Deeper Understanding Part 3

The following is straight from my journal in response to the question, "What if I viewed that certain ears back expression to mean, no not that way, you need to do it different, as a form of communication that is not about bossiness or dominance? What would it look like then?"

To take yesterday as an example -- I would have walked away and instead of thinking he was being dominant or ornery, I would have thought about: why is this a no? Why not this way today? How can I do it different?

I definitely would have known that it had to do with the new horses but I would have come up with a different solution and I wouldn't have felt bad in the process or later.

As I did things yesterday, I just kept trying to do the same thing and waiting for him to change. That really isn't any different from how I used to do things except it is lower key and calmer now.

So if I would have asked myself those three questions the first time I walked away, I probably would have tried facing Gunny in a different direction so he was not looking at the new horse. Also, if I was not thinking that Gunny was behaving dominantly as I was moving him around and I noticed he could chew when facing away from the new horse, I would have come to a different conclusion than that he was trying to hide his chewing from the other horse because he didn't want the other horse to see him being submissive to me. It would have pointed out the direction thing more clearly.

And as I started to move around and got "that expression" I could have thought -- oh, this isn't the right way to gain cooperation, he is unwilling to do this right now, why?

At the time I knew I was moving into dominance with my behavior but I thought I needed to because of the conclusions I had come to because I thought he was trying to be dominant over me.

I could even look at the very slow, very obvious invasion of my space and then the repeated chews and the way that he responded when I back him up as an attempt to show me -- "see, if I invade your space and you ask me to back up I will do it with a nice expression and I can chew right away because I am not trying to boss you, I am trying to tell you something."