25 Ways to Make Your Horse Happy: Essential Skills and Unique Tools or Making Training and Performance Fair and Fun

Concrete steps toward forging a strong partnership and clear stream of communication with your horse.

True bonding is the key to happiness, in both human and horse. We are both social creatures who are instinctually drawn toward getting involved with each other, and finding ways to not only create deep trust in another (your horse) but also experiencing it (yourself), creates this kind of bond. In these pages, Anne Krüger-Degener, founder of a systematic approach to communication called HarmoniLogie(R), provides a practical guide to how you can build or repair these bonds. Part of this formula is a solid foundation of understanding built from a sense of empathy, benevolence, and compassion. The other part is a clear and unambiguous exchange of information, and this requires more than just love for your horse. It needs a training system ensures a smooth exchange of information between you.

Krüger-Degener knows that horses and humans often "talk past each other." She helps readers learn to observe horses like a biologist, "listening" with all their senses, and reading not only what is there, but also what is not there. When in doubt of what a horse may be telling us, she guides us toward slower, friendlier, quieter questions, ensuring that we prioritize compromise over dominance in the relationship.

Inspirational case studies of students and horses are shared as readers are taught how to:

• Analyze spatial changes when working with horses.


• Work with activation and defense zones.


• Recognize geometric patterns in communication.


• Resist the urge to speak "gibberish" to horses.


• Translate the bonds built on the ground to the work you do under saddle.


• Build intervals into training that accommodates natural performance curves.


• And much more.

With sensible advice that still puts the horse first, above all, Krüger-Degener's fundamental keys to making your horse happy are integral pieces to modern-day training and competing, ensuring progress not only as performers, whatever your sport, but as partners in life.