating more stress because they just have to, there's not really options for them. So now they're not a participant. And then more than likely that horse is the one that's getting drilled. So now they're not having the opportunity to stop, to take a break, to soak on it, to really think, to start
causing those neurons to come together, myelinate, speed up that pathway. in turn, we're losing all of these opportunities. Plus, if we're not stopping and taking a break, there's no consolidation of information.
Dr. Stephen Peters (33:46)
right so so so if i wanted to create problems for my horse i could do this i could say
this allostatic performance that you need to have, that's a limited resource. After a while, it's just too much wear and tear on the nervous system. So, if I didn't really care about that, I could, in essence, run you into the ground. I could actually put you under pressure so that even things you knew you didn't have access to.
What I mean by that is think if you were really afraid of taking a test, but you knew the information and then You look up and the clock's moving along and you just get so nervous you draw a blank You know the information but under too much stress You don't have access to it then if you left after you handed in your test that you weren't real proud of and you just Went for a walk and then all of a sudden well heck
The answer to one was this and the answer to two was that. So we often demand things of our horse's brain that we ourselves can't do. And then if we label those things, we either call the horse names or we look at it as horses trying to take advantage. They're trying to be dominant over me. And we take this as a fight.
And we come up with words like respect and disrespect. The horse doesn't have the brain capacity to figure out abstract terminology. So they what they do know is, wow, I, this person has trained me to come into them in some inadvertent message or or that person is sending some message that tells the horse, this is what you need to do.
But if we're clear with our horse, we can make it very comfortable for them. it doesn't have to be, get out of my space, whip, whip, whip. Actually, you can work with your horse because they want their safe spot. They don't know that their safe spot's not on you, especially if you've run them around the round pen a hundred times, and then the only time they get relief is when they walk into you, then you've inadvertently trained them.
to come in and then if somebody's sitting on the panel watching you and said, that horse has no respect, Now you're punishing a horse and they're at a loss because all these messages are so confusing. We think we know what we're doing. In fact, I would tell people, when your horse is confused, go back to yourself and ask, what am I doing?
where's my horse's nervous system state right now? One, are they, can they even listen to me? Are they available? can they be curious? If not, then we really need to make a change in the neurochemicals that are in their system to get them back to where we can start over and go slowly again. But when it's in that mix and we take things personally,
That's a recipe for disaster. And think about this. If you would love for your horse to be a super learner, if you would love for your horse's brain to take all these neural networks and start binding them together and do tremendous things.
All you have to do is listen to their nervous system. If you decide that you want to be in control, that you're going to use punishment, and by the way, there is no study on learning, any scientific study that shows punishment is an effective strategy for learning. So if that's in your toolbox, that's one of those things that you can take out, and there's better replacements.
Paula Curtis (37:16)
it's that idea of a conversation. So that you talked about earlier, when we're coming to our horses, we're entering into a conversation with them. And that conversation, like you're talking about in the paddock, when you're maybe feeding them or whatever, that conversation starts well before that point, it's the moment that you're in their environment. So where I live, I
the house is away from the barn quite a ways. But boy, boy, those horses, if you watch, you step out the back door on the porch, they know you're there. Even if they look like they're just kind of doing their thing or grazing, they know you're there. They're aware. If you watch their ears and their body, and they'll start to turn just ever so slightly to keep you in their vision, and they know exactly what's going on. So if you're going to the barn, let's say, and you're in your car,
you need to think about regulating your own nervous system and then planning and preparing for an actual conversation with your horse, where when you're stepping into their world, you're regulated and you can see how they are and who they are today, because we're all different. Let's face it, every day we show up a little differently because of how our chemistry is and what happened. And so then, you you're in that conversation and you're modifying your responses because it's a conversation.
So depending on what you're seeing is going to depend on what you're doing. we're watching and relating. And now we're creating, like what you talked about earlier, the idea of life experiences together where we're in this dialogue. We both have our own internal locus of control, but we're still watching each other and participating together like you would in any good relationship. And now through that, are
continuing to create positive and good life experiences with our horses that are allowing them to become the super learner you're talking about. And then when we, instead of creating like the push button robot horse, we're creating a horse that can problem solve and actively engage in whatever task we're doing. So now I would be comfortable putting somebody else on.
them because I've got confidence in the horse because we've done enough of the pendulation. We've gone through life experiences. We've set it up so that we know that they're learning and they're actively participating all the time. So when we put somebody else on them, they're safe.
because that horse is going to learn how to figure that person out. And it doesn't have to be a specific cue. It's the idea of the horse has learned to learn. So they're going to start to sift out what's going on with that person. And they're going to show up and be a pretty darn good horse for that person.
