What I Learned Stepping Back From Horse Showing

Some may think it would be a loss to take a major step back from the show ring in the manner I have the last 4 years.

I grew up showing and competing horses a lot. So much of my energy with horses was spent fixating on every which way to prep for competition and be in the ribbons.

In the process, I lost a lot of the part of me that first got into horses for the sheer enjoyment of the horse.

Where I could enjoy the little things and there wasn’t so much pressure and stress on having everything “just so” for competition.

The pressure of it all made it easier to get frustrated with my horse when he didn’t comply, just like I was taught by role models.

It made me perpetually insecure, feeling that my value as a rider was in my ability to prove it in the show ring.

I lost SO much from that mindset.

I lost the amount of compassion for the horse that I had as a child first getting into riding.

I lost the relaxed days spent hanging out with horses with no focus on riding.

I lost self esteem and identity, pressured to conform by so many different outside forces, often viewing there to be no other options when it came to how I was taught to view training and horse care.

In setting that aside — I have gained so much.

I have been able to let go of pent up stress and chronic burnout in a way that would’ve not been possible prior.

I have learned to develop a sense of self that isn’t reliant on other people valuing me or caring about what I have to say.

I have learned to enjoy horses and the “little” things like watching them graze on a beautiful summer night, just listening to the sounds. No expectations.

I have gained more patience. Better emotional regulation.

I’ve learned how to more readily look at the bigger picture, rather than searching for immediate fixes.

I have learned to value horses in a way I couldn’t before. I’ve realized that there’s more to them than riding. That there’s more to riding than focusing on competition.

I’ve learned to accept the potential realities that I might not ride certain horses ever again and realized I can take a step back to give them the time I need and accept the outcome, regardless of what it is.

In the process, I’ve learned to appreciate horses so much more.

I am fortunate just to have my horses around as my friends.

Riding them is a fun bonus.

Heck, maybe one day I’ll ever show again.

But, I’ll do it on my terms.

I won’t do it if I feel overwhelmed, too busy, don’t have the finances or simply don’t feel like it.

I don’t have anything to prove anymore because how I show up for horses now is really just about trying to find homeostasis and exist in harmony with my horses.

To provide them with the best life that I can.

To journey through life together, as companions, and true partners in a way I hadn’t really been able to offer them for so much of my riding career.

In doing so, I’ve freed myself.

I’ve released shackles that for a very long time, I hadn’t realized were there.

It’s still a continuous journey but the amount of peace I’ve been able to find within it speaks for itself.

No one else has to believe me because I feel it.

And it has taken me a very long time to get to that level of acceptance and assurance within the horse world.

Offering my horses a life of more freedom and autonomy has brought that to my own life.

Human stress and horse stress are linked.

The horse world, I think, will be all the more healthier on all accounts if the type of environment that fosters peace in horses is created.

Naturally, I feel like we regulate alongside them.

At least, that was the case with me.

Horses have taught me an awful lot.

I’m so thankful for all that I’ve learned from them and will continue to learn. ❤️

Photography by Carleen Giesler.

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Are competition horse deaths really “freak accidents” or is our industry just refusing address the elephant in the room and start utilizing proven prevention tactics?

Isn’t it interesting how virtually every time a horse dies in competition, it’s a “freak accident?”

What a fun way for us humans to evade accountability and justify a lack of effort put into prevention.

When I say competition, I’m referencing any instance where a horse is competing for human interests, at any level.

Not all of these “freak accidents” result in death but many result in injury to horse and/or rider. I firmly believe that many would be preventable if earlier signs of building stress were noticed and addressed.

Anyways, the most recent “freak accident” involves a dressage horse.

A horse competing at an international level bolted on his rider following the prize ceremony, so out of control the rider had to bail off.

The horse then proceeded to bolt at full speed before running into a stone wall, slipping, falling and breaking his femur.

For a domesticated flight animal to be so panic stricken that they quite literally are blind from fear isn’t something that should be shrugged off as a freak accident, that implies it’s an unpreventable fluke.

Losing a horse is devastating and what I’m going to say next I want to clarify is with no disrespect to those who loved the horse.

The type of husbandry and training that increases the likelihood of horses experiencing this level of panic is so normalized that many of those immersed in it are doing what they’ve taught is best for the horse.

Now, let’s jump into it.

First off, a horse who suddenly bolts, panics and runs to this degree had to have been trigger stacking prior to this.

It isn’t a sudden, one off event that isn’t contributed to by chronic stress or pre-existing stressors and suppression of communication of stress.

What triggers might be stacking?

The general bustle of the show environment.

A history of shows being highly stressful

Poor emotional regulation

The discomfort of a restrictive noseband paired with a double bridle.

Being ridden over flexed and in an inherently uncomfortable position.

Chronic stress being ignored and suppressed in training or written off as personality.

Lack of turnout / social access to horses

General discomfort or pain from a number of different possible factors…

This isn’t to say that all of this was the case for this particular horse, but these issues are the case for many internationally competitive horses and there is a consistent pattern of equestrian media, riders, trainers and show organizations like the FEI making light of horse stress.

The fact of the matter is that the level of terror a horse has to be experiencing to forego self preservation and be running blind in fear is a level of fright that is not only dangerous but also extremely detrimental to welfare.

We should be doing EVERYTHING in our power as an industry to avoid horses ever becoming trigger stacked to this point.

And we aren’t.

When stress is rampantly normalized to horse people and they’re taught indicators of anxiety and/or pain are just normal horse behaviour or funny quirks, they can’t see the earlier attempts from their horse to communicate anxiety.

This leads to riders being blindsided when a very stressed horse, who likely has chronically recurring stressors, finally can’t suppress their internal state any longer and must outwardly react.

This lack of emotional regulation is exceptionally dangerous to both horse and rider.

It is, in many cases, avoidable.

But, the current attitude of so much of the horse world makes addressing this difficult because people are in denial that there is an issue in the first place.

How many more times do we need to call recurring injuries and deaths of horses “freak accidents” before we realize they aren’t so freak? They’re frequent.

And we could, at minimum, reduce their occurrences by looking at the common denominators leading to these accidents and making changes.

Or referencing the findings of modern research that support the need for an overhaul of the entire horse show industry.

These awful and traumatic accidents can be made much less likely to occur if we train, care for and handle horses in a manner that doesn’t put them in a chronically anxious state.

A horse who isn’t terrified out of their wits and unable to find any safety isn’t likely to react in this manner. Not as severely or for as long.

This was blind panic.

So, now, isn’t it time to ask ourselves why such highly trained horses so often struggle with basic emotional regulation skills within the very environments their entire “job” necessitates?

Why, as an industry, are we allowing organizations like the FEI to continually ignore what is a growing body of evidence showing the rampant stress in upper level sport horses and where change is needed?

It’s undeniable.

But, let’s even pretend this was just a freak accident.

Why would we not want to take steps to make these types of things less likely to occur?

If it could even save one horse, why not?

Equine behavioural scientists have the gold standard of knowledge when it comes to trying to understand why horses react the way they do.

Their expertise should be valued and listened to in competitive horse sports.

They should be collaborated with to do continued research to understand more areas the industry needs to improve.

The industry needs to act now and start making real tangible changes for the benefit of horse welfare or we are doomed.

It is absolutely negligent to continue ignoring the elephant in the room and making no effort to address the degree of stress so many competition horses are facing.

It is killing horses AND people.

And it will kill this industry, too.

Rampant Tone Policing in The Horse World

Let’s talk about tone policing and why it’s so damaging to the horse welfare movement.

First and foremost, from everything I’ve seen online, in any industry; women and people of marginalized groups are overwhelmingly more tone policed than anyone else.

So, at its core, there is an aspect of oppression behind shutting down the voices of certain people unless they phrase them in the “perfect” way.

Secondly, it seeks to protect the abuser above all else.

It completely negates the compassion fatigue, frustration and overwhelm people actively involved in welfare reform encounter and how hard it is to maintain positivity and never become frustrated or hit a breaking point when they’re perpetually listening to people defending abusive practice.

It carries the notion that those who are speaking out against harmful behaviour must construct their responses in the most perfect manner, never setting a foot wrong or having a statement land differently.

It also carries the assumption that how people react to said statements is the responsibility of the person making the statement, not something that at its core is triggered within the person reacting.

Lastly, it is also inherently discriminatory to people who are neurodivergent and tend to speak more directly and not respond to the same social cues and signals that neurotypical might be, effectively punishing them for making the choice to communicate at all.

It’s already exhausting enough trying to interact in a world that doesn’t serve us, constantly being picked apart for having a voice in controversial topics at all is something that results in many making the choice to simply say nothing.

Imperfect advocacy is better than no advocacy.

From my perspective, those tone policing the most aren’t the ones engaging in any activism at all.

It’s easy to critique from the sidelines when you haven’t been privy to just how many ways people can take what you say out of context, no matter how clear you try to make it.

