LS Horsemanship

LS Horsemanship Equine behavioural consultant. Kind, horse-centred training and support.
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“Don’t worry he won’t do anything” 🐴Something I’ve been pondering this week is how wanting to be kinder to horses is oft...
29/05/2026

“Don’t worry he won’t do anything” 🐴

Something I’ve been pondering this week is how wanting to be kinder to horses is often perceived to come from fear or nervousness. That the only reason you might back off when a horse shows some anxiety is that you’re worried the horse is going to do something to hurt you.

This comes from the widely held, but misguided, belief that horses are trying to dominate and take charge of us. That we must push through any effort they make to express their discomfort otherwise we will ruin the horse and teach them they can intimidate us or “get out of work”.

I go out to see a lot of horses who are showing behaviours that are perceived as aggression, pinning ears, biting, threatening to kick etc. Every single person has been told they must never back off as the horse is trying to dominate them, the horse knows they are “too soft” and the horse is taking advantage of this. This just is not the case. Horses are not aggressive animals, they are gentle and very easy to train when they feel safe and have their needs met. Behaviour is communication.

When a horse resorts to these loud behaviours they are shouting, usually because their quieter communication hasn’t been listened to. The majority of horses displaying “aggressive” behaviours are in pain, even if they aren’t experiencing physical pain they are definitely not okay mentally and ignoring their communication, or worse punishing it, will make life worse for them. Often punishment works in that it gets the horse to shut down and stop communicating their discomfort, other times it makes the behaviour escalate into something more dangerous.

If we learn to listen to their quiet communication and respond accordingly, they will no longer need to shout at us. This can take a long time when a horse has been ignored or punished for it their whole life and feels the need to defend themselves, especially when pain is involved.

When I meet a new horse I will perhaps greet them then gently reach my hand out to see how they feel about me touching them. Sometimes this is met with a horse looking away from me and pinning their ears, so I will immediately drop my hand and back off to let the horse know I’m listening to them. This is how you start to build trust with a horse. But often this is met with the phrase “don’t worry he won’t do anything”, which when we think about it really means “don’t worry you can continue to do whatever you want to him, even though you’re doing something he is communicating he really doesn’t like, because he is too gentle to actually hurt you”.

I do not back off when horses communicate discomfort to me because I am scared they will escalate and hurt me, I back off because it is the respectful thing to do and I want to start creating a rapport with that horse and let them know I will listen and they are safe with me. They don’t need to shout. Not being injured by horses is just a nice extra bonus.

This is not a judgement of people who have been taught this, it is a reflection of how horses are viewed industry wide. As long as the horse will tolerate something then it is fine to do it. We must not let the horse know they can have any control over what happens to them or else they'll become really dangerous. 🙄

Back in the days when I used to get on strange horses for people I remember hopping onto a horse who was extremely tense. He jogged away from the mounting block and I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get him to walk on a loose rein and allow me to relax and wrap my legs around him. After a while the owner said to me “you can trot him you know don’t worry he won’t do anything”, and I realised that she thought I wasn’t trotting him because I was nervous he would explode. I had to explain that trotting him was inappropriate because he couldn’t even relax in the walk and it wouldn’t do him any good. We are always rushing and expecting our horses to just put up with things and improve when they are clearly struggling (turned out this horse had raging stomach ulcers and kissing spine but that’s another story).

I really want horses to be listened to before they have to shout and become labelled aggressive and dangerous. I encourage you to take some time with your horse and observe how they really feel about what you’re asking. Are you just going through the motions and carrying on because you know your horse won’t protest too much? Do you notice when your horse doesn’t want your touch? What happens if you pause and listen? 🐴

I am currently writing my next webinar "How to build a good relationship with your horse" which will cover topics like this one, I will add the link to express interest in the comments 😊

Successful training 🐴We all want to have good training sessions with our horses, we want to end every session feeling li...
27/05/2026

Successful training 🐴

We all want to have good training sessions with our horses, we want to end every session feeling like we have achieved and progressed.

For me success used to look like linear progress, making a plan of what I wanted to achieve in that session then doing what I needed to do to make that happen, very often at the detriment of the horse. My only metric of success was whether I could get the horse to “do the thing” or not.

Could I get the horse over the scary fillers?
Could I get the horse to hack out round the block alone?
Could I get the horse to stand at the mounting block?
Could I get the horse to load onto the trailer?

