WARNING - RED HERRING ALERT!
Warning Red Herring Alert
When you initially think something is important but later find out it is not relevant at all, this can be described as a "red herring."
A red herring is a term often used to denote something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.
It originates from a technique used in training dogs for hunting, where a fish (typically a smoked herring, which is red in color) was used to distract the dogs from the scent they were meant to follow.
In a broader context, it refers to any piece of information or a topic that seems significant at first but ultimately has no relevance to the issue at hand. This term is commonly used in discussions, debates, and narratives where an apparently significant point or argument is later revealed to be unrelated or unimportant to the overall subject.
This image contains screenshots of a video I made 9 years ago. I was obsessed with watching the facial expression of horses. I was sure it was connected to getting horses relaxed.
In this video, I had paused at the start, middle, and end of a training session and recorded his face watching the stress rise and fall and change.
This was a very worried horse, and I was certain that if I could see the worry, I could fix the worry.
Do you want to know what fixed this horse? NOT DOING THIS!
This was a total and absolute red herring.
In fact, I rate it as even worse than a red herring as it did more harm than good.
At that time, I wrote a lot of articles on stress gestures and behaviour, and I wish I could take them all back because I feel like I helped start a conversation in the horse world that has got so many people stuck down a rabbit hole, paralysed because they are waiting for something that doesn't need to happen.
It's like meeting someone at a cafe, introducing yourself, and then staring at them until they scratch their heads before you say any more.
I realise that doing this was not having a conversation with the horse, and a conversation is what I needed to establish to get the horse locked onto me and following where I guided it.
The more conscious I was of what I was doing and where I was going, the more a horse followed along.
You have to give a horse something to follow; that is where your mind must be, not staring, analysing, and judging what I was seeing and reacting to it.
So, to all those people out there obsessing over your horse's nostril heights, triangulated eyes, tight chins, quivering lips... I know it seems relevant, but it's not. Get proactive about improving the quality of your conversation so the horse can build trust following you, and all these things will improve because of that.
