GROW Horsemanship

GROW Horsemanship I'm Brie Simpson, behaviour consultant, R+ trainer, and the founder of GROW Horsemanship, formerly PATH Equestrian. Please feel free to reach out ❤️

Welfare-focused equine education, discussion, and community

Endorsed Trainer with the WBA

• Behaviour consulting
• R+ lessons (in person and online)

Track-system boarding at Balancing Whispers (Caledon, Ontario) 🇨🇦 PATH was where this work began, but GROW reflects how my understanding and approach have evolved over the years. GROW stands for Guided by Research, Observation & Welfare, the three

pillars that shape everything I do:

Research: keeps the work grounded in evidence and curiosity. Observation: helps us truly see the horse in front of us and respond to them as an individual. Welfare: is the foundation, making sure every choice supports the horse’s physical, emotional, and social needs. I manage Balancing Whispers, one of Canada’s largest track-system facilities, which is home to a healthy mixed herd where horses live in a manner that supports their physical, social, and emotional needs. Designed in collaboration with owner Martine Sudan, who has created a haven for welfare-focused owners and a model for progressive horse management. I’ve hosted clinics and mentorships focused on the equine pain ethogram, consent-based procedures, and welfare-based care, supporting owners, professionals, and students in applying science to real-world horse management. I’ve also mentored students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds, including veterinary and graduate students, as well as co-op placements and horse owners seeking hands-on experience in welfare-based training and management. I’m an Endorsed Trainer with the World Bitless Association, a recognition that holds deep meaning for me because it reflects years of learning, reflection, and dedication to welfare-led, evidence-based horsemanship. Very few trainers hold this recognition, and I feel deeply honoured to be part of that community. GROW Horsemanship is about creating a welfare-focused community, a place where questions are welcome, science meets empathy, and education is meant to empower, not judge.

09/05/2026

Project Enzo: When health affects training

Enzo suddenly had a big reaction to the halter, despite doing his other behaviours normally.

By the next day it was obvious how itchy and uncomfortable his allergies had made him.

A good reminder that sudden behaviour changes aren’t always training problems. Pain, discomfort and environment matter too.

Can we stop inventing emergency scenarios to justify behaviours we like training?Laying a horse down is flashy. People l...
09/05/2026

Can we stop inventing emergency scenarios to justify behaviours we like training?

Laying a horse down is flashy. People like teaching it. People like showing that they can manipulate a 1,200 lb animal into a vulnerable position and have it stay there.

But no one really wants to admit that. So let’s be honest about what we’re doing.

You are not laying a horse down to prepare it for some hypothetical entanglement situation. Lying down has very little to do with the actual skills a horse needs if they get caught.

All of my horses are taught to think through pressure. If a lead rope drops and they step on it, I don’t want their first response to be shooting their head up and potentially injuring their poll. I want them to stop and work out where the pressure is coming from.

I teach the same thing with ropes and things around their legs. I teach them not to immediately panic when something feels wrong or they become restricted. And when they do end up in a scary situation, I don’t want my presence adding more pressure to it. I want them to know they can look to me for help.

Those are skills we can actually train, directly.

And a real entanglement isn’t a controlled lay-down exercise.

A horse caught in wire may be in pain. They may already be panicking. The pressure may be sudden, sharp, tightening or coming from multiple places. And the leg that’s caught isn’t necessarily neatly folded underneath their belly in the exact position you used to take them to the ground. It could be stretched forward, pulled behind them, caught underneath something or restricted in a completely different way.

That’s a very different situation.

So I’m not sure why we keep acting as though restraining one leg in a particular position until a horse goes to the ground somehow teaches a universal “if any part of my body ever becomes trapped, I should calmly stop moving” response.

That’s a pretty enormous assumption.

Restraining a horse until it lies down and then sitting on it does not somehow teach it what to do when its leg is unexpectedly caught in a fence.

If you want to teach your horse to lie down because you like the behaviour, JUST SAY THAT.

What I’m tired of is watching the justification change the second people start questioning a practice.

Suddenly it’s not “I wanted to teach my horse to lie down.” Now it’s “this could save their life if they get caught in a fence.”

You don’t need to take a horse to the ground and shut it down to teach them how to handle pressure or restraint.

And if the emergency justification only comes out when people start questioning why you’re doing something, maybe it wasn’t actually the reason you were doing it in the first place.

As someone who is neurodivergent and has been a groundwork trainer for years, I struggled with this whole concept of “en...
09/04/2026

As someone who is neurodivergent and has been a groundwork trainer for years, I struggled with this whole concept of “energy” for a LONG time.

