The Rarey technique is intended to be used on horses that have become fearful and vicious because of abusive handling or other traumatic events that the horse associates with humans. In the beginning, a wild or feral horse may be wary of human beings. But there is no great prejudice against humans, and horses can very quickly learn that humans can be welcome associates of theirs. On the other hand, if a human repeatedly attacks a horse for no good reason, then the horse can begin to treat humans as enemies. Horses are not predators, but they are well adapted to protecting themselves with both front and rear hooves, and with their teeth. In addition to that, horses that reject their riders can rear up on their hind legs. The fortunate rider can retain his or her seat, or can fall relatively harmlessly to the ground. The unfortunate rider can be seriously injured or killed if, after rearing, the horse falls over backwards and lands on the rider. Such a horse is no longer a safe companion for human beings, and unless it can be rehabilitated somehow it may end up being destroyed.
It is very difficult to modify the behavior of animals that have learned that their well being depends on performing preventative measures. If a rat (or other laboratory animal) is placed in a cage constructed in such a way that it can be shocked no matter where it stands, and if a shock is delivered on a timed basis unless the animal presses a lever before the shock is scheduled to be delivered, then the rat will very readily learn to press the lever. It will treat the regular manipulation of the lever as a matter of life and death. It will be so faithful in its endeavors to press the lever, in fact, that the shock mechanism can be disconnected without any change occurring in the rat’s behavior for a very long time. The reason is that the rat never dares to test what might happen should the lever not get pressed.
For the abused horse, the lesson it has learned is that it must protect itself against human beings because the human beings it has had to deal with in the past have caused it terror and pain. So, just as the rat protects itself by continually pressing the lever, the horse continues in its efforts to drive human beings off and thwart their hurtful behavior. It will not permit itself to learn what might happen if it did nothing to drive humans away. To refrain from thwarting human beings means, to the abused horse, giving humans the opportunity to hurt or even to kill it.
What Rarey did was the behavioral equivalent of preventing the rat from pushing the lever so that the rat could discover that it no longer mattered whether it pushed the lever or not since a shock was no longer being delivered. For the horse that means to be put in a situation in which it is absolutely unable to do anything to thwart human contact so that it can learn that even though it is totally unable to protect itself it is not hurt in any way whatsoever.
Rarey's method was to gently but firmly cause the traumatized horse to lie down on a comfortably soft surface. Once the horse was lying on its side, Rarey could use his weight, concentrated at a strategic point, to keep the horse from rising. While the horse was thus unable to protect itself, Rarey showed it that it was still entirely safe with him by touching and stroking it on all parts of its body. The result was that the horse learned that it could be entirely safe in Rarey’s company, and from that beginning it was relatively easy to demonstrate to the horse that it did not need to protect itself from most other humans.
Rarey's method is susceptible to being misunderstood because it would superficially appear to be a demonstration of how a human can dominate a horse, when in fact the demonstration is that regardless of any capacity to do harm the human is in fact making no such attempt. Some may wonder whether this lesson is a good one for the horse to learn, since the abusive human may return. However, horses are known to have extremely good memories, and would most likely remember a hurtful human being as well as remember the most effective ways it had found to fight back against that abusive individual.;
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