Round Pen for People!

complimentary, but an accurate description, given my experience. Habits, or established ways of thinking, are stubborn things; they are not simply unraveled with a little new contradictory information. It seems almost any new and radical idea can be accepted, when the so-called "slate" is clean. Whereas, unbelievably thorough support for a new idea has to be provided if another, contradictory concept, has already been accepted. Even when the original idea is clearly not working. God help us if the idea is instinctual.

        Without the round pen, a horse will not allow us to try a single threatening new idea once his instinctual fears have been reached. Yet, I think the round pen is just like the repetitive day Bill Murray faced as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. There is no running away until the behaviors or thinking needing to change are faced and unlearned. I think he relived the same day a million times until he (Bill Murray) got the point and stopped being such a self-absorbed bore. I love that movie.

        I believe the round pen gives the horse the perception of flight (the horse just runs round and round in circles thinking it's getting away(?)) while the trainer stands somewhere near the center of the ring just 10-20 feet away. As an alternative, try to outrun a horse, once its flight instincts kick in. Or better yet, grab a rope and try to keep him from running off. Worse yet, if he does run off while you were trying in vain to hold on to him with a rope, you've now taught the beast a new trick to offer you, when you're introducing him to yet another new thing later - to run away when the pressure builds. Now this new and undesirable behavior will need to be undone. I don't know how significant training can be done without the round pen.

        It is a great tool, but you still have to know where you're going. You have to put pressure on the horse, but not too much. If it tries to injure either you or itself in an effort to escape, you've applied too much pressure. In "Groundhog Day" Bill Murray learned he could not kill or embarrass himself to death. This is not true about the round pen. The 1100 lb. horse still has a few tricks up his hock ... like running you over or stomping you to death. It's the fight part of "fight or flight." Trainers with long successful careers do not train at excessive levels of "pressure" with a horse.

        In most other cases however, Bill Murray's round pen operates the same way as the horse round pen. You have to allow the critter and person to try their non-working idea in a million different ways until they eventually surrender it. Fortunately, in the case of the horse, it's just one idea: the trainer is the leader. Once they get tired of running, they will generally surrender to the trainer's leadership. At this point, they're ready to learn something new. For people, it's a little more complicated, but the process is the same.

        Maybe horses are in fact getting cues from the herd's leadership, as Kathleen described in her essay. The round pen merely creates the conditions for a successful human-horse leadership battle that cannot be won at a physical level with a horse out in the open. This is not true for people. I think people build intellectual "frameworks" around their ideas. In other words, one idea builds upon another. When you ask a person to give up on one idea, you are in fact asking them to forfeit the potential truth of all the ideas that may have followed. This is scary and you no doubt need a million- iterations of the days of "Groundhog Day" to unravel it all. But those "Groundhog days" are fictional. The problem of unlearning for people is not. So where's that people round pen?