SureFire Horsemanship, LLC

11/14/2025

One of my many teachers, taught me in such a way I could go home and teach my students, and have brand new exciting feelings after years of getting the same stagnant responses. I’m always going to recommend Mills Consilient Horsemanship for those of us who want to know all the reasons, and understand the process, and feel really unable to do more with the “because I told you so” answers were either were taught or pigeon holed ourselves into early in our learning.

I’ve been doing this a long time.

I’ve worked with a lot of horses and a lot of different types of horses.

Not dozens, not hundreds… thousands.

And yet, this year in particular, I’m noticing, sometimes that experience doesn’t do me any good.

My perspective and my priorities have shifted, so that many of the old answers I had are no longer applicable.

So when I’m working with a horse, I truly have to be open to them teaching me an entirely new answer.

I no longer jump straight to a ‘known answer.’

I have to feel my way through, or dead end and backtrack, and feel my way forward again.

I’ve chosen to embrace that, rather than feel intimidated by it or threatened by it.

If we want to feel something we’ve never felt, get something we’ve never gotten, we have to be OK with doing something we’ve never done.

We have to be OK with not knowing, and put our faith in ourselves and our horses.


11/14/2025

My baby and someone else’s baby. You ever met a sweeter foal?

11/13/2025

Everyone’s got something to say, no idea what they’re looking at. This guy is a genius at fixing stuff and sometimes it looks unconventional
Me too :) but he’s much more well known and still gets crap for it 🤷‍♀️

11/13/2025

Hilliard Ohio

Scarlet-15.1hh thoroughbred
19 years old going on 3. She is going to make an awesome speed or dressage mount. We’ve started lateral work. She’s for a confident rider, not necessarily a strong or aggressive one. She’s more sensitive than many here and has a dynamite canter. Owner willing to discuss lease or sale.
Lease would be $2-300 a month, sale would be low 4 figures to the right home. Chestnut, totally sound of body.

Thoroughbred gelding-not here, but with a friend. Very fun to ride. Great lofty canter. Dark bay all around. War horse blood lines. For sale in the low 4 figures located in Johnstown currently. Age 18 height 15.2hh

Chloe-Gypsy vanner mare. Carries a roam gene, buckskin tobiano. Owner has some major life changes and is drastically reducing cost. Very low 5 figures now. Please reach out if interested. Age 7, been there done that, used in a lesson program, up to date on everything.
Tb mare in photo one gypsy in Ohio 2

No photo of third horse but can put you in touch with his owner. He was here for awhile and I vouch for him

11/13/2025

Empathy: An Important Word That Can Turn Human Discomfort Into Horse Problems

Empathy is the capacity to recognise, understand, and respond to the emotional states of others. It has multiple dimensions that include cognitive empathy, which is the ability to interpret another’s feelings or intentions, and affective empathy, which is the emotional resonance you experience in response. There is also empathic concern which is the motivation to act. So empathy is not just feeling sorry for a horse.

It is a blend of perception, interpretation, emotional regulation, and behaviour.

Which brings us to the real issue in the horse world...

➡️When Empathy Backfires for Horses

Humans can empathise with horses, but only up to the limit of their own imagination, their own emotional comfort, and their own understanding of how horses actually perceive the world. Horses do not think like us. They do not interpret pressure, learning, novelty, or social cues like us. Which means our empathy is a translation exercise and sometimes our translations are as inaccurate as a Google maps 10 years ago...

A distressed horse can stir up a wave of discomfort in a person that is harder to settle than the horse itself. So the human often shifts to soothing themselves and not the horse. This is where empathy loses the plot.

The horse might show stress while learning something new because it is confused or needs the task to be simplified or presented with more clarity and skill. The solution is usually better training, not a spiritual intermission.

But if the person feels uncomfortable watching the horse be confused, they may stop altogether. They may avoid the situation next time. They may proclaim that the horse does not like groundwork, or finds training sticks traumatic, or cannot be caught, or fears the mounting block, or hates being ridden. They make these declarations from the throne of empathy, as if being empathetic means never checking whether the horse can learn something new with good guidance.

They justify their avoidance by claiming they are being sensitive to the horse’s needs. Meanwhile the horse remains stuck with a problem it could have easily learned to navigate if only the person had sought knowledge, stayed consistent, or asked for help.

➡️What Real Empathy Requires

Practising empathy with horses is not about emotional purity. It is not about announcing your feelings and calling it care. It requires knowledge of equine behaviour and learning. It requires skill and the ability to regulate your own emotional discomfort so you do not project it onto the horse. It requires accepting that your feelings are not diagnostic tools.

Empathy becomes useful when combined with observation, strategy, and willingness to improve. Without these, empathy can collapse into avoidance and self soothing, while the horse quietly struggles with something it could have mastered.

If we want empathy to lift horses rather than trap them, then we can never stop learning. We need to pair empathy with competence, because the horse does not benefit from our discomfort. The horse benefits from our clarity.

➡️And what is clarity?

