http://www.lshorsemanship.co.uk/

LS Horsemanship, Ingleby Barwick (2025)

22/07/2025

Client story - Inappropriate Training 🐴

These stories are shared with permission but names have been changed to protect their privacy.

I was called out to see a horse, lets call him Harry, as they were having issues with him rearing in hand and under saddle. His owner had purchased him 6 months earlier from a home where he had hunted and competed heavily for several years and she just wanted to enjoy some hacking and low level dressage. As he had settled in his behaviour had become more unmanageable, he would seemingly randomly become extremely stressed in his paddock and gallop around until he was dripping with sweat, he was rearing and napping under saddle and had now started to rear on the short walk in from his paddock to the stable.

This horse had very recently been seen by a bodyworker who found “no issues” and cleared him to be ridden, and a saddle fitter who happily fitted a saddle to him. The owner was having fortnightly flatwork lessons with a local dressage rider and had also had a horsemanship trainer out to do some groundwork with him.

She showed me a video of her dressage lesson where she was being made to ride him on a 15m circle around the instructor in trot while he constantly tried to yank the reins out of her hands and his tail didn’t stop swishing, he was struggling so much that he looked extremely lame and was on three tracks. The instructor told her she just needed to work through it and he was trying to get out of it because she was too soft with him.

She then described the horsemanship lesson she’d had which involved chasing him around with a flag, making him back up, disengaging his quarters etc until he stopped protesting. She said he initially reared a lot and was very explosive but after about 20 minutes he seemed to settle and comply. She then tried to emulate this every day for 2 weeks afterwards like she’d been told, but every day he would come out really explosive before eventually settling. His owner just didn’t know what to do.

Upon seeing Harry, it was immediately apparent that he had a very weak, compromised body. Despite being a healthy weight, he had an extremely sunken appearance all through his neck, spine and back-end. There is no way it was appropriate for this horse to be ridden in this condition and I expressed my disappointment and concern than not one of the professionals involved with this horse had flagged this at all. These conversations are difficult, but I have to advocate for the horse.

We had a long conversation about healthy posture and musculature, the potential pain and discomfort issues and how this would affect his behaviour and how we can start to move forward.

We discussed his management first and foremost, if it was possible for him to stay with his pony companion in turnout and add enrichment to his stable. As with most behavioural issues this horse was extremely chronically stressed and our first port of call to help with this is to get our management the best we can.

We then took him into the arena and turned him loose with some empty buckets, we encouraged him to move from bucket to bucket by throwing low value food into each one, he was initially quite tense but started to relax into it. All of his associations with people and training had been so stressful that he naturally felt unsafe with people so it was going to take a while for his nervous system to calm down. We did maybe 10 minutes of this then took him back next to his friend to eat some hay. We then repeated it and took him back again.

We also taught him some basic nose targeting and did some treat scatters, just lots of low pressure, fun things to engage his brain and build positive associations with people again. At one point he spooked at something behind the hedge and froze, after about 5 seconds he touched the target with his nose and was back to being engaged with us. His owner couldn’t believe he hadn’t exploded.

Given how he presented and what had been going on I obviously referred the owner on to the vet for some investigations. Harry was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and arthritis in his neck, spine and hocks and his lovely owner immediately decided to not try to bring him back into ridden work. She medicated as appropriate and we worked with a physio on developing his body to help keep him comfortable. This looked like shaping movement and postures with positive reinforcement and enrichment games, not drilling over poles or up hills while he braced against us.

Harry now enjoys turnout with his pony friend, lots of hand walks with his owner and some quiet liberty work in the arena. His lovely owner has found a new joy in enjoying his company without riding him and would never have continued to do so if she knew he was in pain, but she just kept being told to push on.

Harry is a very sweet, gentle horse. At no time when I was there did he rear or explode, not because I am some magical horse whisperer, but because I didn’t put him in situations he couldn’t cope with. I can only imagine how painful being ridden or being chased and pulled around might have been for him. He was shouting out but nobody was translating this to his owner. This is such a huge issue within the industry, we have highly qualified and recommended people who do not understand behaviour and we are constantly pushing horses through pain.

I’ll leave you with this thought, if the training is causing your horse to be explosive, rear, pull back, try to get away from you or it just generally feels like a fight, it is not good for your horse regardless of what the end results looks like. I see so many compromised horses who are trying to communicate that they are struggling, and maybe that comes out as “bolshy” behaviour. We are then taking these compromised horses, hassling them into submission and calling it good horsemanship.

If training feels like a battle we are doing something wrong. 🐴

19/07/2025

After a 5am start to do the horses I managed to blow out a tyre on the motorway (do not recommend). Luckily my superstar friend Kelly saved the day and transported me and the obstacles from the lay-by ❤️.

