Teaching Feel: when a person learns to drive a car, the car teaches the driver by its predictable, exact responses. Hit the brakes and the car slows down to a speed exactly proportional to the pressure applied to the pedal. Same goes for the accelerator and the steering wheel. Even though every car is different and requires a quick learning curve, it is likely to always respond in the same way. This constitutes a simple, immediate reward and punishment system: the right action gets the right result (reward) and the wrong action gets the wrong result (punishment), and both of them are immediately recorded in our hippocampus and our prefrontal cortex. They are replayed thousands of times during sleep, ensuring they are engraved forever by forming new synapses. The driver only needs to cease the wrong action for the reward to occur and the car does not get offended or worrying about driving mistakes. Bar extreme situations at high speed or on snow, the car does not make things worse because it is equipped with many self-correcting mechanisms. In 20 to 50 lessons, most people are able to get on the road semi-safely.
This concept is not so easy with horses
The wrong actions can aggravate the problem disproportionally and the responses are unpredictable, creating worrisome memories. The rider needs many trials and errors (and a precise sense of rapid observations) to find the measure, direction and form of the aids needed to get the right response from the horse. The repetitive fault-free practice of the correct actions creates an "experiential credit" for the rider, but every mistake represents an "experiential debit" that may far outweigh the credit, especially with a nervous horse.
Only trained horses teach the right feeling because the self-correcting mechanisms have been deeply installed in the horse's memory bank by a painstaking educational process. An untrained rider riding an untrained horse makes matters worse and starts a tailspin of issues in the short and long-term. Every mistake produces a disproportional problem, compared with the benefit of the correct actions
The SoftTurn guides the horse to a series of responses that mimic a trained horse’s physical behavior. It creates a virtuous circle: the horse learns from the martingale’s tiny, multidirectional corrections and most mistakes are dampened or avoided altogether.
When he yields to its effect, he is immediately rewarded by finding the correct equilibrium, the most comfortable position for his bio-mechanical needs for carrying the rider’s weight. The same happens for the rider’s hand: the correct action (slight forward release) elicited by the martingale action gets a reward (achieving an easier control of the horse without pulling backward) and dampens the excessive hands’ movements. The wrong actions are buffered by the martingale and do not entice the horse to more resistance. The brief corrections are limited in time and force for both partners to their absolute minimum. Horse and rider are gently guided into a virtuous circle and become a trained horse and an educated rider. The Softturn is not hiding contact issues, it resolves them by creating a better horse and rider couple!