If I couldn’t complete what I set out to do in that session I would feel like I failed, I was often applying heavy pressure to horses and becoming frustrated if they wouldn’t “do the thing”. I had been taught if I quit I would be ruining the horse.

Often even if the session was deemed “successful”, I would feel an itch of conflict in the back of my mind over my treatment of the horse, we are all conditioned its okay and normal to “get into it” with horses. A flick with the stick, a kick in the ribs, a yank on the rope, refusing to let them turn away. I knew I was causing horses high-stress at times, but I believed that was a necessary evil to train horses.

As time went on and I learned more about behaviour, I would often feel apologetic towards horses after a training session, the conflict inside of me became bigger. One lightbulb moment for me came when I was trying to repeat a jumping exercise with my horse to make him more careful, he found it too difficult and was repeatedly hitting the fence and not improving. He eventually fell to his knees and I remember turning to my friend and saying I wasn’t going to jump him anymore as it just wasn’t for him. I felt horribly guilty that I had frightened and hurt my horse. That was the start of very slow spiral down this road for me.

I no longer judge the success of a training session on obedience at all. Success to me is the horse having a positive experience where they feel safe and listened to, definitely not one where the horse has been pushed into high-stress. Progress often isn’t linear and that is absolutely fine. When you train with this mindset every single training session can be a success, we can simply choose to make it so by making good choices for that horse on that day. If they can’t get to the same point as they did in the last session, that is absolutely fine.

The pay-off in the relationship when we train with the horse’s emotional experience in mind is huge. What is so amazing about training gently and allowing horses more agency is that they become so much easier train, as long as the ask is appropriate, and also much safer to be around. Horses who are listened to don’t need to shout loudly.

I’ll give you some examples of successful training sessions I’ve had over the last few weeks:
🐴 A very nervous horse learning to put their own head into the headcollar.
🐴 A horse who has issues around the mounting block standing calmly while someone walks up onto the first step and back down.
🐴 A horse confidently walking 100yds out of the front gate and calmly eating food out of a bucket away from their friends.
🐴 An anxious horse being able to stand calmly while someone touches their left hind leg.
🐴 A previously uncatchable horse coming to call.
🐴 A horse who would go to the back of the box to avoid being bridled who now comes to engage with it at the stable door.
🐴 A nervous young horse being able to have their front hooves trimmed by the farrier for the first time after weeks of preparation.
🐴 A horse who has had traumatic loading experiences being able to confidently eat a food scatter off the ramp.
🐴 A horse who used to find being wormed really distressing voluntarily putting a syringe in his mouth.
🐴 A horse who struggles with having their back legs handled being able to be poulticed daily for an abscess.

All of these sessions involved giving the horse the agency to say “no thank you I’m not comfortable”, most of these sessions the horse was loose and able to completely leave the situation if they chose to.

A comment I get a lot from clients is their yard friends just think they’re “doing nothing” when they train their horse. We are so used to quick fixes and pushing horses through. Truly ethical, gentle training that is “for the horse” prioritises the horse’s emotional experience. If we are seeing high-stress such as bucking, rearing, bolting, pulling back, kicking etc we have already failed them and we need to back off and rethink. Many issues come from expecting way too much too soon and also failing to read the behaviour.

I never thought I’d get such a buzz from watching a pony willingly put their nose into a headcollar or watching them willingly offer their hoof, but I genuinely do, honestly more so than I ever did from kicking horses over jumps or dragging them onto horseboxes.

Once you really learn to read behaviour and you can see all of the subtle communication, this kind of training becomes really exciting.

I’d love to hear about any of your little training successes recently. Clients also welcome to answer even though I already know 😊🐴

We cannot assess a horse’s wellbeing based on their obedience 🐴Horses are constantly judged based purely on their obedie...
25/05/2026

We cannot assess a horse’s wellbeing based on their obedience 🐴

Horses are constantly judged based purely on their obedience.

A “good” horse is seen as one who complies with our demands without question, a “problem” horse is seen as one who doesn’t. And this may be as far as people want to take their thought process if all they care about is using a horse to do what they want to do.

However those of us who care about our horse’s life experiences and want to be more ethical need to think more deeply.

It is great that pain is talked about so much more now as a potential reason for “bad” behaviour, we have learned that a lack of obedience is often a sign of pain. The issue with this is, in the absence of obvious lameness, we are often taking a horse’s obedience as proof there is no pain present, regardless of other stress/discomfort behavioural indicators. As long as the horse is “doing the thing” then we accept this as good enough.

