Things I Know I Know

In Seabiscuit, the book, it's clear that Tom Smith the trainer is wondrous with horses because he pays attention, observes, tries things and learns from them. He's not bound by conventional training methods or even notions of how things 'ought' to be (as in, that horse ought to submit to me, it has to know who's boss). Tom Smith's approach was to look at the horse and figure out what was needed, not what would make him look good or how he could win. In Seabiscuit, the movie, the training was all about mystical Tom Smith and his mystical way with horses.

My theory is that the real work Tom Smith did doesn't play on television and in the movies because a great many people don't believe that this kind of approach is possible. They don't believe it can be done. The only explanation they have is magic. And it's okay in some way to concede that it's magic, to say that this man has a special rapport with animals that the rest of us can never understand because figuring that--it's this man, he's special--doesn't at all change the dominance, punishment-driven, I'm-the-boss approach to human-animal and even human-human relations that is culturally ingrained in us in ways we can't even see.

Books can show us something more complex because books have more time and books are occasionally written by the people who know how it really works or by women, some of whom don't seem to have as difficult a time believing that this kind of non-punishment, non-dominance training is real.

Here's how the book, Seabiscuit, describes Tom Smith and his style:

The most difficult quirk was Seabiscuit's behavior in the starting gate. Within its metal confines he raised holy hell, throwing himself around, exhausting the assistant starters, and reminding everyone of Hard Tack. To stop the colt's gate rages, Smith used a daring method. He led him out to the gate each morning, walked him inside it, and asked him to halt. Risking life and limb, Smith positioned himself directly in front of the horse, facing him. When Seabiscuit began banging around to get out, Smith held his ground, raised his hand, and tapped the horse firmly on the chest and shoulders until he stood still. When the horse stopped, so did Smith. When the horse moved, Smith tapped him again. Morning after morning, he was out at the gate with the horse, repeating the lesson. "You got to go at a horse slowly teaching him most anything," Smith explained later. "Easy, firm repetition does it." The effect was mesmerizing. The horse began to relax in the gate. "He caught on quick enough," said Smith. "He's wise as an old owl." Eventually, Smith was able to leave Seabiscuit standing in there for as long as ten minutes without the horse turning a hair.

This is shaping behavior, pure and simple. It involves knowing what you want at the end and helping the horse gradually get a picture of what that end is, working it in pieces that finally come together. It's not about force or dominance or punishment, though it is about sticking to goals and working within a frame that accommodates what you're trying to achieve and about 'listening' to the horse and learning to communicate.

It's mystical in the sense of not-scientific, but it's not mysterious or unknowable and it particularly and importantly is not because Tom Smith is unique in some way that precludes anyone else from ever achieving what he did. Seabiscuit, the horse, was nearly driven into failed obscurity by force/punishment training. He was the luckiest horse alive, the day Tom Smith became his trainer.