Great and busy obstacle clinic at Mount Huly, lots of lovely people learning about positive reinforcement and how it can help them train more ethically. Some very big horses today I need to modify the archway 😅.

Now to drive home in the biblical rain ☔️.

I still have weekend availability in August for these clinics at your own yard, please message me for details.

17/07/2025

The boys had a lovely session with Yasmin Stuart Equine Physio this morning, so nice to see them improve over time and be so much more able to participate ❤️.

15/07/2025

Does training with positive reinforcement mask pain? 🐴

As someone who used to train heavily with negative reinforcement who now trains primarily with positive reinforcement I wanted to offer my thoughts and perspective on this.

As with anything, just because someone says they’re using positive reinforcement doesn’t mean they’re doing it well. Really good, ethical trainers are skilled at reading even the most subtle body language and communication from the horse so a scenario where they are training the horse through any significant level of pain just isn’t happening.

I find the comparison bizarre when social media is filled with videos from “problem horse” trainers showing horses screaming a very loud no, to a quieter no, until the no doesn’t come anymore and the horse gives up, through persistently tapping the horse with a stick/flag/legs/whatever until they comply.

I think one of the biggest frustrations I have with the industry is we equate people being good at making horses comply with having good behavioural knowledge. This then translates into the positive reinforcement sphere with people thinking it is just taking away the stick and adding food instead to reinforce the horse “doing the thing”.

Ethical, skilled trainers are not doing this. We are constantly observing and information gathering. Of course I may have a goal in mind of behaviour or movement I’d like to shape, but I’m always ready to re-assess whether that is an appropriate ask depending on the feedback from the horse.

To give an example my older horse Lenny has several physical issues that we manage, I haven’t sat on his back in a decade and we keep him comfortable by doing gentle movement to influence healthier posture for him. I do this all with positive reinforcement. Yesterday we were simply walking some squares together, normally he is really happy to walk either side of me, but when I asked him to go to my left he kept putting himself back on my right. I asked him 3 times and every time he re-positioned himself back on my right. If I tried to put myself on his right while he was stood still he showed subtle stress behaviours. So I stopped asking, this isn’t a training issue, he knows how to walk on my left, for some reason he felt uncomfortable doing that today, so I listened and I will investigate further if he doesn’t go back to normal.

I genuinely think that if I’d still been using my old negative reinforcement training here he would’ve complied despite feeling uncomfortable about it. And it wouldn’t have been the end of the world as we were just walking a bit together, but you can see how this spirals if we aren’t listening or the horse doesn’t feel they can express their feelings.

If you’re worried you may be masking your horse’s real feelings when training with positive reinforcement here are a few things I think about.
🐴 Use the lowest value food you can and have other food available.
🐴 Make sure we are really giving the horse a choice and not coercing them into a situation just to add food on top.
🐴 Do not try to train facial expressions, I have seen people only reward a horse for “happy ears”. I really, really don’t want to be messing around with their line of communication with me. What they do with their face and ears is their business.
🐴 Get really good at observing, filming yourself and watching it back is great. If you see a behaviour and you’re not sure what it means, research it.

It always feels like people are looking for a “gotcha” around training with food and its really frustrating when the industry is already so backwards in terms of ethics.

Training with positive reinforcement well is challenging and humbling, I’m still learning every single day. Coercing horses is easy. It would be so much easier to look at horses like mathematical equations, do x until you get y and ignore anything that doesn’t fit, but when we train like that we miss and ignore the horse’s attempts to communicate.

More and more we are realising that many horses are really not okay, often in pain and the work we are asking them to do is inappropriate for where their bodies are at. I truly believe training with positive reinforcement gives us a much clearer line of communication, especially when horses have a history of being trained with heavy negative reinforcement where no hasn’t been an option on the table. 🐴

14/07/2025

Dan waiting patiently for his weighbridge numbers ❤️🐴 Horse Weighbridge North East he somehow managed to lose weight while Lenny gained this time 🤷🏻‍♀️

13/07/2025

We’re making it through the heatwave 🥵 so thankful it’s a few degrees cooler today for me and the horses.

How is everyone doing?

12/07/2025

Spooky horses 🐴

Spooking is a completely natural equine behaviour, their survival as a species depended on being quick to flee from danger. What we may perceive as silly, they may perceive as a real threat. Horses don’t spook and gallop away and then think “gosh that was silly of me”, they think “thank goodness I decided to run, that was really scary and running kept me safe”.

“Spook-busting” type training is very popular, introducing your horse to all manner of weird and wonderful objects within the safety of the arena. These can be great confidence-building experiences for your horse if approached sympathetically (just to note sympathetically does not involve dragging horses towards objects while they rear and try to get away), but there are often several other factors contributing to frequent spooky behaviour rather than just a lack of exposure to new things.

