03/25/2026
What a Bad Trainer!
By Gaye Derusso
So you send your horse in for training. It’s got bad behavior, a bad gait, or it’s just bad-bad. Like “I found it in a kill pen and thought, ‘Perfect first horse!’” kind of bad. Excellent life choices so far.
You decide you need help. (Good start.) You pick a trainer and ship your discount dragon off. If the trainer’s good—and spoiler, not all are—they fix as much as they can in the tiny, ridiculous little window you gave them. You hand them 30–60 days and say, “Hi, can you please turn Satan into a kid-safe babysitter? Thanks.”
This trainer pours their entire heart, soul, spine, and possibly a few internal organs into your horse. They spend 2–6 hours a day with it. They ride it, lunge it, desensitize it, pray over it, negotiate with it, and occasionally reconsider all their life choices—all because you gave them two months to undo years of mystery trauma and bad riding.
They get bruised, stepped on, bitten, sunburned, and emotionally damaged. They are out there trying to turn water into wine, except the water bites and kicks.
And the great ones? They actually make it work.
You show up, climb aboard like you’re mounting a bar stool, do literally everything wrong—lean forward, yank on the reins, clutch with your legs, flop around like a fish in a dryer—and the horse still goes, “Okay… I’ll try.” It stops, it turns, it doesn’t immediately launch you into orbit. Miracle.
You’re thrilled. Trainer’s silently wheezing inside. They smile, say, “You’re doing great!” and cross every finger and toe they have as you load the horse up. You drive away buzzing, and where do you go first? Straight to Facebook: “BEST TRAINER EVER OMG!”
And then… it happens.
You get home. You’ve had one lesson. Maybe seven, if you’re fancy. You now consider yourself a semi-professional. Then life shows up: work, those damn kids, the hubby or wife, the dog, the neighbor, Netflix, the couch. You don’t practice. Or when you do, you do it… creatively.
Because let’s be honest: seven lessons doesn’t make you a trainer. Seven riding lessons barely makes you a competent passenger.
You don’t book more lessons. You don’t buy a Pivo. You don’t video yourself. You just head to the arena and freestyle your way into chaos.
Slowly—or very quickly, lol—you start peeling the training off that horse like duct tape off a hairy leg. A wrong cue here, a missed correction there, some accidental punishment for the right answer, a reward for the wrong one… and boom. The poor animal is speaking Spanish, you’re yelling in French, and nobody knows what’s happening.
Then you pick up your phone:
“I don’t know what’s wrong with this horse! It was PERFECT with you! Now it’s dangerous and won’t listen!”
Trainer: “Send it back in, and you need more lessons.”
You: “That’s stupid. I already did that and it didn’t work.”
Plot twist: It did work. You just undid it.
Because guess what? It’s not the horse.
It’s you.
You’re not a trainer. Your timing is off. Your feel is off. Your balance is off. Your reins are uneven, your legs are doing the Macarena, and your core took a personal day. You give the wrong cue at the wrong time, then get mad when your horse doesn’t psychically guess what you meant instead of what you actually did.
But wait, it gets better.
Now you have another genius idea: Facebook.
You log in and type, with righteous fury: “My trainer RUINED my horse. It’s DANGEROUS now. I can’t even ride it!”
Yes, clearly the problem started after the professional, who rides 5–10 horses a day, fixed your bargain-bin dragon and handed it back in working order. Definitely not when you, who rides twice a month on a good year, climbed aboard and started pressing buttons like an unsupervised toddler on a nuclear control panel.
That trainer did everything right—except maybe one thing: they didn’t sit you down, look you in the eye, and say, “Hey. Even if I turn your horse into a saint, you still need training. Lots of it. Repeatedly. Forever.”
Because here’s the truth nobody wants on a T-shirt:
I can train your horse. I cannot magically install skills in you via Wi-Fi.
A trainer can start the process. They can put on the buttons, explain the settings, and hand you a freshly updated model. But you have to learn how to ride it. You need to learn balance, timing, feel, leg aids, hand softness, body control, and the advanced art of “not becoming a flying lawn dart when things go sideways.”
You need experience. You need to make mistakes, fix them, fall off, get back on, cry a little, laugh a little, and do it all again. That’s how riders are made.
I always tell clients:
“I can train your horse. I can put all the right buttons on it. But you can rip them off in a week. If you don’t also get trained, you will need a full-time trainer to fix your horse every week so you can un-fix it again every weekend.”
What a sad little loop for that poor horse.
Honestly, I’m shocked horses don’t kill more people. Not because they’re mean, but because we are:
• Lazy
• Inconsistent
• Overconfident
• Undereducated
• And somehow offended that riding actually requires effort
We expect them to be:
• Calm after two months off
• Polite while they’re young and stuffed with rocket fuel
• Perfectly balanced while we flop around like a sack of laundry in a windstorm
• Totally fine with us yanking on their face while gripping their sides like a nutcracker
Then we’re shocked—shocked!—when they say, “I’m uncomfortable and confused” in the only language they’ve got: bucking, bolting, rearing, or just tuning us out.
If the trainer does everything right and you do everything wrong, it’s not that the trainer failed. It’s that you didn’t do your job.
It’s your horse. It’s your responsibility. It’s your riding.
If you can’t or don’t want to put in the work, that’s your choice. Totally valid. Get a pasture pet, get a horse you pay someone else to ride, or don’t ride at all.
But don’t you dare blame the trainer who:
• Got on your bargain-bin dragon when you were scared to
• Risked getting launched into low orbit
• Poured their heart, soul, time, and body into making it safer
All so you could go home, skip your homework, and then bash them on Facebook.
What a bad trainer, huh?
Sure. Let’s go with that.
