I love this photo of Mercedes and me. It was the first clicker training session we filmed. I can see Mercedes’ body language, she was not sure what was going on and I was naively confident it would all go well.
It was a bright new clicker training world back then.
I’m very lightly touching her shoulder to reassure her, but we are training with food and she’s pretty keen to figure out how to get the food, so it seems like she doesn’t mind, but I don’t know and I don’t assume. Even back then I was very generous with the food and she always enjoyed her clicker training.
People make jokes about mares all the time, but I don’t ‘mare shame’. I don’t, as I can empathise with her, because we have both had similar experiences. Our bodily autonomy disrespected, our boundaries crossed and ignored, our choice and our power taken away, our personal dignity trampled. We’ve been touched in ways we didn’t like, made to do things we didn’t want to do and our protests were ignored, sometimes even punished, we often had no agency at all.
Worse, people have shamed us for protesting, for expressing when we didn’t want something done to us, we didn’t want to do something, we didn’t want to be touched, when we felt violated, when we *were* violated.
Because of this, I am very much triggered and my skin crawls when I hear people talking about “consent training”. I don’t want to be trained to give consent and I can’t imagine Mercedes does either. Basically, that is the definition of grooming and I don’t want to do that to anyone. By trying to “train consent”, it feels to me that people are actually promoting the idea that consent is something we teach or make happen and that’s not consent imo.
If I need an injection that will improve my health or prevent illness, I can look at the pros and cons and make a decision, Mercedes can’t. That means I don’t train her “consent”, because no way is she going to agree to having a needle. But I can train and condition in a way that it is the most positive and least aversive experience possible for her. I can watch her body language extremely closely and adjust my training and conditioning appropriately to make it the best experience possible for her. I don’t need her “permission” to do things to her that benefit her wellbeing, as a good caretaker and trainer. Things that involve her health are not optional, but I do prepare her in a way that it’s as pleasant and pleasurable as it can be and it can be surprisingly pleasurable for her sometimes.
We can clicker train behaviours and we can condition emotional responses. These are not conscious decisions they make, based on an animal’s personal beliefs, these are ways they interact with their environment, an environment *we* create.
I like to use my understanding of learning and behaviour, to describe what I do.
I avoid making up stories or constructs about the training and conditioning I do.
I avoid trying to mind read or assume horses are like people in how we make decisions.