Trudi Dempsey: Equine Trainer and Behaviour Consultant

28/05/2026

Love learning?

Having access to the depth and specialisation possibilities of online learning continues to excite me.

Recently I've taken two interactive courses with one of my dogs – Harnessing the Powers of Choice and Habit with Irith Bloom and Training with Opt Out Stations with Kim Palermo. Being pushed to look at things with fresh eyes always leaves me enthusiastic to share new ideas with my student coaches and clients. I highly recommend both of these amazing teachers and their courses.

Choice can be deep and rich for us humans yet I daily experience equestrians denying any form of choice. Perhaps because venturing deeper into the paradigm of choice is absolutely at odds with us having control. The idea of horses having choice over outcomes seems terrifying to many. One step too far.

Yet a horse that can influence what happens to them, that has learned the world is somewhat predictable and responsive - might result in an equine/human relationship that is mutually beneficial rather than one that is singularly focused on what we desire.

Opt out stations take choice one step further. Offering a genuine exit route that we don't control doesn't lose us anything, it provides a richness of solutions. A horse that stays because they can leave is a very different proposition to one that stays because they have no option.

I came away from both courses with fresh eyes and ideas to implement.

What have you been learning lately or what would you like to learn?

Come and join us at Understand Horses Live, where Irith and I will be collaborating on a practical session looking at letting horses opt in to their own care and handling.

24/05/2026

Always wonderful to talk to Nicola Gregory but this time YOU get to listen too. We discuss her published study on recognising equine pain and look to her future studies.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HXjQqNEYhMIHNkceclppV?si=def948994da044c2

Lead a Horse to Water · Episode

21/05/2026

We've just crossed into the final chapter of this year's Professional Horse Trainer Certificate, and I couldn't be more proud of this cohort.

These students are working so hard - the theory, the practical training, the wobbly moments and the breakthroughs and now they begin what I think is the most exciting part of the whole process: training their own student.

Watching people grow into confident, thoughtful, ethical trainers is genuinely one of my favourite things. I don't understand how any course for trainers can be solely theory based. If you are going to train humans and their horses then you need to practice that skill and be supported in doing so using THE most modern training techniques.

If you've ever thought about taking this course, the next one starts in March 2027, drop me a message. There's always a scholarship place at a hugely discounted rate!

18/05/2026

The Brain Keeps the Score
And sometimes it over predicts the worst case scenario

I didn’t fully understand what I was taking on when I started training with my first PRE. I knew he’d had a hard journey. Transported from Spain, ridden and handled in ways that hadn’t served him well. I knew he was tense. What I didn’t understand was that his tension would be so persistent and resistant, or that I’d have very little idea how to help him.

In the arena he was what’s commonly referred to as ‘sharp’. Head up, back tight, scanning. Out on hacks he seemed braced, waiting for something to go wrong. He didn’t switch on slowly. One moment he was calm, the next he was fully on, and getting him back down wasn’t easy. I was once left swinging from a low hanging branch I couldn’t pass under as he shot sideways through the woods after spotting a woman on the path ahead.

I tried a rope swinging bloke who wanted to move his feet. Yes, still feel bad about my one and only foray into NH. One session was enough.

Then gradual exposure. Keep going, keep trying, let him get used to things. It helped a little. It didn’t touch the core of what was going on.

More progress came when I engaged his mind. Transitions, lots of them. Lateral work in hand. Eventually clicker training, which turned out to be more useful than I expected. When his brain had a job to do the scanning reduced. His back softened. His tension became less. The final piece was moving to France where he could finally live a fully horse appropriate life. I now understand that should always be the first step, not the last.

It took a long time. Probably because I had no real idea what I was doing. I was still early in my understanding of equine behaviour and, if I’m honest, I was making it up as I went along.

Over time we became solid partners. He became my sit-on partner for lessons with nervous horses or riders. We’d walk with them in the arena and just lower the ‘temperature’. He taught refined students how to sit advanced movements. He was still a quick thinking horse. He could still expect the worst. But he wasn’t on constant scanning duty.

I began to hear about The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk) some years ago. It became popular in equestrian circles. We know the body participates in fear and stress, you can see that clearly in a tense horse. But the idea that the body itself stored trauma was something different.

