27/07/2025
I'm posting the full text of this week's article: "What To Do About The Horse That's Not Working Out" here...in case you had trouble accessing it on Substack. Remember, if you subscribe to Substack articles will be delivered straight to your inbox!
Chances are, if you’re in horses for long enough, you’ll go through the extremely painful experience of buying a horse that doesn’t work out. The reason things may not work out are many: soundness, compatibility, job ability, etc. But of all of these, compatibility is the most tricky. Having a heart horse that can no longer do a job because of lameness, or because you’ve outgrown them is painful in its own way. But having a horse where it’s not working out because you aren’t a match for each other brings up so much other stuff.
I know the pain of this firsthand. In 2018, I flew to California with my daughter and bought her a beautiful horse named Goodie. At the time, Caroline was 14 and I think she would have said yes to absolutely anything just to have a horse of her own (her pony had died in the fall). My first mistake was letting a 14 year old have any say in what we were buying. My second mistake was falling in love with Goodie’s personality, even though under saddle she was way too much horse for Caroline. I’m embarrassed to write the next part, but in the spirit of honesty, my daughter cried after her first ride on Goodie (the trial). Literally got in the car and started sobbing because she had felt so scared at the canter. Again, embarrassingly, I pushed her to go back for another ride. We’d come all the way to California. The seller was a good friend who I trusted. And after a few days of riding Goodie, Caroline fell in love (not with the ride, but with the horse). My next mistake, and complete obliviousness to the universe trying to send me a message, was that she was lame at the PPE. The vet did not sound enthused about the x-rays, but I was headstrong and convinced that Goodie was going to be the perfect horse and we’d already committed, and it was a sale through a friend, and, and, and…
Goodie came to our farm in June of 2018. For almost 2 years, things were a struggle. She had a ton of anxiety. She couldn’t keep a shoe on to save her life. She rushed through jumps like she was on fire. It was so clear to everyone that she and Caroline were not a fit. But not to me. Or at least, I didn’t want to see that we couldn’t make it work. I tried new trainers, I tried new supplements, I tried new vets, I tried new meds, I tried new farriers. I can never say that I didn’t try everything, so I guess that part is good. Except that it wasn’t good, because the one thing I didn’t try was acceptance: Goodie and Caroline were never going to work out.
I would have stayed in my little hidey-hole of denial forever but thankfully, I was not so stubborn that I couldn’t see my kid was silently falling apart. She stopped wanting to ride all the time, stopped asking for more lessons, didn’t want to horse show. She was sad a lot and anytime conversation turned to Goodie she started crying. Thankfully, I finally (so belatedly it was almost too late) capitulated and realized that I needed to find her something else to ride or she was going to quit riding forever.
I was a basket case of emotions. I felt sad, stupid, angry, and overwhelmed by what to do next. I didn’t want to sell Goodie because we truly loved and adored her. She was, for all intents and purposes, the sweetest mare in the world. I was worried that she would end up in a sh*tty situation and so we decided to keep her and let her live her life out on our farm. We are fortunate to be in the position where we can do this, and I realize that almost nobody else has that option available to them. In a really ironic twist, Goodie ended up becoming my horse a few months later. Not because I was a better or more talented rider than my daughter (I am massively worse) but because I didn’t want to do much of anything with Goodie except toodle around the arena and go for walks outside. She and I got along splendidly for that and Goodie spent the rest of her life delighting everybody who was lucky enough to experience her kind, gentle, demeanor.
The pain of Goodie’s incompatibility was immense. Yet, I feel fortunate that we were at least able to bond on the ground because there’s another, harder, incompatibility that I don’t think we talk about enough. This is where the horse and rider aren’t a match under saddle, OR on the ground. The truth is that the relationship between horse and human needs a certain chemistry. And just like when you’re meeting other humans, not everyone is a fit. On paper, things can appear perfect. All too often, we overlook our needs, our desires, and our own intuition to try to make something work because for all intents and purposes everyone else thinks it’s a perfect match. Of course the answer to a mismatched relationship is almost always the same: a breakup is necessary. The same is true with a mismatched horse-and-human relationship. And these breakups can weigh particularly heavily on us.
Thoughts swirl through our minds. Things like:
It’s my fault…
I wasn’t good enough…
I messed him/her up…
Maybe if I’d just…
I just need to try harder…
What will everyone say…
I’d like to say that these thoughts move through quickly, but I’ve seen first hand just how long they can linger, and the mental toll they take over time. I know there are no easy ways to ease this, but I think if we talked about it more it would help everyone. Because coming to a place of acceptance, where you can say “This isn’t working” is not the same as saying “I don’t care.” When we need to move on from a horse, we aren’t just discarding them, we are attending to their needs as well. It is not kind to keep a horse that always disappoint you, or that is not happy doing the job you want it to do and even though it’s really difficult the decision to sell or move on can be rooted in love, respect and responsibility.
I know that almost no one comes to this place without having exhausted quite a lot of time, money, and emotional energy. But in any partnership there needs to be room for two beings. Your goals, your dreams, your desires, and your happiness matter too. When we ignore that, or pretend that what we need doesn’t matter, we aren’t being good partners either. Entering into a horse relationship doesn’t mean we’re bound to our horse forever. It does mean that we are good stewards though, and I’d define stewardship as the mindful, responsible care of something entrusted to you — with the understanding that it’s not truly yours to own forever, but rather yours to guide, protect, and nurture for a time. When that time is up, talk to people you trust about what the next most responsible thing is, for you and for your horse.