Clarity is the ability to present information to a horse in a way that is consistent, comprehensible, and free of mixed cues. It means your signals are clean, your timing makes sense, and your intentions are easy for the horse to interpret. Clarity is the opposite of emotional projection. It is the opposite of hesitation or avoidance. It is the steady, understandable guidance that allows a horse to feel secure enough to learn.

This is Collectable Advice entry 78/365 of my challenge focusing on words used in the horse world. Hit SAVE or Hit SHARE and spread the word - literally ❤😆

IMAGE📸: My good friend Isabelle and OTTB Dash. This is a heads up to all the OTTB and STB fans to Join our Racehorse Reboot 8 Week Challenge Event from the 3 January - 28 February 2026. Everyone already enrolled is welcome. If you haven't enrolled, do so now and follow our advice to support and prepare your Off-the-Tracker to be ready commencing re-training in January💪❤ More info below.

11/13/2025

Ayeee! I get it now. LOVE watching some students figure this out too.

11/12/2025

Today/tomorrow will be LONG
I’ve got a few new riders and we need to wrap up something’s before winter, like scrubbing troughs and prepping to repair some old spigots
Please be patient as I teach my 4 group lessons and manage the horses all day while trying very late to prep for winter 🙂
I’ll post about our cold weather care soon, but horses have spent two full nights in this week before returning back outside. We have an order of large bales coming Sunday and Friday. These will cost us THOUSANDS of dollars, and I still need to pay my hay guy throughout the year for the little squares so please make sure your payments are getting to me on time. The horses appreciate it

It’s my least favorite time of year-mud season. Get yourself some good overalls.
Robin catching Shaman

11/12/2025

Posture is very important. Reading into and discovering pain signals is important too

But I’m finding the current climate is so unsure, so tentative, backing off for every potential signal of discomfort either physical or emotional, that horses are actually worse off for it.
If you never put the horse straight, they will BECOME painful. If you back off EVERY time the horse has a question, often interpreted as resistance, the horse WILL break down.

Why? Because without some guidance, some straightening, some questions and answers, horses and people will never get anywhere.

Imagine going to a fitness coach. Imagine he backs off every single time you’re remotely uncomfortable, a little sore, a little unsure, not perfectly comfortable. Imagine you need this for PT to recover from an injury.

Not only will you never get fit, you’ll actually become more anxious and more lame. Why? Because you have no guidance through and forward. Your coach will be feeding into, and building anxiety and weakness.

This is what I see in the world at large now- a well meaning attempt to create comfort in horses is actually building more lameness, more body pain, more anxiety.
Of course we need to address and solve sources of pain and discomfort.

Get good fitting tack, learn to sit WELL, and learn to ride straight. I’m not saying don’t listen to the horse - but don’t become so tentative you’re no help.

A lot of people are capitalizing on people’s good intentions to create confusion, dependence, and mystique. This stuff isn’t new - it’s been around for ages. We’ve known how to straighten horses and keep them sound for a long, long time, but suddenly it’s like the Tower of Babel out there and nobody knows what to do.

Calm; forward, and straight. Soundness is actually quite simple. Get your seat right, your tack right, and then ride them forward and put them straight.
—obviously there are some horses with lameness or congenital issues that this will not apply to. But a qualified vet or other professional will be the best help, not every Facebook post or forum you can find

Almost all of my horses came to me unsound. At a certain point I decided they were either going to be ridden to soundness or retired. And wouldn't you know it, they are all sound now. Sometimes you just gotta go for it.

11/12/2025

RESPECTING THE STUDENT…

In discovering something new to us, or in coaching something, we should be careful not to assume that if others do not call it by the same name, they have not experienced it.

For example, you’d be surprised by the number of ranchers who have a lived memory of dressage components in their bodies, whose only language for it has been between them and their horse.

This is why I believe so deeply in consilience, in experiences and truths that are universal, and it’s why I bristle when anyone attempts to gatekeep, monopolize, or claim ownership or exception to something that is, by nature’s law, accessible to anyone.

And it’s why I try desperately not to over-teach.

Or, heaven forbid, trainer-splain to another trainer. Nothing gives me more secondhand embarrassment than seeing another trainer do this, because I’ve done it.

Most people‘s territory of felt experience is way larger than the map they have to describe it.

This is why I spend so much time observing students rather than instructing. I’m information-gathering.

This is why I no longer teach group clinics.

To observe someone, to understand their current sense of the territory, and then build a map of shared language around that, respects their underlying experience and autonomy.

For instance, I’m often coaching very experienced, lifelong riders who grew up ranching, but who now wish to explore classical concepts.

These horsemen have an incredible depth of feel, built from decades of experience, something no one should disregard or bulldoze.

Before we start teaching, whether horse or human, we should take the time to really see them, and never take for granted the trust they’ve handed us in the process.

11/12/2025

11/11/2025

I’ll post tonight/tomorrow about horses here for sale and lease and horses from friends. Lots of really nice equines for all budgets and taste it’s just getting to be that time that people reduce