Amanda Wilson: A Journey of Transformation

Uh, they develop associations, but they can't just randomly go through their brain and reflect on what happened six days ago and think about what a lovely day it was, you know? So we've got a little bit of different programming, because with humans we've got such a large prefrontal cortex.

Would you say that horses store their memories oftentimes in their body more so because of the smaller, you know, prefrontal cortex not being what it is in a human?

I think, I think they store ...

It, it, it can be a mixture of body and brain.

I think, uh, your neural pathways, I'm not too sure how many neural pathways horses have, but humans have something like 86 million, and that stores a lot of information and a lot of emotion.

There's scientific proof now that something called a glial cell, which attaches to your neurons, is capable of storing emotion, which is just chemicals.

And I think that's very similar for the horse, regardless of whether it's, where it's stored in what particular part of the brain.

I also think our body remembers.

There's some amazing books, um, one, uh, that I read as part of my study, uh, called The Body Keeps the Score, and those sort of books I find fascinating.

I think it's very much the case for horses.

When I talk about trauma, uh, it's just unprocessed stress, and we've got three causes of stress in our lives.

We've got emotional stresses, which is what I'm talking about in terms of triggering and traumatic past experiences.

We've got physical stress, which is pain-related issues in horses or sort of discomfort in some form or another.

And we've also got chemical stress, which is toxicity, too much of something, deficiency, not enough of something, and grass issues and whatnot.

So when we're dealing with horses, not only are we dealing with the training aspect of figuring out if they've got emotional triggers to work through, which a lot of horses do if they've had confusing training or bad experiences, but we're also dealing with a huge array of physical issues they can have and chemical issues.

Very interesting.

What do you think is one of the most overlooked aspects that people have in the care of their horse and just everyday sort of interactions that can cause stress for the horse, and therefore that stress will show up in a variety of ways during their training?

Probably what I find, there's so many things.

Probably one of the main things that I find is there isn't a clear right and wrong answer that we give the horses.

A lot of people are very quiet when they work with horses.

The horse does the right thing, they may get a tiny release of pressure, or they might get a tiny little pat.

As they do the wrong thing, they increase the pressure.

I look at it like I'm playing charades with the horse, and every movement I make means something to them depending on my body language.

And I liken it to the metaphor of, like, if I was abducted by a French person and they were trying to make me perform an obstacle course, and they didn't speak the whole way through, and they didn't tell me when I was going the right way, and they weren't making it very clear except for smacking me sometimes when I went the wrong way, I would get very confused and start to panic because I, I don't have a clear sort of guideline on, on where to go and what to do.

So with me, um, I'm very huge on vocal praise.