Horses that are in pain or discomfort will be more on edge and less able to cope with things. Horses that don’t feel safe in their environment and aren’t having their needs met in their daily life will also be less to cope with things. Sometimes when we address these issues the excessively spooky behaviour goes away. But often we need to address those things and also rethink the way we are training with our horses.

Spooky horses make tense riders and tense riders make spooky horses.

I have a client with a horse they ride to a fairly significant level in dressage. As the horse moved up the levels, no matter how hard they trained at home it would all fall apart in the ring as he would spook at the boards/decorations to the point he started grinding to a halt. This man is a very accomplished rider and skeptically asked for my help on a recommendation. He was adamant he was so spooky you couldn’t hack him at all and was quite concerned about the idea of exposing him to potentially scary objects.

I did a bit of work with his horse on the ground, tried to emulate a dressage board situation, he seemed fine. I built up to riding him and doing all sorts of weird stuff including trotting along on the buckle while scraping a dressage whip loudly against the wall, brushing my legs through plastic bags on jump wings, weaving through random stuff on the floor. And while he was a normal level of “looky” you’d expect a horse to be, I did not feel any particular tension and he was very quick to feel like he was saying “yeh okay I can do that, that’s fine.”

At one point when we moved some pots on the floor, he came back to walk and dropped his head to look at them, the owner said “aha that’s what he does”. So I sat on him, did nothing, we bobbled past the pots, came round again in a walk, he seemed fine, so I asked him to trot and he trotted through no issue. The owner was baffled and said normally once he’s stopped that’s it he drops off his leg for the rest of the test and is really stuffy.

I got the owner to swap with me and they rode around the objects fine, so I asked to see them walk the horse up the lane. The horse hesitated going out of the gate and immediately the rider clamped their legs on strongly, while not letting up on the contact and started growling at the horse. And there was the issue. As soon as the horse hesitated or wanted to look at something, he was met with so much pressure to go forward that he just got really tense and shut down. Yet when he was allowed time to assess and investigate the things he was unsure about without pressure, he very quickly relaxed and was able to carry on normally.

The owner was logically concerned that they couldn’t have a very successful dressage career if they had to let their horse stop and sniff the boards in the middle of every test. But when we take the pressure off and let horses assess things in a safe environment, amazing things can happen with their confidence. The more good experiences they have, the less likely they are to react as dramatically in the future, but if we never let them look and learn and immediately demand they go where we’ve asked, we create our own problems of tension and anxiety.

This pair are now happily hacking out together every week and no longer have any issues with spooking and backing off in the ring, all by doing less and changing their attitude towards training. How quickly a horse can be labelled as something just through a lack of understanding and communication, we would now label this horse as quiet and far from spooky.

Next time your horse spooks at something I encourage you to just wait, add no pressure and let them assess the situation. Even better we can do so much foundational training using positive reinforcement to build your horse’s confidence and ability to cope out in the world. 🐴

If you'd like to learn how to use positive reinforcement to build your horse's confidence I can bring obstacle clinics to you throughout the North East and Yorkshire.

10/07/2025

When your hairdo is too much to be inside the fly mask 😎😎

05/07/2025

Your horse didn’t sign up for this 🐴

My friend recently sent me an article that was basically just belittling anyone trying to be more ethical with their horses, a running theme within the article was the idea that horses have entered into a “mutually beneficial” contract with us at some point. Because we feed them they must work for us and if we do silly things like groundwork and don’t ride them we are doing them a terrible disservice because you absolutely cannot treat a horse like a pet and do ridiculous things like cuddle them and give them treats. They're there to work!

Well I must’ve missed the memo because my boys definitely didn’t sign anything.

You can’t call something an agreement when one party has no choice in the matter. Regardless of how kind or ethical we try to be with our horses the truth is, unless we are turning our horses out on acres and acres of land and essentially leaving them to be feral, we control every aspect of their lives. Where they live, where they go, what they eat, when they eat, who they live with. Very few horses get to opt out of being ridden or jumping or dressage or hacking or whatever else we decide to do with them.

It is not your horse’s responsibility to stay sound and be a good jumping horse just because a bunch of humans decided that was his designated job and you paid £10k for him, and it is not fair to reduce his quality of life for your convenience. Unfortunately the industry is still full of people who think a horse’s life only has value if they can be ridden and some people seem to project this onto the rest of us who love our horses for who they are and not just what they can do for us.