A recent paper from Kotler, Mannino, Fox and Friston addresses this directly. They found that the body doesn’t keep the score. The brain does, through its prediction systems. Fidge wasn’t storing bad memories in his physical body. His brain was predicting danger. Constantly, in the background, running that same forecast over and over.

We might think of it as a forecasting system. The brain takes everything it has learned and uses it to predict what’s coming next. In a horse with a sound history, that system is flexible. Alert when it needs to be, relaxed when things are safe, curious with novelty, able to recover quickly when something does go wrong.

For Fidge that dial was stuck. His brain had decided the world was unpredictable and dangerous. So it looked for proof of that. A plastic bag, a shadow, a woman in the woods. Not because those things were genuinely dangerous but because a brain primed to expect threat will find it almost anywhere. A self fulfilling prophecy.

Was he stuck in a cycle of overestimation? I think so.

What I understand now is that in giving him something precise to think about, a transition, a lateral step, a click and reinforcement for something specific, I was giving his brain a different job. A break from scanning. Instead of predicting danger, it started to predict something else. Something more manageable. And in those moments of focus, he began to settle.

I can’t know this for certain. But given what we now know, I believe we can change those predictions. We can, over time, change what a horse expects the world to be.

He never became a bombproof horse. I’m not sure bombproof is actually something we want to have as a goal . But when he reacted he could reset. He became present rather than constantly somewhere else.

Elimination of reactivity is not the goal. Restoring flexibility is.

It takes as long as it takes. Usually a lot longer than most people are prepared for.

The body doesn’t keep the score. The brain gets stuck in overprediction mode. The way out is a horse appropriate life first, then creating new experiences well below threshold, adding triggers slowly and giving the horse time to recover. Every time.

A brain that has learned to predict danger can learn to predict something else thanks to neural plasticity.

Kotler S, Mannino M, Fox G and Friston K (2026) The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 20:1812957. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957

Image Helena Lopes

10/05/2026

What IS the message?
The deficit model and why we don't just need more science

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching someone dig their heels in. You know what the research says. You’ve read the studies. You’ve seen the outcomes. You think you’re right. And the person in front of you, who has spent dozens of years with horses, is looking at you like you’ve just suggested something deeply offensive.

We wrongly assume the problem is information. Or rather a lack of good information. That if we just explain it better, cite more papers, the resistance will dissolve. It doesn’t.

The deficit model is the assumption that public skepticism toward new ideas stems from a lack of knowledge, that people resist change because they simply haven’t been properly educated yet. The solution, under this model, is to deposit more information.

The problem is that the model is wrong. Research across science communication has shown that more information alone rarely changes deeply held beliefs. When people feel lectured to, especially about something tied to their identity and lifelong experience, they often become more entrenched, not less.

Sound familiar?

Why is the horse world particularly resistant?

Horse people are not ignorant. They often have decades of hands-on experience. Traditional methods bring cultural weight, identity, and community. When a researcher or behaviourist arrives with new thinking and suggests that something they believe is wrong, it is perceived as an attack.

The lecturing approach has another problem in that it often comes from practitioners who have swung so far into advocacy (hand up from me here) that they’ve become the mirror image of what they’re criticising. Equally certain. Just pointing in the opposite direction.

But if we continue to tinker at the edges of change, we may change enough to carry on competing horses under a social license. But at some point the genie will emerge. We will have to accept that we do things TO horses for our gain. Our love of competing and our egos.

We decided zoos, in the way they used to exist, were unacceptable. We looked at animals in enclosures, performing or on display for human entertainment, and concluded that wasn’t good enough. The horse world hasn’t had that reckoning yet.

This isn’t ultimately a question of science. Science can tell us what horses are capable of, what causes them stress, what wellbeing looks like. But what we do with that knowledge is a question of fairness. Of what we are willing to ask of another species, and whether we are honest with ourselves about why we are asking it.

We can quote science. We can be ‘science-based’. But it comes down to much more than science and knowledge. It comes down to what it is fair to expect of a living being.

photo credit Louise Pilgaard

05/05/2026

Have you signed up for this free webinar tonight? Come and join us.