Dr. Stephen Peters (40:04)
If you considered that you were training a unique nervous system, and what you wanted to end up with was in a good place, so that you can you're laying groundwork, so that it's like a scaffolding and every foundation is built with good experiences, then that horse is going to be capable of all kinds of things. What we have to think about
is that we have a brain, we have a nervous system, we have good days, we have bad days. We're angry, we're sad. Those are all things we have. Now we know that we didn't used to in the past treat it that way. But now we know animals have emotions as well. So why would they be any different just because they can't tell you, they're sad or they're frustrated, but their neurochemistry sure can. And actually in the future,
We're going to have wearable technology and your horse will be able to tell on you. Well, this damn dude, sends all the messages to the amygdala. Of course I'm afraid. So, but, but basically if we consider it that way, that these are two nervous systems, we have to find out where we're meeting. If this is a dance, it's going to change daily. The horse may be sore one day. It may be windy one day.
You the horse may be tired and not have the same energy it had before. You may have gotten in a fight with your spouse. there could be all kinds of things, but...
we abstractly can think ahead and I would tell people just even find a marker before you reach your horse and every time you reach that marker just do an inventory. Where am I today? It wouldn't even hurt to just stop there and take a couple of deep breaths because what you bring to your horse is you're not just going into your horse's space. You're bringing an environment that your horse can read. Your movement
your voice, everything you do is part of the environment. And your horse is so attuned to that and so sensitive that can work for us. But if you're incongruent, and you're going to fake it, or you're not even going to pay attention to that, and you take that in, your horse has like a toggle switch. Are these messages going to move without impediment?
and just be red and give you what you want? Or is that toggle switch going to start moving a little bit towards self-preservation and defensive responses? And now is your horse a little hesitant? Is your horse bracing? Is their muscle tone changing as a result because of what you brought to the dance? So the more you're aware of your horse and yourself and know that that's ever changing and that's
Really the excitement of this is that every horse is different and you can challenge yourself in this interaction. And once that horse is able to show up without impediment and you work with the nervous system, you will surprise yourself. When did he become such a great learner? When did my horse, my horse meets me at the gate and is looking for what we can do?
What we can do next is because we nurtured that nervous system. And people might say, well, that's wimpy, know, to nurture they just need to get their job done. Science has showed us we all need nurturing. We all need a connection. They're social animals. That's why they're out there and
You have three horses and they're out on five acres and they're grazing. Two of those horses are probably sharing the same blade of grass because it's a social connection. It's not just eating. And so if you want to be part of that social network, and it's in you too, if you allow it to be, because you can tell me, I don't need anyone, but what research shows us is
Yeah, we do. Even people who are hermits and stay locked away don't live as long as people who are married or interact in communities. so if you just realize we're all living creatures, it's always ever changing. If you don't like that, you can go ride horses on the carousel or put a quarter in front of the one in front of the drugstore, because those aren't living beings. But
That's what real ethical horsemanship's all about. And it behooves the welfare of both you and your horse. Don't you want a healthy horse when they're 25 instead of one that's been so stressed? And people ask me, can horses develop dementia? Yes, they can. Yes, they can, depending on the environmental factors that we've put in.
If indeed You want to grow a garden you have to water it you have to fertilize it you have to nurture it and you get great plants If you want to grow great dendrites, how do you do it by working with the nervous system?
Paula Curtis (44:56)
and you talk about the five domains. And I'd love for you to touch on those because, you put horses in situations and we get things like
cribbing or stall weaving or ear pinning when others go past their stalls. And so this is showing us their nervous system state, the state of their brain. And I would be very curious to learn more about the five domains and how they play a role in our horses' lives and in their brains.
Dr. Stephen Peters (45:23)
Well, everyone knows about those things. I think we call them the five F's before, or the three F's, forging friendship, etc. But that model was lacking in that it was good for survival, but wasn't good for necessarily optimum health. And so, scientist Dr. David Miller, also Andrew McLean,
whose Dr. McLean has done tons of research. He's also the CEO of Equitation Science International. He weighed in on this. They looked at all the research and what they did is not putting each domain in a silo, but showing how they all interact. And in the middle, the most important component was mental health. So that's not too different than us.