We also have to be careful to recognize that many people don’t actually fully read online posts before responding emotionally.

And that is not the responsibility of the poster, in any capacity.

It’s the reader’s job to read what they’re reacting to and react to what is actually being said. If they make the choice not to do this, it isn’t fair to blame the author for how they took what was said out of context.

People aren’t mind readers. We can’t preemptively consider and address every which way people could misread what we are actually trying to say.

We are all also operating from our own perspectives and might not even be aware of how people may misconstrue words until it happens.

There is definitely room for constructive criticism in the welfare advocacy world, or any world at that, but tone policing comes from a place where the issue is with the person speaking out in the first place and the focus is placed entirely on their tone and essentially requesting them to perfect it or shut up.

This deflects the focus away from the abuse at hand, which is beneficial to abusers, because they essentially are allowed to operate unchecked while the voices of those concerned about their behaviour are drowned out by the standard they are held to.

Tone policing involves putting a spotlight on how people respond to harmful issues and taking that spotlight away from the issue itself.

It is rampant in the horse world.

So often I see people actively causing harm to horses and humans left to continue doing as they want to, meanwhile, those outraged by their conduct are bombarded with remarks about how they should’ve responded instead.

Seldom do you ever see those who tone police directing the same type of criticism at the abuse being discussed.

If it were a more balanced perspective, it would be less of a problem, but instead, the response to abuse is hyper inflated to being more damaging than the abuse itself.

There is a reason why the abuse in the industry inflicted on BOTH horses and humans is still so rampant.

Abusers know they have certain protections and that people in this industry operate with an “out of sight, out of mind” ideology.

They know that even if exposed, odds are it’ll blow over at some point, especially if they’re famous enough.

They know victims are terrified to speak out because of victim blaming, tone policing and harsh judgment of them for choosing to out their abuser.

Judgment that often times is much harsher towards the abused than it is towards the abuser.

And so, the cycle continues.

We must ask ourselves who we care about protecting more.

The victims or the perpetrators?

Who needs our help more, the loud voices or the voiceless?

Imperfect advocacy will always be better than no advocacy at all.

While it’s important that we all look at how we respond in debates and refrain from mean spirited personal attacks and instead focus on behaviour, actions and conduct; we also must recognize that we are all human.

Imperfect tone during a heated discussion about ethics is much less damaging than abusive and harmful behaviours.

It’s something that is far less insidious and easier to correct.

All of that aside — it does hit a point where we also need to consider why we think abusers should be afforded more patience, “niceness” and empathy than what is often given to victims.

Kindness doesn’t necessarily equate to being nice.

Sometimes the kindness thing that can be done is checking someone on their harmful behaviour.

Exposing these issues comes with the assumption that they are fixable.

That people can and will change with new information.

That better welfare policy and protection will hold people more accountable and bring change.

Behaviour is something we can all change and work on and while it may be hard to hear when we are harming our horses without intending to, it does come from a place of love and empathy for the horse and for the people in the industry.

The vast majority of us do not operate with malice.

We learn to hurt our horses unwittingly.

We believe our mentors and normalize what we’re doing to such an extent that it’s painful and hard to accept where we might be going wrong.

Criticism of such wrongs isn’t coming from a place of calling someone an irreparably bad person, it’s coming from a place of trying to appeal to logic and empathy and encourage needed change.

Everyone is capable of becoming a better person.

Our behaviour on our worst days doesn’t need to stay that way forever, it’s changeable. It doesn’t have to be who we are.

When we identify so heavily with our behaviour and how we handle our horses, it can feel highly personal, but these things are all subject to change with greater knowledge.

And so, we must consider where we put the most focus and energy when it comes to advocacy.

If it is perpetually directed at people who are trying to make positive change because they don’t go about doing so in a perfect way, this is effectively taking the focus off of the actual problem.

It’s also implying that we shouldn’t speak out on any issue unless we can do so without ever making mistake.

This quiets a lot of voices that would be extremely valuable in enacting mass change.

Everyone is learning and growing.

Changing policy is new territory and involves going against the status quo, which tends to cause discomfort and resulting upset no matter how you structure your argument.

Dismantling traditional structures and exposing the harm it causes is not something that can be done while being “nice” to everyone if being nice is to never cause any discomfort or upset.

We can’t accurately target and expose problems needing change without talking about why they’re harmful.

And in exposing that harm, we upset those who engage in it unintentionally, with the belief that they aren’t causing harm.

But, intent doesn’t change the outcome for horses or people who are subjected to such treatment.

Ultimately, when we are engaging online, we have a lot more escapes from content that makes us uncomfortable than horses do from harsh training or people do from abusive trainers.

Also, much is lost in translation in writing versus speaking where tone of voice and facial expressions can be seen.

We ultimately read posts with the internal voice in our head, influenced by how we are feeling.

This can lead to having a much more negative perspective and feeling personally attacked if what is being criticized is something we do.

We feel that criticism of the training method is an attack on our humanity and the entirety of us as human, when really it’s just about the training tactic.

And ultimately, we are in the drivers seat when it comes to changing with new information, ignoring the information and moving on if we don’t believe in it or keeping it in the back of our minds to consider as time goes on.

That’s why advocacy is needed and so valuable.

Because, even if imperfect, it can plant seeds that bring needed change.

It can also encourage people with better, stronger and more clear voices to join the cause in ways that may be closer to “perfect advocacy” than others.

So, as a community, let’s please consider where we place the most energy and focus. If it’s on those speaking out against abuse and not on the abuse itself, there may just be a problem.

Harm Reduction in the Horse World

Trying for better horse welfare can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing when you feel trapped by circumstance.

When you’re limited by the types of available boarding options in your area.

When you lease or take lessons and have limited say.

When you are working with horses who aren’t yours, be it as a trainer, groom, stablehand etc.

When you want things to change for your horse but aren’t sure where to start and are doing this best that you can.

There is no shortage of roadblocks that may halt and slow down people on the path to bettering the lives of the horses around them. 

The industry hasn’t really prioritized welfare much at all, it’s only recently becoming more popular, which means there are limited options available in many areas.

Don’t let feeling stuck by the environment you’re in stop you from wishing for better. 

Don’t let the discouragement of feeling out of control of factors you know would better horses life stop you from the harm reduction that you CAN do for the horses around you.

Don’t give into cognitive dissonance and accept the way things are simply because you feel trapped and may be immersed in an environment that encourages this mentality out of necessity for survival, to avoid falling victim to compassion fatigue.

Instead, do whatever is in your power to better the welfare of the horses in your presence.

This is harm reduction.

If you are a barn worker, show the difficult horses more empathy and kindness. Simply hold space for them to understand that they aren’t acting out to be bad, they’re struggling with their environment or any number of underlying factors. Use this understanding to temper your patience and avoid getting angry with them.

Wherever possible, use softer equipment and advocate for this when it is in your power. If your lease horse is bitted up to the nines and you know they don’t need it, there’s no harm in asking if you might be able to try something else and see how it goes, with the understanding that its back to the drawing board if things go awry.

If your horse is at a boarding facility that doesn’t offer free choice hay, get them a slow feed net and pre-fill it so they can nibble at it all day, or if the facility is willing, ask if they will do this for you. This will help to avoid stomach ulceration that can occur from going several hours without food and make your horse a happier horse as a result.

Hold space for horses who are having a hard time and understand they’re not out to get you. When you run into problems with your horse, consider the underlying causes rather than focusing on the “symptoms” of the problem (the behaviour).

Try to gently guide clients to softer practices by showing them that they work with the other horses you handle. Offer less daunting options that they may be willing to consider as a middle ground and slowly build from there. 

In a world where many may feel trapped, harm reduction is the way to creating a better environment for everyone. It is the baby steps towards a new life in what is a very rigid and stubborn industry. It is gently inching towards the finish line, slowly at first, but then momentum may build.

While it doesn’t entirely solve all of the problems of the industry, it will soften their impact for many horses, allowing them some form of reprieve from stress and some more understanding. This is better than the alternative of nothing.

The path to changing the perspectives of the horse world will likely be one that starts off slowly with gentle nudges and when more people see the positive changes in their horse that improved welfare brings, their interest will be piqued and they will be more inclined to keep trying.

The horse world is like a young naive horse. Scared of the new. Scared of the unknown. We have to lead them up to it slowly in some cases, allowing them time to assess the situation from afar and then gradually warm up to the idea as they build confidence.

Does this mean that abuse needs to be enabled and condoned? No. 

There are boundaries and lines that can be drawn but it’s important to be mindful of the rigidity of this so we don’t discourage people from engaging in harm reduction, we want them to start the process of choosing better options, even if they aren’t the BEST options yet.

Plant the seed of the potential that a healed horse world will bring for all horses and humans and wait for it to germinate and come to fruition.