When we understand the body and how taxing being ridden actually is for a horse, the idea that riding them is doing them some sort of favour becomes a bit ridiculous. It takes much patience, care and consideration to ride a horse in a way that isn’t detrimental to their body, they certainly aren’t designed to be ridden. I am so happy that people are taking steps to further their knowledge and try to become more ethical in their interactions with horses and I’m sick of people who are threatened by this trying to shame them out of it.

Feeling like our horse owes us something because we have spent x amount of money or given them what we deem to be the “perfect life” just breeds frustration. No matter how much money or effort you have put in, your horse cannot understand this. He is just out there being a horse and responding to the world the only way he knows how to.

So next time you’ve spent hours caring for your horse, just paid off your last vets bill, he’s broken his 6th rug of the season and he just will not “do the thing” in your training session, remember he is oblivious to all of this. He is just doing the best he can with the information, experiences and body he has available to him. The more we can learn about equine behaviour and healthy movement, the more we can empathise and move through these issues without feeling so hard done by.

Training becomes much more pleasant for us and horses when we start seeing issues as interesting puzzles to solve rather than feeling frustrated at a lack of compliance and feeling a need to make the horse “do the thing”.

And if you want to spend your time taking your horse for walks like a dog or teaching them to jump through hoops because that is what brings you joy then more power to you. Do not let other people’s nonsense justification for the way they treat their horses make you doubt yourself for a second. Friends, forage, freedom to move, freedom from pain and feeling safe, none of this requires you to sit on their back. 🐴

04/07/2025

Summer coughs 🐴

Bit of a different post from me but if my experiences can help someone then I’d love that.

The video is from a year ago. He is fine now.

Out of the blue I think 4 years ago Dan developed a nasty, allergic-type cough one spring. He’d never done it before and he’d been at that yard for years previously with no breathing issues. We tried the usual medication stuff and found success with a tonic from Trinity Consultants called AH181, he stopped coughing completely and everything was good.

The second year it happened again and the AH181 didn’t touch it, we went through a few bespoke tonics from Trinity (thanks Simon for being amazing!) and finally found something strong enough to stop him coughing in Z70.

He’s always lived out and never coughs in the winter despite being on dry hay.

Fast forward to last year I moved the horses 200 miles up north in January, in April he started with an awful coughing fit which resulted in an emergency vet visit as I felt he just couldn’t stop.
His lungs always sounded pretty clear it was just this horrendous cough.

Despite being on the Z70 He would go through a period of about 5 days when it would be minor then he’d have another really bad coughing fit. I decided to have an endoscopy to make sure nothing sinister was going on because sometimes he would cough so hard it sounded like he was choking. The scope was all normal and clear aside from a bit of mucus which was a relief.

The general consensus was this was an asthmatic type allergy and it would likely get worse each summer which is why the things that helped him previously weren’t enough.

We muddled through the rest of the year and he was back to being fine again in the autumn. Me being me I couldn’t leave things alone and came across some information about KPU, Dan does fit a lot of the symptoms so I decided to lightly follow some of the protocols because it couldn’t hurt. This meant not feeding haylage/wrapped hay, cutting out chaff and feeding various herbs. (There is much more to KPU than this but I remain on the fence and confused so just wanted to try the easy changes to see if it helped). My horses were already on very minimal grass and fed ad-lib meadow hay so I didn’t need to make any changes there.

Now I’m absolutely not saying that has anything to do with the fact that this year he is not coughing AT ALL, but it’s really peaked my curiosity. He is in the same place, he is on quite dusty hay (which I do rinse down for literally 5 seconds with the hose but not enough to do anything significant) and I started him on the Z70 back in March rather than waiting for him to start coughing, which could’ve been a big factor.

But here we are in July and my horse still hasn’t coughed for the first summer in 3 years and I am so relieved. Long may it last, anyone with a coughing horse knows the anxiety when you hear them start 😩.

I think, just like in humans, gut health has a huge amount to answer for and I’m excited at the new research being done around this for horses. Wouldn’t it be amazing if some of the ailments we thought were degenerative and incurable could actually be improved through improving the gut?

Would love to hear of anyone’s experiences.

30/06/2025

Searching on behalf of a very good client and friend of mine in Teesside/North Yorkshire.

Looking for land/field/yard to rent for private use, 2/3/4 acres would be ideal. Very self sufficient and can provide excellent references from previous landlords. Always pays on time and takes extremely good care of the horses.

Horses very respectful of fencing, would need to be able to put own temporary field shelter up if no shelter already in place.

Also open to renting space within a yard, horses must live out 24/7 all year round so traditional livery with stabling not an option. Would be open to an equi-central/track setup shared with someone else but these seem to not exist in the area.

Open to all options please PM me if you have anything at all that might work in the areas below.

LS Horsemanship

22/07/2025

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14/07/2025

13/07/2025

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30/06/2025

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