The AIDS
“Riding your horse should be a conversation that nobody else can see.”
Your aids are the collection of tools that you use to communicate with your horse. You use your body to speak directly to different parts of the horse’s body. Your aids include hands, legs, seat, weight, energy, and voice. (fig.1).
(fig.1). – Your aids include hands, legs, seat, weight, energy, and voice.
At its simplest, the application of an aid is termed a cue. For example, when you apply a leg aid directly to the side of the horse,
you can create a cue the horse understands to mean move forward. In this scenario, cues are very black-and-white and create a single reliable, specific response from the horse. But in truth, the application of aids is infinitely more subtle and complex than this. Here’s why: Aids actually say more than a cue. A cue is a single action with a single response, but your aids are “sentences” with inflection and emotion. Initially, for both horse and rider, when the rider applies pressure with the leg and the horse moves off the leg, the aid was a cue to move. But eventually the same aid is refined, and a simple flexing of the rider’s leg speaks to the horse with many different meanings, depending on the position of the leg, the balance of the rider, and the intention in the rider’s seat. Less pressure is applied, making the aid more subtle but also more complex, because there is an infinite number of things the rider can be saying with that same leg.
In this post, we will discuss aids as a bridge in the language barrier between horse and rider (fig.2).
(fig.2.) – In a perfect world, your skeleton mirrors and guides the horse’s skeleton. Your aids speak directly to the horse’s body in a simple-to-understand, if not simple-to-achieve, universal language.
Building an effective relationship between horse and rider is much like two people with no common language learning how to communicate through a new, shared language. While people are primarily creatures of the spoken language, the horse is a creature almost entirely of the unspoken language of body signals. Both horse and rider must learn and adapt to a common means of communication for the conversation to be more than cues and conditioned responses.
For many people, the spoken language is a difficult thing to forego. We love to talk to our horses, and we believe the horses like to hear us speaking to them. Horses are not completely without an oral language. The deep-throated nicker between a mare and her newborn foal
or the far-reaching scream of a stallion are oral communications that ring out universally in the evolutionary history of the horse. Horses will often greet their owners with nickers and whinnies like the calls they would use between herd mates. A horse can learn to recognize the voice of his owner and respond accordingly. But, the prevailing communication observed in a herd setting is through body language, and the inference of motive behind simple gestures that are shaded in meaning by the social standing within the herd.