There will be resistance at first, for sure, but once that seed is planted, it likely will never leave.

So, until then, do what you can to create a better life for yourself and the horses around you.

Heal so that you can inspire the unhealed in your presence to consider doing the same.

Set the example of the change you would like to see in the industry but do so with the knowledge that change takes time. 

There may be moments that you revert to old habits and instead of approaching it with shame, approach it with gratitude that you notice these moments now and want to experience them less often, a huge improvement from being completely in the dark about these flaws.

Change starts with the desire and dream of something different. Of something better.

So, let that desire for change inspire you in taking the first steps to getting to the destination.

And, be incredibly proud of yourself for helping the horses around you using the means within your control that you have immediately available to you.

Allow your new awareness to have you see where deficits in welfare may be present, but, do so with the understanding that you are doing your best.

You can admit to where change is ultimately needed while doing what you can with the resources available to you to at least make things better.

And, remember, just because something is common does not mean it's normal.

Just because we have done the same things for a long time does not mean they are the best way or need to continue long term.

There is potential for so much more in this industry and how we bring out that potential is by believing in the possibility of a better world.

The “It’s Never The Horses’ Fault” Fallacy

“It’s never the horse’s fault” and “You need to get after him, you can’t let him get away with that!” are antithetical mindsets.

By default, positive punishment is directing blame. You are adding a punishing stimulus to discourage a behaviour that you believe the horse is wrong for doing.

The mindset of it never being the horse’s fault should, in theory, involve people not assessing blame and physically punishing horses.

But, often it doesn’t.

It’s important for us to look within and see what are words actually mean, if they contradict each other and if we are excusing certain behaviours that in practice go against what we claim our belief systems to be.

Believing that the horse is “trying to get away with something” in the first place requires the assumption that they are deliberately and knowingly trying to defy you for the sake of doing so, thus, you are blaming them for their misbehaviour under the assumption that they “know better.”

Now, without going into the specifics on whether horses do or don’t know better and whether or not they’re capable of planning acts of defiance simply to upset their human, I want to ask this:

Why would your horse actively try to get out of work if they enjoy it?

Another antithetical mindset is the belief that horses deliberately do things to get out of work and “be lazy” that is often held in tandem with people claiming their horse loves their job.

A horse who loves their job isn’t going to “call in sick” by actively trying to evade the work that he supposedly “loves.”

Contradictory statements like these are important to unpack because if we refuse to acknowledge the contradictions, it can make it very easy to excuse virtually anything we do in horse training, even if it makes no sense in practice.

A lot of industry wide beliefs are actually in direct contradiction with each other.

In a world where it is never the horse’s fault and where horses love their jobs, a lot of the problems we run into and the subsequent solutions wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be need for them.

So, next time you find yourself claiming your horse is trying to get out of work, ask yourself what about the work would make him want to get out of it?

Why isn’t he enjoying it?

And before you say it’s never the horse’s fault, ask yourself why you would hit, yell at or otherwise punish him if you are recognizing that the fault is always the rider’s?

The Juxtaposition of Rider Joy & Horse Distress...

All over equestrian media you can find photos showing the faces of elated riders, joyous from their competition wins or the sheer joy of riding their horses. Their faces are alight with big authentic smiles, their joy is palpable.

But, then you look at the horse.

The horse’s mouth is tensed into a grimace. Their lips may even be parted, teeth visible, or perhaps their jaw is open and their mouth is gaping. Their eyes are tense and wide, sometimes showing the whites of the eye in a look of sheer distress, their eyelid pulled into a triangulated peak. Perhaps their tail is also ringing in the photo, the moment captured as they fly their tail around like a windmill, willing it to propel them out of the situation they’ve found themselves in.

The contrast between the face of the rider and the face of the horse is stark and deeply saddening as it is clear just how happy the human is, their horse bringing them so much obvious joy and the love they feel for the horse and the time they spend with the horse palpable even in a still shot of a photo.

And yet, they don’t see it. They select these photos for their highlight reels, for their profile pictures, for the imagery to go along with lengthy write ups about how fantastic their horse is and how incredible their partnership is. They paint a picture of the deepest love, admiration and respect for their horse while using photos that show their horse in a state of paramount stress.

I didn’t used to notice this eclipse of rider-elation and horse discomfort. I used to be the very type of person I describe, selecting photos of my horses where were stressed, unhappy and possibly also in pain. I thought the photos were beautiful, some of the photos that I now am the most appalled by used to be in the hall of fame for my favourite pictures ever taken.

Learning about horse behaviour and the amount of information we can get simply from their facial expressions has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because now I can better understand my horses and thereby do better by them. But, a curse, because now I see just how rampant the equine stress epidemic actually is and just how out of touch so many horse-loving humans are with how their horse is actually feeling.

It is heartbreaking, to have a community of people so full of love for the horse but so unable to see when horses are not happy. It’s gone on for so long that when they are eventually exposed to information suggesting their horses may be stressed or in pain, they double down in the denial and insist that couldn’t be possible.

That they love their horse.

That their horse loves them.

That their horse loves the job the human has selected for them.

They may even lash out at those who dare suggest many horses are in high levels of stress. They may call those who say these hurtful things names. They may suggest that these humans are less skillful riders, that they don’t know anything about horses or that they’re overreacting. Or, perhaps, they will say that those who express concern about horse stress are bullies.

There may be any number of deflective accusations or excuses to try to derail the conversation of horse stress and quell the growing discomfort inside of them.

A quiet but persistent internal voice that tells them if these words about horse stress are true, then they have hurt their horse.

And, the idea of hurting their horses is in direct conflict with their love of the animal.

So, rather than pausing and considering that even amongst human relationships, love doesn’t cancel out the ability to hurt those we care about, they insist that the information suggesting they may be causing harm mustn’t be true.

It’s easier, more comfortable.

Push away that internal discomfort and go into denial so you don’t have to deal with a storm of conflicting emotions.

But, even as you push it away, it still stays there, deeply rooted within you, whether you realize it or not.

And it festers.

If you don’t address it, it’ll eventually consume you. You’ll become angrier and angrier with anyone who aggravates that discomfort you’ve buried deep within. You may become more and more rooted in your beliefs as time goes on, for the more time you persist in this denial, the more time was spent hurting your horse if you ever do alter that perspective.

I know this because beast that is rage, shame and insecurity consumed me for many years before I finally had the epiphany that allowed me to realize just how misled many horse people are, how many of us have full blinders on when it comes to horse stress.

Admitting that to myself was hard. I had to completely reevaluate my place in the horse world and reinvent myself as a horse person. My entire trajectory shifted. All of my past goals disintegrated into dust.

There was a period of bone deep grief and sadness. A veil had been pulled and my entire reality had shifted, my identity had been lost and I had to rebuild myself from the ground up.

It is a scary place to be and I totally understand why so many would rather run from the discomfort that it promises, but despite how difficult it was, I don’t regret it.

In reinventing myself and learning how to understand my horses better, I deepened my bonds with them. I learned how to love being around horses again in a way not dissimilar to how I could as a child. I no longer needed the gratification of riding and showing to sincerely enjoy my horses and find value in them.

I was no longer deeply impacted by riding and showing plans being derailed by lamenesses or behavioural problems, because my priorities had shifted. The axis of my horsey universe no longer revolved around being able to ride.

My own mental health improved enormously. I had not realized how impacted I was by my horses’ discomfort, even when I wasn’t consciously aware of how stressed they were. My body could feel it in the air and it hurt my soul, but I could never connect why I was feeling anxious, sad or angry. Or, I didn’t realize I was even feeling any of those things at all.

I caused my horses distress for many years of my riding career. Despite the changes I’ve made over the last few years, the time spent contributing directly to my horses’ chronic stress still comprises the majority of my years spent riding.

But, the whole way along I loved those horses. I never acted deliberately out of malice. I acted in ways I’d been taught to act, in ways I’d had modelled to me by my peers, instructors and upper level idols. I reacted from my poor emotional regulation capacity, often taking out that frustration on my horses. Not to intentionally hurt them, but because I was hurting.

What I did was still wrong, but it wasn’t done with malice.

I wasn’t a bad and evil person even though I hurt my horses.

I was just a human.

Humans make mistakes. Humans become misled by belief systems that they are indoctrinated into. Humans are heavily influenced by the environment around them.

Even outside of horses, humans aren’t really taught to prioritize emotional regulation and learn how to feel emotions in a healthy way. We’re often encouraged to suppress emotions like sadness, because they’re uncomfortable and may make others feel uncomfortable. I’m sure we’ve all been told “don’t cry.”

But, you should cry. Let it out. Emotions serve a purpose. Feel sad. Lay into that uncomfortable feeling and see it through, you’ll feel better after.

You aren’t an evil irredeemable person just because you’ve done things you’re ashamed of.

