20/10/2025
🐴 🛠️ Favourite coping Tools & The Shelf analogy 🧰
I often refer to the “shelf” analogy when discussing the tendency of the resurfacing of behaviors that are associated with pain, distress or discomfort.
🐎 Most behaviors that are considered undesirable, reactive responses from our horses, can be understood a little more from our human perspective, like something we choose to use, like a tool - perhaps a hammer, because… perhaps we can’t open the jam jar so we grab a hammer and smash the jar open.
Yummm …🍓🫙💥🔨 + 🍞=🤤✅
We may redirect the behaviors to result in different reponses from our horses, which in turn will have the horse metaphorically “choosing a different way to open the jar”, even with a different grippy cloth … but it will take time before using a different tool is the first considered best option because that hammer is still just in the other hand, and the grippy cloth is in the drawer. It takes retrieval of the new memory that the cloth is in the draw, and needs to be ‘retreived’ first to be used.
The hammer has also been the most practised successful tool. So if hammer shaped, why not hammer jar?
After a while. The hammer may actually get put on the bench….as the needed skill to use both hands to use the grippy cloth is retrieved.
After a while the hammer may end up getting in the way of eating jam, ( bread 🍞 y’know ) and get metaphorically put on a shelf, put of the way.
Also, out of immediate sight while eating jam, out of reach, but still just there ready to be used - without having to open a drawer.
One day, the hypothetical “horse” might be desperately trying to open a door to go outside. The door is tight, and outside there is ALL the other horses running around because the wind has picked up, and the neighbors lot ip a bonfire 🔥😱 🐎
This horse feel the urgency to OPEN the door asap so it can run outside to be with the others (to safety), then suddenly it can see the hammer, so it grabs the hammer off the shelf and *BANG* hammers the door open. Of course the door has busted off its hinges. Ooooops. Not ideal. We’ve seen the hammer used before! 🤦🏽♀️
So, on reflection…l wasn’t about the jam jar anymore, but about the previously used tool that will still, for some time, and often forever remain an “easy acsess tool” or response for the horse despite it not being used for a very long time.
Horses usually only express conflict behaviors initially from their biological “tool kit” of options such as
1. Running
2. Spooking
3. Bucking
4. Rearing
5. Kicking
6. Biting …. Etc you get the point.
However - not all behaviors where habits are formed are overt conflict behaviors. Some can be expressed in response timing, response pressure, straightness and travel of line, particularly for ridden, or non ridden pleasure, sport or performance horses.
🧠 This snippet of a lecture presented by Dr. Cathrynne Henshall, Charles Sturt University, Australia at the 2025 International Society for Equitation science Conference, “💡Habits Are Hard to Break (Even for Horses)” talks about the nitty gritty behavioral science behind habits, learning, their formation & their tendency to not extinct entirely.
🦄 Obviously, these horses are imaginary horses - because horses don’t have hands capable of grasping hammers or jars 😆
**Please don’t feed your horses jam, or leave them unsupervised with tools, they might end up knocking all the walls down and making it an open plan style! 😮😂