When you are trying to advocate for your horse with professionals this can be a really tricky one to navigate as this is the industry norm. I have had to advocate hard for client’s horses with some vets when they have suggested the horse is just “taking the mick” and we need to be firmer. It is so normalised that we should have to battle through with horses.

Once we start really learning to observe behaviour we can see through the cracks. I watch so many “problem” horse videos showing the horse being put under pressure and allegedly “fixed”. What we are actually seeing is a horse going from not being obedient to being obedient. But they are still showing clear indicators of tension and discomfort, such as facial expressions, calming signals and often uncomfortable movement that perhaps doesn’t come under the scope of obvious lameness. But the horse is declared fixed and happy based purely on the evidence that they are now obedient and doing what the human wants without protest.

When we hear people talking about their horse improving, often the only metric that has improved is their obedience. This is a good thing for the human but not necessarily a good thing for the horse. I’ll give you a few real life examples I have seen:

🐴 Horse has undiagnosed hock arthritis, is very stuffy under saddle and the owner struggles to get them into canter. Trainer gets on the horse and flicks the horse with a whip if they don’t respond to the leg aid. The horse doesn’t like being flicked with the whip so they learn to respond to the leg aid to avoid it. Horse now goes into canter easily. Horse is still in pain with hock arthritis, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

🐴 Horse has an undetected sore back from a badly fitting saddle. The horse now bites and threatens to kick when the saddle is presented. The saddler says the saddle is fine so the owner gets a trainer in. The trainer approaches with the saddle, as soon as the horse pins their ears the trainer slams the rope/clip up repeatedly into the horse's face chasing them backwards. They do this repeatedly until the horse stops pinning their ears while the saddle goes on. Horse is still in pain and the saddle still doesn’t fit, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

🐴 Horse has undiagnosed kissing spine and stomach ulcers. The horse is very tense at the mounting block and the owner has had a nasty fall. A bodyworker clears the horse of pain. The owner hires a trainer who tells them the horse just needs to build confidence. The trainer teaches the horse that if they move away from the mounting block they will be tapped with a stick, the horse doesn’t like being tapped with a stick so they eventually learn the only place it will stop is by the mounting block. Rider can now mount without the horse moving. The horse still has pain from kissing spine and stomach ulcers, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

These “success” stories are flooding our social media feeds all of the time, we have to move away from viewing obedience as the only goal if we want to be ethical and we have to be careful of the narratives we create for our horses. An obedient horse does not mean a happy horse. 🐴

I go in depth into case studies about this in my "Is it pain or just behavioural?" webinar which I'll link in the comments.

24/05/2026

What else do you do on a warm bank holiday afternoon except clicker train the cat in your pyjamas 🐱😎💁🏻‍♀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

Client story - “dangerous” horse 🐴These stories are shared with permission but names have been changed to protect their ...
23/05/2026

Client story - “dangerous” horse 🐴

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

I was called out to see Harry as his owner Faye was at her wits end. Harry is a very large young horse who she bought from a reputable sports horse dealer. Upon coming home he was quite strong to lead to/from the field and he started to become difficult to mount and nappy when ridden. The usual comments of “he’s just trying it on/you’re too soft with him/he’s too big to be getting away with that” started.

Faye had a bodyworker out who found a few tight spots but said there was nothing significant to worry about. When his behaviour further deteriorated Faye went to the vet where they couldn’t find any lameness but he was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and given the appropriate treatment. He scoped clean after 4 weeks but his behaviour continued to be challenging. The vet told Faye that he thought this was “definitely behavioural” now and he was just a big young horse who she needed to get a professional trainer to sort out.

She booked a session with a well-recommended behavioural trainer. Harry had developed a pattern of panicking and ripping the rope out of your hands while being led to/from the field. Their assessment was that Harry was extremely dangerous because he’d learned he was stronger than Faye and he didn’t see her as a good leader. The trainer put a thin rope halter on him and immediately set to work making him move his feet and back up and come forward, if he didn’t respond quickly enough he was met with a short, sharp yank on the rope. The trainer then led him out towards the field, as usual Harry started to panic, the trainer yanked his head round sharply to the side with their full weight on the rope. Harry turned towards them and then went to leave again in a panic. This escalated until Harry was rearing, eventually he gave up and complied. The trainer then spent the next 45 minutes walking him to and from the field, yanking on the rope at any sign of anything except compliance. (I know all of this detail from the owner and from the videos posted on the internet as a success story).