We all have. Societally, we often just hide it and pretend we’re more perfect than we really are, creating pressure to fill a narrative that doesn’t actually exist in practice.

Every person, no matter how unequivocally good they seem, has done something to cause harm, somewhere.

Every single person.

So, don’t let the internal guilt stop you from growing.

It is far better to accept where you’ve gone wrong and the hurt you’ve caused than it is to deny it and perpetually continue down a road of causing further harm whilst denying it.

It’s also never too late to change the trajectory of your life. To create a new outlook. To reinvent yourself.

The juxtaposition of rider joy and horse distress is an epidemic in the horse world. Still, far too often, photos of highly stressed horses are used to advertise products or to applaud upper level riders for their competition prowess.

Naturally, it desensitizes us to what we’re seeing. Especially when many of us are never actually taught how to properly read horse behaviour and are often actually taught to misread it.

In the horse world that we’ve created, it’s actually harder to learn to walk the path of lowering horse stress because it’s not the most rewarding or encouraged one. You’re more likely to be taught to ignore horse stress signals than you are to be taught how to accurately read them because of the current state of the industry. So, if you slip up and make mistakes, be gentle with yourself.

Unlearning misinformation is a natural part of bettering your horsemanship.

You don’t need to be doomed to continue repeating the same mistakes.

I firmly believe that in the right environment and with the right help, any person can learn to become a better human, regardless of their history and the wrongs they’ve committed.

Life is a perpetual journey of growth and self discovery.

With that, change comes naturally.

To love isn’t to be immune to ever causing harm.

But, to love is to recognize where harm has been done and make changes accordingly.

I see the amount of love in the horse world growing, changing and adapting.

So, hopefully one day, the photos of rider joy will be more consistently aligned with equine contentment.

The path to achieving that starts with you.

We Are A Mosaic of All Our Past, Present and Future Selves

The New Year is a time of year where people post their highlight reels and talk about big personal wins, areas of growth and discuss their future resolutions.

While it can be a good practice for self improvement, I think it is also important for everyone to remember that the mistakes we make — our failures — are the very catalysts leading to the creation of our biggest wins.

Personal growth doesn’t generally happen without some sort of pressure, epiphany or newfound information resulting in our need for change. Our mistakes lead us to such knowledge or create the necessary pressure for us to move into the discomfort of new mindsets and the unknown.

Some of my biggest failures are what led me to the path I am on now, a path where I am learning more and more about horse behaviour and welfare each day, a path where I have vastly improved the way I approach horse training and how I view horses.

A path that has immensely improved the lives of every horse I touch…

Because it led me away from the harmful mindsets and cruel methods that I had grown so comfortable using. Methods that were causing me upset and grief under the surface and damaging my mental health in ways I never could have anticipated until I started to move away from using them.

In learning to approach horses with more patience and empathy, I learned how to be more patient and empathetic towards myself. I learned how to accept past wrongs and forgive myself for things that I had become so ashamed of.

I became more able to learn and grow because I was less frozen by the fear of failing or being wrong.

And thus started a journey of learning that grew and grew, the rate at which I changed and developed becoming faster and faster. I have learned more about myself and about horses in the last 5 years than I did in almost 20 years prior to that… Because my mind became more open to learning and I started to seek out new information to expand my knowledge base.

Openly acknowledging my failures and shortcomings was more empowering than I could have imagined. It unloaded the gun that people would use to fire off criticism and shame, because I could accept parts of myself that they may see, or, I could have enough confidence in my own self perception that their opinion of my flaws wouldn’t wound me so badly.

It was like a superpower, to be honest. For years, I was so paralyzed with fear about the negative opinions of others, even if I didn’t know or respect them and would never go to them for advice, that it damaged my wellbeing to the point of altering the way I showed up in the world. I felt trapped and stagnated and under constant judgment and surveillance, making trying anything new, or merely being perceived in public, feel inherently dangerous.

Letting go of that constant self judgment that I would then project onto strangers around me was like freeing myself from weighted shackles that threatened to drag me underwater and drown me.

Letting go of that baggage allowed me to approach horse training with increased patience because I wasn’t concerned about fulfilling arbitrary goals set by other horse people around me. I could finally just have fun with my horses, even if we were doing “nothing” according to others, perhaps, even especially then.

Suddenly, riding wasn’t of the utmost importance. A horse needing time off wasn’t the end of the world. I could enjoy groundwork and simply being with horses in ways that I never could before due to being so preoccupied with human-centric goals, largely around showing or certain accomplishments I felt I needed to reach in order to be accepted and viewed as successful and valuable by other horse people.

My love for horses was effectively reborn because the love was actually about the horse, not just the act of riding. It allowed me to really show up for my horses in the ways that they needed me to, without being so selfish and self-serving as I had been.

And, in my developing further patience for my horses’ mental, physical and emotional struggles, I learned to have more grace for myself. I explored my own mental health and found new, healthier coping mechanisms. I discovered that I have ADHD and think completely differently than other people, allowing me to finally understand why I felt on a different wavelength my whole life, why I struggled with things others may find easy. The knowledge of this freed me further.

These years of growth have been about freeing myself from an internal prison that I built and shackled myself into. It’s been about learning who I actually am, without the influence of outside opinion. As I dove headfirst into this new territory, I started to discover who I really am. What makes my heart sing, what I’m truly passionate about.

For years, I thought I wanted to be a competitive show rider and I chased that goal at the expense of mine and my horses’ wellbeing. I was frustrated by set backs and took it out on my horses. Little did I know, part of that upset was due to me chasing a dream that wasn’t actually my own.

I’m still in the process of self-discovery and probably will perpetually be in this stage, as I should be. I am a mosaic of a million different versions of myself, all a piece of the whole that is my present self. I will meet and say goodbye to many more versions of myself over the years and that is something quite beautiful.

And, this is all thanks to some of my greatest failures.

Some of my biggest mistakes.

They helped build the foundation of the person that I’ve become and who I am becoming.

I feel more free, more myself and more at peace than I have ever before.

I hope to continue chasing this feeling, I hope to continue becoming a better and better steward of welfare for horses, both my own and others.

I hope to unabashedly choose myself again and again, even if I' am unpalatable to some. Authenticity is freeing and the pain of people judging my true self stings an awful lot less than living a false version of myself to appeal to others and even then, still not pleasing everyone.

In choosing my true self, I’ve also connected with so many people that are far more aligned with my soul, rather than attracting those who only liked the versions of myself that I showed them, ones that were really masks that I wore in order to feel accepted.

Unmasking and accepting the good, the bad and the ugly of life has brought me more happiness and peace than I could have anticipated. I am well aware of the fact that I’ve become the type of person my past self would look at with anger and contempt, insistent that I’m being inauthentic, too soft and unimpressive when it comes to horse training… Because I’m doing “less” in terms of the value system that is showing, jump heights and more…

But, my past self was projecting the lack of connection to her real being onto other people who’d fully embraced who they were as people. My past self was angry and bitter and felt personally affronted by people demonstrating a level of self-acceptance and freedom that she hopelessly craved but could never grasp.

My past self was lost in the storm of life, finding stability by gripping onto other humans rather than hugging and stabilizing herself.

She was doing the best she could with the skills and understanding she had at the time. She never had malicious intent towards her horses, even when she did undeniably unkind things to them in the name of training. She was misled, led astray and confused about her own being and lashed out accordingly because of that.

And the same can be said about so many people. The unhappy, angry, mean tempered humans we encounter are often lost in a similar way. They lash out at the environment around them, not unlike the aggressive and unpredictable horses that I encounter in training, their needs woefully unmet. They seek outlets for internal turmoil, unhealthy outlets, sure, but the ones that are the easiest and most understandable for them to grasp in the moment.

My hope is for collective healing of the entire earth so that people can find the community that makes them feel loved and comfortable. And so they can learn to love themselves in the way that they deserve. So that they can find true happiness and positivity.

Life does not make finding yourself and achieving happiness easy. There are so many ingrained forms of judgment that encourage us to hate ourselves. There are so many hurdles that make life unfairly difficult. There are so many hardships people can encounter that seem insurmountable.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to engineer an earth that made these things easier for people to accomplish? That encouraged people to find their true selves and helped them through their hardships rather than leaving them alone to climb mountains that may seem impossible to conquer in times of distress?

I dream of that world.

Whether the outside world gets to that point, I hope to create that world in myself.

Sharing my journey as a horse person and my healing journey has been very cathartic for me. I hope to make people feel less alone in doing so. I hope to be a lighthouse to help people find their way in the dark. To be the support that they can lean on in the midst of a storm.

And, I want to be that person for my past self. I want to become the person she deserved all along.

I want to help show people how much more beautiful and bright our lives can be and how much richer our relationships with our horses and others can be if we just start to see things a little differently.

So much judgment, harshness and negativity is promoted in horse training. Naturally, these attitudes get projected onto the humans within the horse world, too. It makes escaping these pressures all the more difficult.

