I was taking a riding lesson once and the horse kept wanting to stop in this one spot and look at something in the bushes. The instructor kept telling me to make her pay attention to me. 🤔
I’ve heard this a LOT. From the extreme idea that your horse should follow you blindly because YOU are the leader and they shouldn’t be worrying about anything that you’re not worried about, to the farfetched idea that the horse is just pretending something is out there to get out of work.
As a prey animal, it’s quite normal for a horse to be vigilant and focused on their environment. Their lives and the lives of their entire herd may depend on it. There’s no one herd leader in a herd of horses that is telling the other horses what they should or should not run from. This would not be a very successful strategy for survival.
It’s a bit ironic that the more control people try to exert over their animals, the less control they actually have. If you really want your equid to pay more attention to you, trust is the key, and you can’t force your equid to trust you by forcing them to pay attention to you.
Instead, the next time your equid stops to look at something off in the distance, stop and look too. Try to see what they’re seeing. Be interested in what they’re interested in. When they’re ready and confident that the potential threat has passed, they’ll let you know and you can continue what you were doing, with a few more threads of trust binding the two of you together.