“Bring your energy up.”

“Increase your energy”

Okay, but what does that actually mean?

I tend to need things to be tangible. If you tell me to change something, I want to know what I’m physically changing. And “energy” can mean SO many different things in horse training.

Usually when someone increases their “energy,” something about their actual body changes too. They walk faster, take bigger steps, become more animated, turn more directly toward the horse, move closer, change their posture, move the rope faster or increase pressure.

We’ve just lumped a whole bunch of those things together under “energy.”

The horse obviously isn’t responding to the word. Something changed that they could perceive.

“Feel” was another one I struggled with.

“You’ll develop feel.”

“You’ll know when it feels right.”

Not always helpful.

But once I started looking at “feel” as a bunch of smaller skills, THAT made sense to me.

Someone with really good “feel” may notice a tiny weight shift, a change in tension or the very beginning of a response and change what they’re doing immediately. After you’ve done that thousands and thousands of times, you aren’t consciously thinking through every piece anymore.

You just do it.

So I don’t actually have an issue with people using “energy” or “feel.” I use both.

But when I’m teaching someone who looks at me like I have three heads after I tell them to “bring their energy up,” I know I need to translate that into something they can actually DO.

Bigger steps. Faster movement. Change your position. Watch that weight shift.

Sometimes “feel” needs to be taught in pieces before it can actually feel like feel.

I think we underestimate the value of education and accessible information when we talk about improving horse welfare.Th...
09/03/2026

I think we underestimate the value of education and accessible information when we talk about improving horse welfare.

There’s a tendency to look at educational content as somehow separate from actually doing something. You can write about a welfare issue, explain research, question a common practice, make an opinion piece, have conversations about it and someone will inevitably ask what any of that actually accomplishes.

But this is actually a problem researchers in the horse world have identified.

We have a growing body of research about horse behaviour and welfare, but getting that information out of journals and universities and into the hands of the people actually making decisions for horses is its own challenge.

But that knowledge doesn’t help many horses if it stays inside journals, universities and conversations between professionals.

Someone has to get it out there. Someone has to take research that the average horse owner may never come across and make it accessible, and connect it to what we’re actually doing with horses every day.

And yes, sometimes that means being willing to talk about things that make people uncomfortable.

That can happen through articles, podcasts, social media, clinics, conversations at the barn, comments on other pages, sharing someone else’s work, or simply passing along something you learned.

I made a deliberate decision over a year ago that I wanted a portion of my own work to be doing exactly this. I had online lesson spots that were full, paid well and had a waitlist, and I gave some of those hours up to research and create free educational content instead.

Some of the comments I’ve received lately made me stop for a few days and ask myself whether I WAS doing enough. Whether making this content was actually creating change.

Then I looked at the reach.

Last month alone, my content had 1.7 million views, and some months it has been upwards of 3 million.

I have no way of knowing what happens after someone reads something I write. But if even one person out of those millions learns something that makes life better for their horse, every hour I’ve put into this has been worth it to me.

And this goes far beyond my page.

You don’t need millions of views or a platform to contribute to better horse welfare. Maybe you bring a piece of research into your barn. Maybe you share someone else’s educational post or add useful information to a conversation. Maybe you volunteer somewhere, help change the way something is done, question a practice you’re uncomfortable with, or simply change something for your own horse because you learned something new.

None of those things individually changes the entire horse world.

But please don’t let someone convince you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter simply because you aren’t personally fixing the whole problem you’re talking about.

You don’t have to solve an entire welfare issue before you’re allowed to talk about it, and you don’t have to stay quiet about one problem because someone thinks there is a bigger one you should be focusing on instead.

Before a practice can change, people have to be willing to examine it in the first place.

I’ve changed a lot of my own practices because someone, somewhere, was willing to have one of those conversations. And I hope this can be a place where other people feel safe enough to do the same.

The horse world is not going to change without conversations. And those conversations need safe places to happen.

Places where we can question what we’ve always done, learn from each other, disagree without tearing each other apart, and change our minds when we learn something new.

That’s the kind of horse world I want to be part of.

09/02/2026

Peekaboo-core 🤣

There is simply no other horse quite like Peekaboo.

He’s a little bit of an odd duck. He’s always been quirky, although his accident certainly didn’t make him LESS quirky.

Sometimes I genuinely have no idea what is going on in that little brain of his.

But gooodness I adore him. This video is just painfully Peekaboo.