What were some of those factors in the five domain? Well, health. You have to be healthy. You have to have clean water. have to have, be sheltered from the elements.
Around health and grazing and being able to forage is also one of the domains. ideally that's done in a pasture setting because some of the overlap there is in interaction, species interaction. So horses are social animals. No horses survive well. They can survive, survive well in isolation.
Neither can we. Stick us in solitary confinement. We've already learned that with Romanian orphans, cetera, that don't have that social contact, what happens? Tremendous cognitive and emotional problems. So one of the domains is understanding they're social animals and they need to interact.
We'll find out more about grazing and diet because I talked about dementia, but metabolic syndrome is one of the things that can create a dementia because it creates an insulin resistance and that can impact the brain. You're going to hear more in the future about something called the gut biome or the gut brain axis. So we're learning that it's a system.
So if you ignore one of the elements, you're actually taking away an awful lot that needs to be in place for the horse's welfare. Mental health, one of the keys is what we've talked about all along here is some sense of agency. But the horse has choices in life. It makes their life worthwhile. So I'd encourage people to look for the five domains, look it up and
Because what that will do is give you a sense of all the components that need to play a role in our horse's well-being. And why should we care about that? We want a healthy horse. We want a horse that can, even if you selfishly only thought, only want good performance, I want to win a bunch of ribbons. Your horse is less of a performer if we're not attending to their
overall welfare and even more so
You could say, I'm not all that concerned about that. I'll just go get another horse. You can't get away with what you used to get away with. you can't abuse a horse and get away with it like you used to. And in your sport, look at the racetracks. They're closing down, because we've had deaths. Some Olympic sports are being taken out altogether. So if we want to compete, then we're going to have to treat our athletic
partner with their welfare in mind. So I would ask people to just go look at the five domains. They're designed not so much for just to meet basic survival needs, but to help your horse to thrive. it's not just somebody sat down said, this would be nice, and this would be nice. These are all evidence-based. So there's tons of research to support each of those pillars within the five
domain so you can hang your hand on that information.
Paula Curtis (49:20)
that's great. think that's such an important piece. And I think our community is very tuned into that. But I think it can be difficult. And I had a discussion with Martin Black recently. And he said you and him talked about how to create a scenario where we're starting to simulate a bit more of that natural environment that our horses are in.
where they're outside and they're grazing and they're with their friends and they can see far and have some engagement with their environment. They're not in a box stall. And they're even in a small sort of management, I guess, scenario where you don't have a lot of acreage.
How can we work that? And we've seen track systems come into play and where you're putting water on one end, food on the other, and they've got to go through this track in order to access them. These sorts of things make such a difference then in our horse's nervous system state, which is in turn gonna make it easier for them and for us, to get things done when we come together and to have some fun together because if they're stressed,
and you're coming in there expecting to do something, you your best bet might be to just take them out for a walk and let them graze because that's probably gonna be the most you're gonna get done that day, which is actually going to be a very lot for that horse that's been stuck in a stall.
Dr. Stephen Peters (50:47)
It may sound, wow, I have never even thought of that. But for all of us, the closer you can get to the animals natural habitat, the healthier they are. Zoos became enlightened. they don't take herd animals and take the antelope and put them in a box stall. Right? They're allowed to move together. People might say, well, I don't want my horse to get hurt. So I don't want him out with those other horses. Well, let's look at the research.
What they find is that there are neurochemical changes that take place in your horse when they're isolated, they're highly stressed. So, I would argue that, losing a little hide might be a better payoff than, or might be a better cost than the psychological and emotional piece that is, that they have to pay.
when we put them in the box stall and we isolate them. What scientists have also found, and here's the paradox, the injury rates are higher for horses that are in box stalls than for those who are out moving around with other horses. So you wouldn't take an athlete and stick them in a broom closet and just pull them out every once in a while to use them.
If you took lab rats and you let them interact with other rats, that might be the standard setup. Then let's say you took out things like mazes and you took out a treadmill, but you put them in there with another rat, right? They're stressed, but not as bad as it could be because there's another rat in there that they can touch and interact with. If you put them in total isolation, those brains are shrunken.
They're small. There's not any dendrites. And what in laboratory conditions we would call that type of arrangement, a sensory deprivation situation, a sensory deprivation box. So if we're saying that the horse is one of the most sensitive horses when it comes to their sensory system, think about putting that animal in a sensory deprivation box.