Understand Horses presents a webinar with equine behaviourist and horse trainer Trudi Dempsey and animal physio Rebeccah Baylis on pole work training for horses.

26/04/2026

A threat is only as powerful as the learner’s belief that it will be followed through. No history of follow-through, no credible threat.

This is the mechanism. Not the threat signal - but what the learner’s history tells them the signal predicts. A child who has learned that the count of three never actually culminates in punishment will ignore the count entirely. They have been taught, reliably and repeatedly, that the warning is just noise.

The same whip waved at two different horses can produce two entirely different responses. One has a history that makes the prediction credible. One doesn’t. The whip hasn’t changed. The learning history has.

But what about the person who walks into a yard and immediately unsettles a horse they have never met? No history. No previous contact. No whip.

Some of it is stimulus generalisation. The horse doesn’t need a personal history with that individual. They have a history with humans. Size, posture, directness of gaze, the way they move, are readable signals. If they overlap with signals that have previously predicted something aversive, the response will transfer. The conditioned template doesn’t require the same person. Just enough similarity.

But there is something else worth considering here. Certain signals like dominant posture, direct and sustained eye contact may not need a strong individual learning history. We appear to be primed to pick these up quickly and generalise them widely. Horses almost certainly are too.

Which means the person who exudes threat without intending to is still doing something. The signals are there. The learner is reading them and intention might be irrelevant to the receiver.

I think this is important, because it means the welfare cost of aversive-based training is not only present at times of contact. But is present in every moment as the horse scans for warning signals. Some horses may not be living in a series of discrete aversive events but living in a state of constant vigilance. That has physiological costs. And in many training contexts, it is almost entirely invisible.

This is where it becomes a bit mucky.

Anticipation is not the enemy but the mechanism. Training is always, in some sense, teaching a learner what to expect.

When a horse moves away from a raised whip they are responding to anticipation. So is the horse who wanders over when you pick up the clicker or food bag. Horses offer behaviour readily when their history tells them that engagement is worth it.

Both horses are responding to an expectation.

The difference is in what they are anticipating. And what it costs them to live with that anticipation day to day.

R+ based training does not remove horses from a world of consequence and expectation. It deliberately builds a particular kind of expectation. Interaction with a human predicts good things and safe engagement. This is not a consequence-free approach. Nor is it magic. We can intentionally choose the consequences our learners spend their time anticipating.

R+ based learning is also full of anticipatory behaviour. The horse learns that their human predicts food. They respond to that prediction, sometimes with such urgency that it becomes hard to work with.

It becomes easy for critics to say, ‘food creates poor behaviour’. And there is something in that. The same mechanism is in play as when a horse flinches from the threat of a whip. A strong prediction has been built, and the learner is responding to it. Different currency same mechanism.

Every interaction is a prediction. Every session adds to or subtracts from the learner’s understanding of what an environment means, what a human means, what the cost of engagement might be.

We are not just reinforcing behaviours. We are creating an anticipatory landscape.

Instead of wondering how to get responses without punishment we could ask what the horse is anticipating, and is that what I intended?

A horse with a rich history of reliable, positive predictions can tolerate some ambiguity. They have enough in the account to cope in the moments that aren’t perfect.

But we should look more closely at the anticipatory experience of our learners - not just the behaviours we can clearly see, but the expectations we have built that lie underneath them.

Positive predictions also carry responsibility. A horse who has learned that their human reliably predicts food is also a horse who notices when that prediction isn’t met. Frustration is not exclusive to aversive-based training. It is the predictable outcome of any strong expectation that goes unfulfilled. We are not exempt from that simply because we have chosen a currency of food.

Building a rich reinforcement history with clarity about when and how reinforcement arrives, and what the learner can reliably expect is the goal, not just positive anticipation - because a learner who feels safe enough to think is a learner who can actually learn.

A very different and more precise goal.

Photo Rex Pickar

22/04/2026

Want to know more about board membership? Drop me a message.

06/04/2026

The Latest Lead a Horse to Water podcast is out now. Listen to .gabriel.lencioni and I geek out on cooperative care and HIT (horse initiated training) in a car park in Minehead (random) just before he headed back to Brazil.
Find the podcast on most platforms and on YouTube.