Faye felt uncomfortable with how Harry had been treated, but also felt thoroughly berated and embarrassed by everyone saying his behaviour was her fault for being too soft. After the training session Harry was more compliant to lead but he became increasingly difficult to catch and put a headcollar on. This is when Faye contacted me.

Harry was very worried when I met him, he could not stand being touched anywhere near his poll, whilst I referred her on to a different bodyworker we needed to do some “crisis management” in the moment so she could safely lead him to and from the field. We basically got him eating feed out of buckets, and walked bucket to bucket, when he was calm we went a little further until he could do the whole field walk with bucket stops along the way.

The new bodyworker referred him back to a different vet to image his neck. He had significant bony changes in several parts of his neck. I cannot imagine how sore he was during that training session. All of his stress and behaviour was pain-mediated.

Harry has had his neck medicated and is now undergoing an appropriate, gentle rehab program to see if they can get him comfortable. He is enjoying enrichment activities with Faye and they have several tools in their toolkit to help him manage when he gets anxious. She spends a lot of time hand grazing him down the track to the field to try and improve his horrible associations with the place. It is difficult for horses to trust that those scary, painful things aren’t going to happen again in the same environment.

We have got to stop justifying yanking horses around by their heads, if that is the only way we can control them then we need to make better choices about the situations we’re putting them in. It is so normal to pull horses around without much thought. It almost seems as if people think the horse “deserves” it by choosing to be “rude” when they’re just scared and anxious and trying to get to safety. We seem to see lameness as the only sign of pain or injury after an “incident” has happened, I think a lot of horses are walking around with really sore polls and necks just from being pulled around like this. The horse’s poll and neck are not made of concrete, there are delicate structures everywhere.

You'd be surprised how many "dangerous" horses are no longer dangerous when we listen to them and stop setting them up to fail.

Next time you’re leading your horse take a moment to really think about what you’re doing and what your first reaction is if he hesitates or gets tense. Do you always have a bit of tension in the rope without realising? Do you immediately grab or start pulling if he hesitates? Do you yank a bit out of anxiety if you think he might be about to spook? If we can be consistently thoughtful and soft around how we handle our horses, we have a much better chance of our horses feeling safe and relaxed with us. 🐴

Mares are horses too 🐴If we put 2 horses side by side showing the same stress behaviours, but one was a gelding and one ...
21/05/2026

Mares are horses too 🐴

If we put 2 horses side by side showing the same stress behaviours, but one was a gelding and one was a mare, I guarantee being “hormonal” would be very high on the list of people’s explanation of the mare’s behaviour. While the gelding may have ulcers, kissing spine and other sources of pain thrown onto the table, its almost like mares are seen as a different species.

I find the way we speak about mares can have a particularly nasty under-tone, no doubt stemming from the misogyny ingrained into all of us from a young age. It leaves a really sour taste in my mouth watching people laugh at distressed horses “haha she’s so sassy, little witch!” who are just desperately trying to communicate their discomfort.

It is so normalised that mares are "grumpy" that we actually highlight the ones that aren't by saying they're "not mareish". We literally think its normal for mares to be stressed and upset and that's just how they are. I hate the term "mareish".

I have a client who’s horse started napping and rearing, after a basic trot-up and palpation of her back, for some reason I still cannot fathom, she was prescribed a course of Regumate “to see if it helped”. Regumate is not something we should be giving to horses lightly and with absolutely no solid evidence of hormonal issues, but I hear of this happening commonly when we have a mare who is showing behavioural issues.

Upon assessing this mare I could see she was on a very restricted amount of forage and also didn’t have adequate muscling to carry the rider comfortably. She was scoped and diagnosed with stomach ulcers, we of course implemented management changes then worked on building her body up again. The napping behaviour never returned as now she was comfortable. This was such a simple, basic deduction from assessing this horse, and yet we jumped straight to a hormonal issue and disregarded anything else simply because she was a mare.

I am of course not saying mares cannot have hormonal issues. This idea of “oh she’s just hormonal”, okay, if that is the case she is likely uncomfortable, perhaps she is in pain and she is not up to training today, it is not a justification for ignoring the horse and carrying on. Grumpiness and irritability usually come from pain and stress, it is not stand-alone. I know if I’m feeling grumpy and irritable I want to be left the hell alone.