But escape is possible and the more people who find it, the easier it becomes for others to join in without the same fear of judgment and persecution of those who aren’t there yet.

So, here is to a happy new year.

One of failures, mistakes and growth.

Of welcoming many new versions of ourselves and saying goodbye to many old versions.

A perpetual journey of self development that never stops.

Because true authenticity involves inviting all of the new versions of yourself, rather than clinging to an identity that no longer serves you or accurately describes your personhood simply because people have known that version of you for so long. Because you have known that version of yourself for so long.

So, welcome all of the versions of yourself that you encounter.

Change is great. It is beautiful and bright.

Even if those who choose not to change and who cling to comfortable patterns try to make you feel like it is foolish or disingenuous.

Only you know who you really are.

And only you can free your true self.

What Does Your Horse View as a “Champion”?

The expertise of riders and the weight their words hold is so often valued based on competition wins and training prowess; in that the extent of useful output they’re able to convince horses to do, no matter how, is what defines a good rider.

In the same breath, people will exclaim that horsemanship is all about the horse and loving the horse first and foremost…

Yet, we’ve created a value system that weights usefulness of the horse, their ability to perform, how well they perform and the levels they can achieve above all else… even if all of the aforementioned are achieved at the horses’ welfare deficits.

If it really is about the horse — the rider who puts their entire show season on hiatus to heal a horse’s physical or behavioural issues should be applauded in the same way, or more, than the Olympian who wins gold.

The rider who chooses to take their horse back to basics, even after having competed them 1.20m, because the horse is fried and needs a breather, should be valued just as heavily.

Foregoing instant gratification and longterm dreams for the longterm benefit of the horse is a lot more difficult than pushing on, when many will encourage you to do so, and achieving said goals at the expense of the horse’s welfare.

And yet, it gets almost no recognition.

The more I talk about welfare, the more heavily people ridicule and chastise me for my “lack” of human-centric accolades.

Even when my horse was off for over a year rehabbing physical and behavioural issues, I met criticism for not riding as often… as if I would be more admirable to continue trying to push a horse who was telling me he couldn’t.

Knowing when to step back for the sake of your horse is a much more important skill than being able to ride an upper level dressage test or jump around a big course.

It requires a level of humility that is hard to grasp. It sets aside immediate (and possibly long term) goals for the long term benefit of the horse’s wellbeing, above all else.

And, it often means you’ll be ridiculed by your peers for doing so. You’ll be judged for your decision to set aside personal gains for the betterment of your horse.

It’s a hard thing to do and deserves far more credit than what is often given because doing something that is entirely thankless, apart from the silent “thanks” your horse will give you, is a lot more difficult than pushing a stressed horse to do something that the masses will applaud and congratulate you for.

So here’s to all of the “gold medallists” of horse welfare, who will likely never be put on a podium for their choices or create fan clubs of enamoured fans, but their horses will be forever grateful.

What Will It Take to Speak Up For Change?

It seems that any time a concern regarding horse welfare is voiced, perhaps one that calls to change certain norms in training or management of horses, there is a resounding public outcry.

“This is the start of PETA cancelling the horse sport, because of tree huggers like you!”

“But I don’t do that to my horse, stop talking about this!”

“Most people love their horses, stop focusing on the negatives!”

“This is a slippery slope to riding horses being outlawed completely!”

Or any number of common deflection tactics that serve the purpose of trying to quiet any mention of concern for horse welfare.

People seem to feel attacked by any and all commentary on equine wellbeing, particularly when scientific study is brought up as a means of bringing a certain level of credibility to the table, an explanation for why there is need for change.

Even when they admit themselves that they aren’t guilty of whatever is being criticized, people often feel compelled to deflect and defend whatever the target of criticism is, oftentimes citing their fear of the sport being cancelled as whole for their reason for doing so.

To be frank, the biggest danger to the sport is our lack of ability to change.

It’s our denial of scientific research that shows us where there is need for change.

It’s our commitment to tradition over doing what is right.

It is our propensity to defend the actions of any upper level rider, simply because they’ve made it to the top and we’ve made ourselves believe that it isn’t possible to do so unethically…

The biggest danger to horse sports is ourselves. Us. The humans.

How do you think it looks to animal rights organizations and people outside of the horse world, who love animals, to see crowds of horse people deliberately denying the validity of scientific studies displaying some of the top welfare concerns in horse sport and horse care?

How do you think it looks to people outside of the industry to see horse people respond with immediate deflection, flimsy justification or outright denial?

I’ll tell you how it looks: it looks like we have absolutely no desire to change, no matter how much proof there is for our need to change. It looks like we refuse to improve and better the sport.

This attitude, if anything, will further justify a more extreme response to protect horse welfare. When you have a group of entitled people, flat out refusing any and all information that contradicts them, no matter how credible, it can feel pointless to push for welfare improvement that they won’t accept and uphold.

What is the point in improved policy if it seems the majority of horse people will refuse to put it in practice? And so, the horse sport may look unsalvageable to many people who have no stake in the game and therefore no reason or desire to defend the horse industry in the ways those who are part of it will.

Our stubbornness and refusal to welcome any improvement that serves to change the sport as we know it, that requests of us a change in perspective, is what puts our sport at the most grave risk. It is what calls into question whether the riding and ownership of horses can be done ethically.

Our attitudes, lack of willingness to accept change and use of status to deflect from welfare critiques will be the undoing of the industry.

People outside the horse world see right through the excuse of “so and so wins a lot, so they’re ethical” or “you don’t know my horse!” They see the deflection for what it is, without bias, because they haven’t been conditioned to have bias in favour of harmful practices… Whereas, the average horse person has.

So, next time you find yourself, or anyone else, feeling compelled to use the slippery slope argument to deflect away from discussions regarding positive change for welfare, remind yourself of this:

It is our apathy and refusal to accept modern information and change for the better because of it that will do us in. It is our apathy, selfishness and dissonance that will end the sport.

Not the openness and willingness to accept change where it is needed.

The Industry Perception of Stalls Needs a Massive Overhaul...

The idea of keeping horses stalled for much of their daily time budget is a common one amongst the horse world. It is arguably more common for people to stall their horses than not, oftentimes even being depicted in the media as the ideal living situation for the horse when we're viewing equestrian movies and TV shows.

The beliefs pertaining to stalling in the horse world are largely outdated with many horse people seeing absolutely no concern with horses spending the majority of their daily time budget (12+ hours) isolated in a stall that averages in size at about 12x12ft. The lack of awareness of the costs of such living environments contributes to many behavioural and physical health problems we see in horses today.

For decades, there has been a known correlation between stereotypic behaviours or "vices" and time spent stalled. Stereotypic behaviours are repetitive and largely functionless behaviours that serve the purpose of relieving stress. They are not seen in wild and feral horses. They are seen at a far greater prevalence in horses who spend more time stalled and isolated and studies have found a very clear link between stalled live and such behaviours.

On top of this, there is also a demonstrated link between extensive time spent stalled and risk of colic. Colic is every horse person's worst nightmare, the #1 cause of mortality outside of old age related death with a ~10% rate of death in horses who suffer from it. Increased risk of colic is directly correlated with stalling due to stalled horses exhibiting a greater degree of stress and having a lowered ability to move about and practice natural behaviours. Movement is crucial for proper digestion for the horse in addition to living in a low stress state, stress increases risk of digestive upset.

Despite there being such a clear link between these rather substantial health issues and stalls, there has been very little movement in the horse world to adapt the architecture of stalls and discuss ways we can modernize horse husbandry to make it more horse friendly.

While urbanization and lack of space does complicate things, I don't believe this is a sufficient excuse for not even making the effort to try to improve lives of horses and utilize modern research to do the best we can to emulate the most natural lifestyle and avoid substantial physical and mental health issues.

Many behavioural issues that disrupt horses use as riding horses are also correlated with time spent stalled due to there being a decreased ability to self exercise on the part of the horse. Horses who are stalled more are more likely to exhibit excitatory behaviours and respond with flight to novel stimuli. Improving living conditions could not only improve the wellbeing of horses, but also the safety of their humans.

Structured and controlled exercise also does not sufficiently replace the autonomous exercise that horses need for optimal wellbeing. While riding and working horses who have limited capacity to self exercise is better than nothing, it doesn't allow for autonomous movement on the part of the horse. Autonomy is highly reinforcing and imperative to adequate welfare. Horses need to be given the opportunity to explore and exercise of their own accord, not just only when they're being piloted by a human.

In addition to limited movement in the stalled environment, the isolation aspect of the traditional stabled lifestyle is incredibly damaging to equine welfare. As social herd animals, horses need to be able to socialize. Many of the problem behaviours we see, such as aggression to other horses, stem from environmental frustration and lack of development of social skills due to chronic isolation.

