Savvy Racing

06/18/2025

Its time to advance your horse-human connection 💟
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06/17/2025

06/17/2025

A horse’s affective state—also understood as their underlying emotional outlook—shapes how they form attachments, learns, and copes with challenges.

Positive affective states promote optimism and curiosity, encouraging horses to try new solutions and engage with their environment.

Negative affective states can lead to pessimism and withdrawal, where a horse may stop seeking solutions to stress or discomfort.

To nurture positive affective states, it’s essential to meet a horse’s core needs:

- Access to high-fibre forage for at least 13 hours daily (no breaks longer than 4 hours)

- Regular exercise

- Social interaction with other horses

- Opportunities for recumbent (lying down) sleep

- Behavioural enrichment

Supporting these needs not only promotes emotional well-being and healthy attachments, but also enhances learning, welfare, and resilience in horses.

06/15/2025

I want horses to have opinions.

A horse with an opinion will express when they do not feel safe - because they are being pushed too hard, because they are hurting, because we’re asking for something incorrectly, because our energy is off. An opinion can tell me that something is not right - and it is my job to do my best to figure it out.

Leslie Desmond famously said “What value does yes have if no is not an option?” If we don’t give them the ability to express themselves, how will we have a clue how they are feeling? Do we actually care? How will they be able to learn willingly verses through submission? And yes, there is a difference. A BIG difference.

A horse with an opinion is thinking for themselves, verses blindly doing what is asked even when they are not mentally or physically capable. Better to refuse a fence rather than jump it in such a way that is going to be dangerous. Better to be unsettled in warm up and try to figure it out before entering the show ring. Better to act up in smaller ways, rather than push them through until the bigger explosion or the really unsafe risk happens.

In my practice, the horse is a feedback loop. How she moves and reacts, in addition to what I feel under my hands and see, tells me things. I need to be willing to let the horse have an opinion, to express how they feel, so that I do not push beyond boundaries to ask too much. I try not to get to “no”, but no is okay. No is important, just as important as yes.

A teacher recently said to me that the way we train and ride horses is often separating their sensory and motor functions to the point that they really don’t know where their bodies are in space. The way we strap down their heads and prevent full range of eye sight; the way that we restrict breathing and mouth movement (which impacts the entire body) by cranking nosebands tight; the use of harsh bits; when we drug them before we ride; the way that we simply ask for constant submission.

Thanks Rhett Fincher for posting this!!

06/03/2025

Still have an opening for exercise rider with us….please let us know if anyone is interested.

05/30/2025

05/30/2025

Me too

If someone did to humans what some do to horses by strapping them into various contraptions to force them into shapes that stretch muscles beyond acceptable levels of pain, those people would be thought of as torturers.

But we watch riders crank on horses in rigs and types of bits that use leverage physics that horses are powerless to resist, and these methods are accepted by certain groups as simply necessary training aids.

The people who use these devices are incapable of getting horses to cooperate using gentler methods, probably because they are either ignorant of quieter methods, or because they are in a hurry.

One missing link is education, but even more important than education is attitude. Does the rider think of a horse as something to be mastered and subdued, or as a potential partner? Force is easier and quicker than learning how to train correctly, but if you suggest to those who use force that there are better ways, you know ahead of time the reaction that you will get. You will be told to mind your own business, that you are naive about the way things work, and that you don’t know what you are talking about.

But watch a real master sometime to begin to understand the difference in attitude. Watch the calm, systematic and thoughtful approach brought to the task, the absence of coercion. It can be done.

01/24/2025

01/24/2025

Thunder aka Thunder Britches and Bruce aka Brucie Almighty are so funny!…new nickname compliments of Miriam Green!