I’m behind on literally everything, so here is my taxidermy-looking pony.
09/02/2026

I’m behind on literally everything, so here is my taxidermy-looking pony.

Time spent within the industry does not automatically correlate to competency or welfare positive practices.In some case...
09/01/2026

Time spent within the industry does not automatically correlate to competency or welfare positive practices.

In some cases, the longer someone has been immersed in an industry or culture, the harder it can become to question what has been normalized around them.

That is not because people are incapable of growth. It’s because repetition, tradition, social pressure, and identity can make long standing practices feel “correct” simply because they are familiar.

Experience ABSOLUTELY matters.
But experience without reflection, curiosity, or willingness to adapt is not the same thing as expertise.

Some of the most important growth in the horse world happens when people are willing to say:
“This is what I was taught, but I’ve learned something better.”

Industries progress when people stay open to new information, not when they treat years spent participating as proof that improvement is no longer necessary.

Discussions about horse welfare tend to break down in predictable ways.One of the most common ways these conversations g...
08/31/2026

Discussions about horse welfare tend to break down in predictable ways.

One of the most common ways these conversations get shut down is with the phrase “my horse is fine.”

People will say horses are “fine” within the limits of the environment and knowledge shaping what their humans recognize as normal.
“Fine” is not synonymous with good welfare.

This is exactly why welfare frameworks like the 5 Domains exist. They give us a way to assess welfare beyond personal opinions.

Discussing the basic needs and welfare of horses should not feel threatening. When conversations about fundamental care provoke fear or defensiveness, that discomfort is worth examining. Questions about welfare are not accusations. They are part of responsible ownership and stewardship.

At the end of the day, people will insist “it’s their horse and they will do what they want with it.”

But the horse industry does not get judged horse by horse. Or by the ones leading and changing with welfare at the heart.

It gets judged by patterns.

By what is normalized.
By what is defended.
By what people loudly insist should be left alone.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The people most afraid of accountability, and the ones who worry most about losing their right to own horses, are often the ones most actively putting that right at risk.

The public doesn’t see the “nuance.”
They see an industry unwilling to police itself.

Accountability is not the threat.
Avoiding it is.

08/31/2026

I think the horse world needs to get better at being critically examined.

One of the strangest responses I’ve received lately, disproportionately from men, is some variation of:

“Mind your own business.”

On my OWN page. While discussing horse welfare.

Or, almost immediately:

“Well what about dressage?”
“What about racing?”
“What about jumping?”

“Why don’t you ever talk about X?”

(Which, chances are, I already have often at length. It just seems to become VERY important that I talk about something else when the current conversation happens to involve your thing.)

We should be able to critically examine ANY part of the equestrian world without treating that examination as an attack on an entire discipline.

And that includes our OWN practices.

I train primarily with Positive Reinforcement, and I critically examine R+ on this page practically every week. We’ve talked about coercion in R+. Food conflict. Reinforcer value. Choice. Start buttons. Whether the labels we use actually match the learning theory underneath them.

Because if I’M only willing to critically examine training methods I already disagree with, I’m not practicing critical thinking. I’m practicing confirmation bias.

The same standard should apply EVERYWHERE.

If a practice affects horse welfare, we should be able to ask questions about it regardless of whether it’s happening in barrel racing, dressage, jumping, racing, natural horsemanship, R+, or our own backyard.

And then there’s the other response I see:

“Well, if THAT’S a welfare problem, I guess nobody should own horses at all.”

But that’s a pretty massive leap.

Questioning one part of how we keep, train, ride, or compete with horses doesn’t mean the only alternative is getting rid of horse ownership altogether.

There’s a whole lot of room for improvement between “everything we currently do is fine” and “nobody should own horses.”

That’s kind of the entire point of continuing to learn about welfare. We learn more about what horses need, how our choices affect them, and where we can do better.

Otherwise, “well then nobody should own horses” just becomes another way to avoid talking about the actual practice being questioned.

Governing bodies and traditions don’t make practices immune from scrutiny either.

And if we’re TRULY doing this for the horse, our first reaction to someone questioning whether something could be better for them shouldn’t be aggression toward the person asking the question.

It should be curiosity.

Maybe you end up disagreeing. Maybe important context is missing. Maybe we can find a middle ground.

That’s what healthy disagreement and critical examination are for.

If we love our horses, then their welfare has to matter more than our attachment to the things we do with them. And that means nothing we do with horses gets to be above scrutiny.

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Caledon East, ON

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