Another thing to note is that often horses who are having hormonal issues improve hugely when we improve their management to be more species-appropriate and reduce their chronic stress-load, just like us.

This is absolutely not a generalisation of all mares, but I have anecdotally found that mares tend to be quicker to express how they’re feeling, which I’m sure plays a huge part in their unwarranted “difficult” reputation. They’re just harder to bully.

Have any of you had your concerns dismissed because your horse happens to be a mare? 🐴

Just a reminder of areas I cover 🐴My regular routes at the moment:TeessideRichmond/Northallerton/DarlingtonDurhamNorthum...
20/05/2026

Just a reminder of areas I cover 🐴

My regular routes at the moment:
Teesside
Richmond/Northallerton/Darlington
Durham
Northumberland/Tyne and Wear
Wetherby/Selby
Whitby/Scarborough

Those are my current routes but I will travel anywhere within North Yorkshire into parts of West/East Yorkshire. Other areas a possibility as I have more scope to travel now I have help with the horses.

I of course still offer online/phone support🐴

Violence towards horses is normalised 🐴One of the most difficult things we are up against when we are trying to promote ...
19/05/2026

Violence towards horses is normalised 🐴

One of the most difficult things we are up against when we are trying to promote more ethical treatment of horses is how normalised it is to treat them horribly. If people are used to seeing horses trained through high-stress, and are sold a narrative of it being necessary for safety/the only way forward etc whilst being given misinformation about the behaviour the horse is presenting, it can be really difficult to step out of that and see the harm it is doing.

I think there are certain videos that do the rounds of extremely abusive treatment of horses that the majority of people would agree is awful such as horses legs being tied up until they collapse to the floor, horses being whipped around the head etc. But I see violence accepted daily in many different forms and it is not only seen as normal, it is often seen as kind and ethical by so many, because we have normalised it.

It seems we are so used to seeing horses being treated horrendously, that anything less bad seems kind to us by default.

I’ll offer you a couple of examples of what I perceive to be violence towards horses that I have seen on my feed today.

🐴 A very anxious horse being led around an arena, the person stopped but the horse continued to walk, the person then repeatedly whacked the rope and clip up into the horses face until they had backed up in a way they deemed acceptable, the horse pulled back, panicked and reared. They repeated this pattern until the horse stood motionless despite their fear, they called it leadership and said the horse was relaxing now they knew who the leader was. The comments were flooded with praise for the kind training and amazing horsemanship.

What I saw was a terrified, overwhelmed horse who had been put into a situation they weren’t coping with, being further terrified by a human attacking them with a rope up into their face until they learned their only option was to shut down and comply. I don’t just find this violent because of the psychological harm being caused, being whacked in the face with a rope hurts, as does being yanked around hard on a halter. If we were able to see bruising easily on horses I imagine, or hope, we would think twice about the things we do to them.

🐴 Someone trying to ride a horse out of the yard gate, the horse very clearly not wanting to go forwards. The narrative was that they were building the horse’s confidence. The rider was kicking the horse hard repeatedly while growling at them. After much scrabbling around the horse eventually jogs forward out of the gate with an extremely tense head carriage. Again the comments were filled with praise for the great horsemanship, which they perceived to be kind because the rider didn’t use a whip or spurs. The horse was described as “sassy” and having an “attitude”.

Again what I saw was a frightened, overwhelmed horse who was being put into a situation they weren’t ready for, being further scared by a human. The horse learned their only option to get the kicking and growling to stop was to go forward. Kicking horses hurts them, just like it would hurt you. There’s this odd idea that horses don’t feel pain easily because they are so large. They absolutely do and again I think/hope we would treat our horses very differently if we could see visible bruising and soft tissue damage. Or perhaps if they could yelp like dogs and cats. More concerningly this horse was in a professional yard for “behavioural rehab” and there were blatant signs that this horse needed veterinary investigation just from watching them move in that short clip.

There is this often unspoken but implied underlying narrative that the horse is choosing to do these behaviours and the human is just doing what they have to do to make things safe and “help” the horse, completely missing the fact that they have chosen to put the horse in this situation in the first place. They have created the unwanted behaviour that they are now punishing.

I used to train like this too, I had been taught misinformation about behaviour and I thought the compliance I was achieving was relaxation. I can now see how horribly I was treating horses and what I was being told was relaxation was shut down.