The ability to interact and socialize with other horses should not be viewed as an optional aspect of horse care. It is a standard the industry absolutely MUST move towards achieving on a global scale.

We can do better by horses. The common nature of these care practices does not mean it is healthy or ideal care for horses and despite the decades worth of replicated research depicting the same problems, it is not uncommon to see horse people deny the existence of such facts and make up excuses for why these aspects of care do not apply to their horses.

It is a difficult thing to accept, but once we start the conversation and start creating realistic solutions to improve the lives of horses, we will all benefit, but mostly, the horses will.

This is not a topic that is up for debate as there is substantial evidence behind it. We either accept the facts surrounding horse management or reject factual evidence to appeal to our own comfort. The latter is much more detrimental for horses and is, at its core, a selfish decision.

Most of the horse world loves their horses and means well, but we need to develop a more selfless love for them and do better by them. Love isn't always easy and convenient, sometimes it requires difficult self reflection and sacrifice.

Demonstrate your love for the horse by doing the difficult work that is undoing of personal biases and accepting the merit of information that may challenge the beliefs you held before. You and horse horse will both be better for it.


Supporting Evidence:

Christensen et al, "Effects of individual versus group stabling on social behaviour in domestic stallions," Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 75, Issue 3, 2002, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1591(01)00196-4.

Cooper & Albentosa, "Behavioural adaptation in the domestic horse: potential role of apparently abnormal responses including stereotypic behaviour," Livestock Production Science, Volume 92, Issue 2, 2005, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.livprodsci.2004.11.017.

Cooper, J., McGreevy, P. (2007). Stereotypic Behaviour in the Stabled Horse: Causes, Effects and Prevention without Compromising Horse Welfare. In: Waran, N. (eds) The Welfare of Horses. Animal Welfare, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48215-1_5

Goodwin, D. (2007). Horse Behaviour: Evolution, Domestication and Feralisation. In: Waran, N. (eds) The Welfare of Horses. Animal Welfare, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48215-1_1

Hausberger et al, "Lower learning abilities in stereotypic horses," Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 107, Issues 3–4, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2006.10.003.

Heleski, et al, "Influence of housing on weanling horse behavior and subsequent welfare," Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 78, Issues 2–4, 2002, Pages 291-302, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1591(02)00108-9.

Hothersall, B. and Casey, R. (2012), Undesired behaviour in horses: A review of their development, prevention, management and association with welfare. Equine Veterinary Education, 24: 479-485. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2042-3292.2011.00296.x

Houpt, K., Houpt, T., Johnson, J., Erb, H., & Yeon, S. (2001). The Effect of Exercise Deprivation on the Behaviour and Physiology of Straight Stall Confined Pregnant Mares. Animal Welfare, 10(3), 257-267. doi:10.1017/S0962728600024039

Lesimple et al, "Stall architecture influences horses’ behaviour and the prevalence and type of stereotypies," Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 219, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2019.104833.

Löckener et al, "Pasturing in herds after housing in horseboxes induces a positive cognitive bias in horses," Journal of Veterinary Behavior, Volume 11, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2015.11.005.

McBride, S.D. and Long, L. (2001), Management of horses showing stereotypic behaviour, owner perception and the implications for welfare. Veterinary Record, 148: 799-802. https://doi.org/10.1136/vr.148.26.799

MCGREEVY, P.D., CRIPPS, P.J., FRENCH, N.P., GREEN, L.E. and NICOL, C.J. (1995), Management factors associated with stereotypic and redirected behaviour in the Thoroughbred horse. Equine Veterinary Journal, 27: 86-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2042-3306.1995.tb03041.x

Park, Sang-Kook & Jung, Hee-Jun & Choi, You-Lim & Kwon, Oh-Sub & Jung, Young-Hun & Cho, Chung-Il & Yoon, Min. (2013). The Effect of Living Conditions on Stress and Behavior of Horses. Journal of Animal Science and Technology. 55. 10.5187/JAST.2013.55.4.325.

Sauer FJ, Hermann M, Ramseyer A, Burger D, Riemer S, et al. (2019) Effects of breed, management and personality on cortisol reactivity in sport horses. PLOS ONE 14(12): e0221794. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221794

WATERS, A.J., NICOL, C.J. and FRENCH, N.P. (2002), Factors influencing the development of stereotypic and redirected behaviours in young horses: findings of a four year prospective epidemiological study. Equine Veterinary Journal, 34: 572-579. https://doi.org/10.2746/042516402776180241

Werhahn et al "Competition Horses Housed in Single Stalls (II): Effects of Free Exercise on the Behavior in the Stable, the Behavior during Training, and the Degree of Stress"
Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, Volume 32, Issue 1, 2012,
Pages 22-31,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2011.06.009.

Yarnell et al, "Domesticated horses differ in their behavioural and physiological responses to isolated and group housing," Physiology & Behavior, Volume 143, 2015, Pages 51-57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2015.02.040.

Human Exercise Faces Vs Horse Stress Faces

“Human athletes often look angry and in pain when under physical strain for sport!”

The age old excuse that is so often brought up when people discuss the prevalence of pain and stress faces in competition horses.

So let’s dive into this and point out some of the flaws with this argument as a deflection away from needed discussion about sport horse stress and why we need to be looking at how to mitigate it.

First and foremost — human athletes consent to sport. Even if they ARE in pain, they’ve made the express decision of their own accord TO compete and can opt in or out at any time.

Horses do not have the same privilege, in fact, when they exhibit behaviours that serve as their “no, I don’t want to do this” they are often punished for it and such behaviours are labelled as disobedience and disrespect.

This comparison would only really be relevant if everyone in the horse world practised consent based training and didn’t continue to push when horses tried to say no and certainly didn’t opt to physically punish horses when they try to resist engaging in wanted behaviours.

If consent were prioritized in horse training, then we could MAYBE argue that horses make the choice to compete despite physical discomfort / are merely making a “focus” face due to physical strain.

Also, what we aren’t going to do is claim that horses do consent because if they “didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t” as there’s already been some studies showing there’s absolutely no correlation between obedience and lack of stress or a desire to participate.

Secondly, humans are predators. Horses are flight animals. It is in the nature of predators to engage in more physical strain to seek certain outcomes whereas flight animals are natural energy conservers.

Flight animals also, if anything, seek to mask pain and discomfort, because making this outwardly obvious makes them an easy target for predation by signalling some level of weakness.

So, when they do start to show clear discomfort, more often than not, it is the indicator of a more severe level of discomfort, rather than something that should be immediately shrugged off as nothing.

Thirdly, at this point in research, we have enough studies that use biological markers, such as blood and saliva cortisol levels to link certain horse behaviours to stress and pain. Given the fact that they are actually testing for stress hormones, this removes the level of bias or personal perception that may be present when you are simply only looking at outward behavior .

On top of this, there have been equine pain studies where researchers have looked at the faces of horses who have known pain issues before and after treating such pain with pain blockers like lidocaine and they have tracked the results reliably to conclude what behaviours are likely to be associated with pain.

As horse advocates, we need to be really careful how quickly we write off the discomfort of a being that is not ourselves, especially one that has no voice, because it is easier to air on the more favourable side for ourselves. It is tempting to shrug things off if acknowledging their presence seeks to potentially disrupt our ability to use the horse for desired purposes.

It is much harder to look at situations critically when they serve to cause us personal discomfort and potentially alter the way we view the sport as a whole.

But, it is necessary, and in order to be excellent horse owners, we need to do the uncomfortable work that is checking our own biases and not always taking the easy and comfortable way out.

Currently, there is no literature that supports the idea that like humans, horses may exhibit pain and stress faces simply due to physical strain and focus. There are some studies that see a smaller rise in cortisol due to the stress of exercise, which is normal, but there are thresholds that are normal for strenuous exercise versus an indicator of a higher, more chronic level of stress.

There are also numerous studies on elite sport horses at this point that find there to be high levels of stress associated with competition. Because of this, it is absolutely imperative that we start to look deeper and talk about what we can do to address this and lessen the level of stress that they may be under.

This shouldn’t be viewed as an attack on the industry as a whole because we have the capacity to change and develop with the times and use modern research to better the way in which we go about things for the sake of our horses.

The willingness to do so is the mark of a good horse person.

So, here is your encouragement to lay into the discomfort that is accepting that the way we have been taught to look at a lot of things, and the excuses that we make may be harmful to our horses.

The level of discomfort that we feel in starting to accept the fact that horse stress is much more prevalent than what we may like to admit, is absolutely nothing compared to what so many horses go through, completely unheard by their handlers.

We owe it to them to be a little bit uncomfortable in the pursuit of knowledge that will allow us to be better horse people to them.

Harm Reduction in Horsemanship

Something that I don’t think is discussed often enough in the horse community is the idea of harm reduction.