In the future, I don't think we'll be able to do that. I think with pasture paradise, think with trail systems, I think with more enlightened approaches. mean, zoos found out animals would then mate again, they would start to thrive, they were in natural habitats. Sometimes the humans had to come over in a monorail and look down on the animals down below without boxing them up. The more confined
the more stressful. So a lot of behaviors that people say, well, I see this that must be the dominant horse. there's a lot of fighting going on. Oftentimes, it's because we've confined, and then we've, we've taken, not everybody has equal access to food and water, etc. But if given those types of environments,
And if we're creative enough, we can set it up where watch how a lot of those behaviors that we think are natural behaviors are actually responses to an abnormal situation. And that's exactly what cribbing is. We don't have time to go into all and I've looked at all the meta analysis, I've done statistical analysis on every study I can find on cribbing, we truly understand it.
as a stress relieving behavior that becomes addictive. know, so it's, it's actually they used to say it's a stereotypy. It's a repetitive behavior with no purpose. What we know now is cortisol levels balance out when the horse is doing it. They found a means to, to manage their stress. Unfortunately, it's so successful, it becomes addictive. And now we can't get rid of it.
Paula Curtis (54:25)
interesting. I think everybody in the horse world has probably run across a horse or knows of somebody that's had a horse that has that behavior. yeah, hopefully we
Dr. Stephen Peters (54:35)
They
take away movement. They weave. So we interrupt natural behaviors and then we end up with something that we don't like. But the horses have actually done a wonderful job of managing their own stress, being able to simulate behaviors that were taken away from them.
Paula Curtis (54:53)
Right. Yeah, the nervous system's a beautiful thing. I mean, it can make of situations that are terrible and learn how to navigate them, but it might not be in the way that is advantageous to the horse. I mean, it is because you're regulating cortisol and you're creating, so you're actually down-regulating your stress response, but now you're putting in patterns and behaviors that are
not helpful in the long term.
Dr. Stephen Peters (55:20)
And then once it becomes an addiction, it's incredibly hard to break because it's highly dopamine reinforcing and it's like crack cocaine at that point in time. You put them out in the pasture, they'll start to chew on anything wood that they can find. It's not about food. You can give them sugary grain and they'll eat a little bit and go right back to cribbing.
The key is not to get that started in the first place.
Horsebrain Science is a reference. It's designed to be almost a textbook. Then, because it's that type of book, in October I have coming out Horsebrain Science Simplified.
So that's designed for those that really are hearing about the neuroscience, want to get involved, but are just intimidated by the deep science. So simplified, I'm hoping 4-H kids read that. I'm hoping that that's appealing to people. And then the book that we talked about, A Horse's Life, I have the poster back here that I wrote with.
with Mark and Chrissy, 19 horses, all case studies, and we take you through each individual horse so that you can get a look through a different lens. But they're compelling stories anyway about the interaction with horses. And that's going to be out in just a few weeks. Actually, May 3rd, that's released. you got it. Exciting. Yay.
Paula Curtis (56:49)
Yeah, I got it really copy. Thank you for that. I got it a couple days ago and I was like, I better get through this before the interview, but I didn't.
Dr. Stephen Peters (56:56)
You
know, I've truly enjoyed talking to you here this afternoon and I'm hoping that it appears that this message is starting to resonate, starting to ripple. And I know because I used to talk about things 15 years ago and people ask questions like, well, how about those horses just love to fight, that just really like to give it to you? I don't get those kinds of questions so much.
anymore and I know that the world is changing and the we'll soon have wearable technology. The horse will have a voice not somebody's interpretation but the horse actually communicating to us what's going on in their nervous system and we can even improve this dialogue. So I think for the horse we're heading in good directions and I have to tell you I appreciate
all you've done with Art of the Horseman and all the educational opportunities that you've brought out. And in talking to you, I think our missions are really overlapping, pretty similar.
Paula Curtis (58:01)
Yeah, yeah, I think so too. It's about increasing the understanding and then the horse gets better because of it. So, well, thank you so much for your kind words and I sure appreciate all the work that you're doing here in the horse industry and really bringing the lens of science into it. So we actually know what's going on underneath the hide in the hair and can really dial it in and how exciting about the wearable technology. So thank you so much, Steve. I sure appreciate.
you being here today and we're all looking forward to the book coming out.
Dr. Stephen Peters (58:32)
And if you don't believe me, go ask your horse.
Paula Curtis (58:34)
Yeah, there you go.