If you just want to get a horse to be obedient so you can use them as quickly as possible then you’re going to continue doing that. But if we truly care about our horse’s life experiences, want to cultivate a relationship that the horse finds pleasant too and we actually care about being ethical beyond using it as a label to make ourselves feel better, we have to look more deeply at this stuff.

I will say this if you’re trying to navigate your way towards being more ethical with horses, something that has become such a red flag for me is people marketing as kind but then using horses showing high-stress behaviour as “entertaining” content. I’m not sure why people who claim to love horses find highly stressed horses so funny, its really hard for me to take the hard-sell of “doing it for the horse” seriously when we are amused by their distress. Anyone who genuinely understands equine behaviour is not going to be misinterpreting stress behaviour as sassy/stubborn/spicy and they certainly aren’t going to be laughing at it.

I think its important to get more footage out there of calm, ethical training and what that can look like. I’m trying to start filming a bit more but I really don’t like asking my clients as I feel there is a certain power dynamic at play between a trainer and a student, I don’t want anyone to feel pressured. So if any of my clients reading this would be happy for me to film some clips of our training together let me know.

I am planning my next webinar to be “How to build a good relationship with your horse”, I am writing it down here to force me to write it. I will add a link to the event in the comments so you can express interest. 🐴

Compliant does not mean comfortable 🐴This is something that can be really hard to get your head around when you’ve been ...
17/05/2026

Compliant does not mean comfortable 🐴

This is something that can be really hard to get your head around when you’ve been indoctrinated into the conventional ways of training and being around horses as most of us have been. It is definitely something I struggled to understand in the past when I was being taught misinformation about behaviour. I thought I was helping horses and “fixing” the issue but my only metric for success was their compliance. I didn’t notice, understand or put any value on any of the other more subtle signs of stress, as long as the horse was “doing the thing”.

Something I come across a lot with clients who are going through behavioural issues with their horses is this phenomenon of the horse being “fine’’ when their coach/instructor/yard owner/friend asks them to do it, but not okay when the owner tries to do it. We are told that logically this means there is no fear/anxiety/discomfort/pain issue and the horse is clearly trying it on with us. I actually find the opposite to be true.

The horse isn’t “fine”, they’re just compliant with the other person because that other person is more skilled at making horses comply. They still feel just as worried or uncomfortable. I can see this as I used to be really good at making horses comply, I know exactly how I did it and I can now look back and see that I was shutting those horses down and ignoring their attempts to communicate.

I’ll give you an example. I had a client who contacted me because their horse would not stand at the mounting block, yet they had been told the horse was just testing them as he was “fine” for their instructor to get on. They sent me a number of videos. With them the horse had a tense eye, raised their head and stepped back every time they tried to get up on to the mounting block. With the instructor the horse did the same but they kept tapping the horse with a stick until they came forward. Eventually the horse stood still, but their eye was still worried, their face tense and their tail swished as the instructor mounted. I didn’t see a horse that was “fine”, I saw a horse that was really uncomfortable who had been made to comply.

Upon assessing this horse I felt he was uncomfortable in his body. The musculature over his back was poor and he had a tense, anxious expression on his face while he was being groomed and tacked up. I referred them to the vet where he was diagnosed with kissing spine amongst other things.

It would’ve been so easy to teach this owner to be more skilled at making their horse comply and they could’ve continued to ride their sore, uncomfortable horse until he exploded because nobody was listening to him. This is what is happening all of the time when people say they’re “fixing” behavioural issues, they're just suppressing behaviour.

More often than not horses with behavioural issues have extremely blatant poor posture and musculature which, without having to even dig any deeper, gives us a really obvious reason as to why it is uncomfortable and inappropriate to get on that horse’s back right now.

The best thing we can do for our horses is learn to be really, really good at reading their behaviour and facial expressions, then we can make good choices for their welfare. Ethical training is not dramatic, it is not battling through and it does not paint horses as vindictive, manipulative or naughty.

So often my clients feel ashamed because their horse’s behaviour is allegedly “worse” with them and they’re told its their incompetency. Most of the time its because their horse knows someone finally might be listening. 🐴

Photo of my horse Dan many years ago being very compliant while I rode him around an arena "tackless" with undiagnosed hock arthritis. He learned that if he didn't do as I asked he would be tapped with the stick, so he complied. Compliant not comfortable.

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