So much of the horse world seems to view all opinions in a very black and white light, assuming that someone either has to be completely for something or completely against it. And, unfortunately, a lot of horse people DO contribute to this belief by publicizing their very black and white views.

A lack of nuance can contribute to more harm than some flexibility, or at minimum, understanding of where other equestrians may at in their journey of knowledge acquisition and horsemanship improvement.

I do think as an industry there needs to be a certain openness to people who are moving towards reducing harm in their horses, even if they are not fully there yet. Trying to do better is something that does deserve appreciation.

I do think that this is an important discussion when we are referencing the rewards based community versus people who are still using predominantly, or entirely, aversive methods. It’s a hard transition for people to make especially with how closed off much of the community still is to rewards based training, it can be hard to find trainers and mentors to help make that transition and adequately learn how to use R+ or even just learn WHY it’s beneficial.

It is not reasonable to expect someone to go from using entirely traditional methods, with no rewards, to being purely rewards base with no aversives. This is the equivalent to expecting a horse to do a complete 180 in training and start doing the opposite of everything that they have learned prior in just a matter of hours or days, which isn’t something that good trainers would reasonably expect because we know re-learning and unlearning things takes time. There is an adjustment period and shaping typically has to be a slower approach of many little steps.

And so, it’s important to consider that operating with a shame based mentality and taking such a rigid stance that you cannot appreciate the growth of an equestrian until they have completely committed to a purely rewarded based approach is counterproductive. It is a mistake to label people who are actively trying to learn how to do better as terrible or abusive people simply because they haven’t fully committed to the entire process and are in the beginning stages of undoing previous mistakes. All this ends up doing is creating barriers that make people less likely to want to reduce harm due to feeling that nothing they do will ever be good enough.

The desire and attempt to start doing better is how one begins the journey of developing more ethical practices. No one starts this journey by fully committing to a 100% change in practices because it’s hard to do with a lack of support and resources, which let’s be real, science based horse training is currently under resourced due to how few available trainers there are with equine sciences backgrounds when compared to traditional trainers.

It’s imperative that we realize that the shift in the horse world won’t be immediate. We can hold space for our personal views while still recognizing when someone is engaging in harm reduction and choosing our battles wisely.

For example, you can believe that bitless riding is the most ethical way of riding. You can believe that there is no need for a bit and that they are always going to be uncomfortable and unfair to the horse.

BUT— you can do so while recognizing the fact that encouraging people to ride in a smooth mouth piece snaffle or rubber snaffle, is preferable to someone using an abrasive mouthpiece, such as twisted wire, or a gag bit. Doing so is probably more likely to result in a softening of methodology than demanding someone go bitless when they have grown used to using harsh equipment. They’re more likely to meet in the middle and choose a softer bit than they are to go from harsh bit to entirely bitless, especially when we remember the aforementioned lack of resources for qualified trainers to help them along this journey.

It may still fall outside of the realm of your ethical beliefs, but for the horse, the improvement from going from a harsher bit to a softer one is something that will still undoubtedly improve welfare, even if it is not the perfect situation.

And, for the horse, that welfare improvement is substantial enough to at minimum make their day to day more pain free and tolerable.

Similarly, even if you believe purely positive / rewards based training is the way to go, it is still a positive and meaningful improvement for someone to start using ANY rewards-based training in their program if they did not used to. Even if it is still not enough by your belief system, it will still enrich the horse’s life to have any type of rewards based methods used, even if it is more sparingly than what you may like.

Plus, beginning to use such methods allows people to see and test the efficacy of them, leading them to use them more and more in a lot of cases. It is the beginning of a transitional period and if we get too rigid with how people should go about things, we can cause them to balk and give up on testing the waters altogether, rendering their horses less likely to experience harm reduction.

This doesn’t mean we have to settle for situations in which welfare is undoubtedly impacted to an extreme extent, such as blatantly abusive training methods. Or, in the case of large governing organizations like the FEI, there is more need for accountability due to the level of influence they hold, so when addressing major governing organizations, it may be fair to be more critical of their decisions and what they enable due to the power they hold over the industry.

However, with what has been allowed to slide in the horse world and what has been normalized for so long, we do have to make some concessions because we cannot expect people to do a complete 180 from beliefs that have been instilled in them from the very beginning of their riding career. Beliefs that they had never been led to believe are problematic even in the slightest because they were educated in such views by someone they perceived as credible.

There is so much misinformation in the horse community, horse stress behaviour is so frequently mislabeled. Because of this, it can be very hard for people to not only find but also accept what is and isn’t true because if they’ve grown-up being told one thing and are suddenly having random people say the complete opposite, there will be a lack of trust in that information, and it will be hard to accept information that serves to completely dismantle their belief system.

Many people struggle with this transitional period, because it is exceptionally uncomfortable and it is reliant on a huge shift internally to fully accept and embrace ethical and science based methods when you have been taught something completely different.

Some people may have an easier time with this than others, but we shouldn’t base the way we go about this approach off of the most resilient people. We need to look at a pragmatic and realistic approach towards improving the horse world and that may start with realistic steps towards harm reduction, and then having our end goals of where we would ideally like for things to end up.

There are a lot of welfare concerns present in the Horse world currently that are totally valid. But because of the number of years that we have had people put into spreading misinformation and normalizing harmful practices, it will be very hard to completely just collapse that system without taking small, shaping steps to help people get to the eventual goal.

This is, of course, is within reason because certain practises that are so harmful do deserve to be taken on a hard line with less flexibility, such as the prevalence of hyperflexion in competition arenas, both in warm up and the actual show ring, this is not something we need to take the slow approach on because there is enough evidence and need for immediate change. Plus, this type of treatment is being enabled by powerful organizations that profit to the tune of millions off of the competitive world. Such entities are deserving of far more scrutiny than your average junior or amateur rider because there is a power dynamic involved.

Besides, as far as training goes, it is a lot easier for people to adapt training to avoid hyperflexion than it may be for them to fully embrace positive reinforcement training or switch from going bitted to bitless if they lack the instruction to do so.

Similarly, improving bitting regulations in the in competition ring is a realistic approach to harm reduction because it’s not calling for a complete ban that will result in people balling at the idea of change due to its extremity, and because of this is more likely to be accepted with less of a fight. Besides, more stringent bit regulations are a stepping stone towards less harsh practices, even for people who eventually want to see bits banned, it should still be viewed as a win to set a standard for what level of harshness isn’t allowed in the arena.

When we take a very extreme approach to things, it increases the likelihood of people completely writing it off and wanting to entirely resist without even considering the possibility for change or looking at the information to justify the need for change, which will end up prolonging how long it takes to achieve meaningful growth in the industry.

Starting with realistic goals is of the utmost importance and starting the discussion in the first place is paramount because it opens the door for people to slowly learn about a better and more ethical way of doing things when they may not otherwise be able to access the information.

I think a lot of people are extremely well-intentioned and I do think that there is merit to those who have adopted more extreme mindsets, such as being completely anti-bit, however, I see how the response from the general horse community to such mindsets is counterproductive in igniting change. Because a lot of people are put off by the extreme nature of these views and fail to even consider what would be valuable information that they may be open to if those producing such information were not taking such a hard and fast stance .

We can do so much better for our horses and I really do believe that harm reduction is a very positive start because at the minimum it will reduce the harm that horses experience, instead of prolonging it by creating argumentative discussion that seeks to try to halt said needed change. A little improvement is better than no improvement at all and this does not mean we should give up and not continue pushing for needed change, but we should see steps towards a more ethical industry as a little win, even if the battle has not been completely won yet. It is still a step in the right direction.

So while people may want to ban horse sports or horse racing or bits or XYZ, getting to that point is something that is going to take a lot of time. Would they not prefer to help better the lives of horses in the meantime by improving regulations to help promote better welfare practice? Otherwise, the alternative is creating a ton of discourse with no change while in the meantime horses continue to suffer with little to no efforts being made to reduce harm as the sport currently exists.

We should not be so stuck in our personal views that we negate any ability to create immediate and sweeping improvement that could better the lives of horses long-term and lead to what the eventual goals may be.

Even those who have the most extreme stance of wanting to ban all equine sports are still benefitted by harm reduction, because it is a step towards their eventual goal whether or not it is fully representative of the direction that they want things to head. It is still a win in terms of welfare improvement.

I, for one, am not for a complete ban but I fail to see why those who are wouldn’t be happy with measures being taken to make horses more comfortable and cared for in the meantime, after all, is the movement to end all horse sports not about the well-being of the animals? If that is the case, harm reduction should be embraced rather than shrugged off as not good enough.

So, here is your encouragement to be open to people improving, to not hold them to their past mistakes and to be happy to see harm reduction in the industry

Tides are changing, attitudes are shifting, and people are becoming more and more open to these ideas so we have to try to find ways to support them in trying to make positive changes for their horses even if they’re not at the final destination for what would be best for horse welfare quite yet.

