Experiential Learning with Horses- what is it?

Chances are, like most of us, you are new to the world of Equine Assisted Learning (EAL). Perhaps you are looking to find out what EAL actually is and how it is that horses can help us learn. Some of you may already be horse owners, or maybe you are among those who admire horses from afar, or maybe you are even afraid of horses. In any case, horses have a lot of things they can teach you and here’s how.

Horses are prey animals that live in a herd and communicate through nonverbal body language. Because of these inherent traits, horses are naturally reticent to trust humans (since we are natural apex predators), they communicate through subtle cues that can be learned, and they are highly social animals, desperately in need of a herd group – be it horse, human, goat or otherwise. To a horse, to live alone is to die. Therefore horses are motivated to find comfort within a herd … and you can become that herd, if even for an hour!

When you work with a horse on the ground, you will be challenged to be the kind of human a horse could trust. You will have to earn their trust. You will also learn to be more sensitive to body language – your own and your horse’s. You will become more aware of yourself and your own emotional congruency, which is a big word that simply means that your outsides match your insides. Horses are very nervous around incongruent behavior.

Because horses are finely tuned to their environment in order to survive, they have amazing ways of reflecting back to us who we are. For example, with a nervous person, a horse may appear nervous. To the bossy or aggressive person, a horse may shy away. To a grumpy person a horse may appear grumpy. For this reason many people have remarked that “horses hold a mirror to who we are”. And because of this, horses may quietly and intuitively teach us what we need to work on and reveal areas where personal growth is needed. And that is what we mean by Equine Assisted Learning!