|  Imagine that you have a horse that is fine when he is at home in his field with other horses close by. He will allow you to handle him and even ride him around in his field. However if you take him outside this familiar area he becomes very upset and if you push him he may rear or bolt back to his field. You may not have this exact situation at home but if you have been around horses for any length of time I think you will know someone with a similar problem.
We can now apply the model illustrated on the left to analyse what is happening to the horse in the above scenario. KNOWN TO BE SAFE is a place where your horse believes everything is OK and nothing is going to hurt (kill) him. This place for the horse we chose in our story would be in the horse's field with other horses around. THE NOT SO SURE is where your horse is starting to lose confidence. For the horse in our story it could be when he started to move away from his yard or when you added something to his yard that he had not seen before, or moved some horses away from a nearby yard. THE UNSAFE (life threatening) is where the horse is put in a situation where he believes his life is in danger. For the horse in our story it would have occurred when he was moved so far away from his yard and other horses that his confidence was reduced to the point where he believed his life depended on returning to where he felt safe. To achieve this he may have done anything he thought necessary as he believed his life was being threatened. For example he may have reared up and fallen over backwards resulting in injury to both himself and his handler in the process. Regardless of how he returns to his yard or how much injury has been inflicted, his successful return to Known to be Safe reinforces that behaviour. His perception would be that the behaviour saved his life, far better than dying, which is probably what he believed was going to happen to him. The difficult thing for us to do is to see things from our horse's perspective. They do not have the reasoning power that we have and therefore may act in a way that could totally frustrate, frighten and even hurt us if they are put into a situation that they do not feel able to cope with (survive). If we left this horse in his yard he would not have a problem and would be happy to live his life there if he could. Chances are, that if we left him there for months or even years nothing would change and he would be unable to become any braver without a specific plan of action. Think of an area that your horse has a confidence problem with. How does it relate to the above scenario? What behaviours does he use to get back to his Known-To-Be-Safe area? If we look at the diagram above, we will substitute the small circle in the middle, Known To Be Safe, with the horse's yard or a place where your horse is confident. The next circle, the Not Too Sure, is an area around his yard where he is less confident but is still under control. Then we will have an area further away, The Unsafe, which is the area outside the second circle (where you would lose control). The application of this model is central to the Silversand Horsemanship Programme helps us to understand and know more about how our horse thinks and learns. It was designed and used by Tasmanian Natural Horseman Philip Nye. Whilst the model remains the intellectual property of Philip, he has kindly given us permission to use it in our courses and in our teaching in general. | 
Silversand Horsemanship
