rational treatment.

When your horse baulks, or is a little excited, if he wants to start
quickly, or looks around and doesn't want to go, there is something
wrong, and he needs kind treatment immediately. Caress him kindly, and
if he doesn't understand at once what you want him to do, he will not be
so much excited as to jump and break things, and do everything wrong
through fear. As long as you are calm, and keep down the excitement of
the horse, there are ten chances that you will make him understand you,
where there would not be one under harsh treatment; and then the little
_flare up_ will not carry with it any unfavourable recollections, and he
will soon forget all about it, and learn to pull truly. Almost every
wrong act the horse commits is from mismanagement, fear, or excitement:
one harsh word will so excite a nervous horse as to increase his pulse
ten beats in a minute.

When we remember that we are dealing with dumb brutes, and reflect how
difficult it must be for them to understand our motions, signs, and
language, we should never get out of patience with them because they
don't understand us, or wonder at their doing things wrong. With all our
intellect, if we were placed in the horse's situation, it would be
difficult for us to understand the driving of some foreigner, of foreign
ways and foreign language. We should always recollect that our ways and
language are just as foreign and unknown to the horse as any language in
the world is to us, and should try to practise what we could understand
were we the horse, endeavouring by some simple means to work on his
understanding rather than on the different parts of his body. All
baulked horses can be started true and steady in a few minutes' time:
they are all willing to pull as soon as they know how, and I never yet
found a baulked horse that I could not teach to start his load in
fifteen, and often less than three, minutes' time.

Almost any team, when first baulked, will start kindly if you let them
stand five or ten minutes as though there was nothing wrong, and then
speak to them with a steady voice, and turn them a little to the right
or left, so as to get them both in motion before they feel the pinch of
the load. But if you want to start a team that you are not driving
yourself, that has been baulked, fooled, and whipped for some time, go
to them and hang the lines on their hames, or fasten them to the waggon,
so that they will be perfectly loose; m