Reinforce the changes in human behaviour we want to see by appreciating those who are making an active effort to learn how to do better and are attempting to adopt a more welfare forward approach because this is where it all begins.

I used to resist a lot of the information I now embrace. At first, my change started off slow but then it began to catch fire as I learned more and realized how well these new rewards based methods worked and realized how the changes in management of my horses benefitted both myself and my horses.

From there, I kept going and didn’t look back. But, it took me testing the waters first and really learning that such changes could bring so much positivity to the life of myself and my horses. I had to try it first.

And, when I did, I got hooked.

So, all we have to do is wait for people to get hooked.

Put the information out there. Encourage them to try it in their horsemanship. Applaud them for their attempts and gently help them along the journey.

When they realize it works, their interest will be piqued and they will become much more accepting of new information and then so begins the journey of change.

We can reduce harm in the horse world, but we may need to consider approaching it similarly to how we would nervous horses and recognizing that one step forward is better than no steps forward.

Save the anger and rigidity for powerful governing organizations and try to encourage the average horse owner along with compassion when they’re actively trying to find ways to reduce harm.

Behavioural Suppression Is An Unhealthy & Archaic Method Of Training

Behavioural suppression is an epidemic in the horse world… AND the human world.

Equestrians everywhere are often only given a toolbox that suggests punishment for getting rid of unwanted behaviours.

Punishment may be rebranded to sound better by being called “correction” or “discipline” or “creating respect” but it is punishment nonetheless.

If the horse bites you? Hit him.

If he bucks? Spank him with the whip.

There is no shortage of examples of how punishment is used to suppress unwanted behaviour in the horse industry, failing to get to the nitty gritty of the root response and actually address the reason WHY the horse is doing the behaviour.

I think this attitude comes so easily to humans because in our day to day life outside of horses, we are also encouraged to suppress behaviours.

“Don’t cry!” You’re told when you noticeably start to tear up.

“Stop doing that!” A teacher says to a stimming kid who is nervously tapping their pencil.

We’re taught to hold in our emotions and make our behaviour palatable to our society, sacrificing well-being whether we realize it or not.

All behaviours have an underlying motivation, whether we realize it or not.

Us humans are often so out of touch with our bodies and our emotional responses that we may not even realize what sensations and emotions are connected with one another because we’ve been so encouraged to shove it down internally and ignore it.

Emotions may sometimes feel inconvenient but they’re necessary to express and they’re the driving force behind behaviour.

How you feel internally impacts how you react, same with your horse.

Our entire world would benefit from people becoming more aware of how damaging and ineffective behavioural suppression is.

Suppressing one unwanted behaviour may work temporarily, but in the long run, it just causes more fallout behaviours as the learner adopts new behaviours to fill the role the punished one served.

If the underlying motivation is not addressed, the need driving the unwanted behaviour is likely still there and will need some sort of outlet.

When we try to bottle up emotions for lengthy periods of time, we see explosives, in both horses and humans.

That horse that reacted out of nowhere? He really didn’t, he just had the prior warning signs punished away and suppressed them until he can’t take it anymore.

That human that snaps and throws an adult temper tantrum? Sure, they may be overreacting to the situation that was the final trigger for them, but they’re merely unleashing a whole sea of emotions they’ve ignored and suppressed until they simply cannot anymore.

In order to even begin healing the broken aspects of society, we first must acknowledge what factors cause them. There is so much that is vastly misunderstood in both human and animal mental health, starting with how often bandaid fixes are used to address the symptoms rather than the cause.

If we focus on the symptoms of a problem rather than the underlying issue, we will always fall short of properly addressing it.

Symptoms are merely how the issue materializes outwardly. They’re clues to follow towards finding the cause, but they’re not the sole problem and we should not fixate on merely eradicating behavioural symptoms, we must focus on healing the underlying problem.

Let’s modernize and become more compassionate in how we train our horses AND how we view ourselves and other humans.

Suppression will always come at a cost and generally speaking, we do not enjoy paying that cost when it finally happens.

Feel your emotions.

Find healthy outlets.

Allow your horse to do the same.

The Rubber Band Effect in Horse Training

Let me compare horse training to a rubber band.

When you rush horse training and try to obtain a certain result on your timeline and not the horses, you stretch the elastic band.

You can stretch and stretch that elastic band and for a time, it’ll seem like you’re getting further ahead.

And for a time, it’ll actually be true.

But, as you push on, the tension will build and eventually, it will become too much and that elastic band may snap, rebounding back with much more of a sting than what would’ve otherwise have existed if tension was relived earlier.

If you had just relaxed and slowed down, allowing the horse to build the flexibility, fitness and understanding for the work being asked.

If the horse’s fear and tension was honoured and sought to be relieved instead of punished and pressured on for a result…

If there had just been a little more patience, result could’ve been different. The fall out that is a snapped rubber band, a broken or traumatized horse, need not exist. The damage may be mental, emotional or physical, but the damage is still apparent.

When we push and we push, eventually, the horse will hit a breaking point and once you get to that point, the physical and mental damage the horse sustained in the process can come rebounding back in a manner much more severe than what would have been had the time been taken in the beginning.

Trying to fix something that is damaged or broken is a lot more difficult than not damaging it in the first place.

If you’re interested in more training help, tutorials on reading equine behaviour or other learning resources, I have several options:

Free learning resources: http://milestoneequestrian.ca/resources

Purchase behaviour webinars:

http://milestoneequestrian.ca/shop-milestone

Subscribe to Patreon: http://Patreon.com/sdequus

Treats & Science Based Horsemanship Changed My “Crazy” Horse’s Life

Switching to using a predominantly rewards based program with my horses has changed my life, particularly with my rescue horse, Milo.

Milo was the quintessentially difficult horse. I adopted him from the BC SPCA as a 2 year old back in 2014. He was born into starvation and was eventually rescued as a coming 2 year old, so emaciated that he was just a 1.5 on the body scale and the SPCA initially had aged him as a yearling (a later dental clarified his age). He was nervous of people, exceptionally strong willed and “stubborn” in addition to being highly sensitive, highly intelligent and very anxious. The perfect storm of traits to make a difficult horse, the type of horse who responds extremely poorly to rough, forceful or high pressured handling.

Even a more “classical” or “gentle” traditional training approach using pressure and release was too much for Milo at times. He felt little incentive to do what I asked and despite being exceptionally tolerant of me despite his inner turmoil, he was very comfortable with outwardly voicing his anxiety through biting, bucking, leaping, refusing and sometimes, rearing. But, mostly bucking.

His bucking videos actually are what initially built my following on social media…

I fumbled through Milo’s training, doing the best I could to listen to him with the knowledge I had at time. While I pushed him way too hard, lost my patience with him and got frustrated and would be overly punishing at times, I will say that I do strongly believe I made a greater effort to listen to communication than many riders might have. Lots of different trainers, much more experienced than I, would encourage me to “show him whose boss” and punish him more than I was comfortable with. They interpreted his anxious behaviour as malicious, though I didn’t believe it was.

As Milo and I both grew older, I started to explore more science based training methods. I started classes in U of Guelph’s Equine Sciences program. I took human psychology classes at a local university campus. I learned more about Behavioural science and had previous misgivings reaffirmed by science and connected with like minded people.

Milo was my first horse to experiment on with what I learned and the changes I started to see were remarkable and undeniable. I started using rewards based methods more and more and then begun my deep dive into hoof care and natural horse care. The science behind equine stress and how many modern boarding situations are inadequate for horses due to lack of socialization, lack of free choice forage and lack of space. I applied what I learnt and saw the changes.

Good intentions but wrong application with hoof care had destroyed Milo’s hooves for many years before I made the big jump to look into transitioning to barefoot. His hooves already were not the most ideal due to his history of malnutrition but we underran the heel, lengthened the toe and made his already thin soles more susceptible to discomfort with how his issues were managed. Pads and wedges kept him more or less sound visually but did little to help with his discomfort and his hoof soreness definitely came out in behaviour.

Milo was so incredibly sore barefoot initially that he looked foundered. We had to utilize hoof casts, boots or glue on shoes initially because it was cruelty to have him be as sore as he was completely barefoot due to how dysfunctional his hooves were. It was a long, long journey fixing the damage. His posture adapted to handle the poor hoof angles so his whole body needed a full reset. His posture was created by the hoof issues but also contributed to the hoof issues, so it took a long time and a lot of adjustment to being more and more comfortable before he has started to consistently move and use himself in a way that is promoting healthy posture and hoof health.

We had some setbacks where despite my improving good intentions for Milo and my desire to follow a rewards based and science backed approach, I didn’t do right by him. We had a horrible trail ride where we got lost on trails, marked as horse trails, but not suitable. Due to the fact that they were in the mountains on a path we couldn’t turn around on, by the time we’d realized it was too late too turn around so we had to keep going. It was a stressful, scary and horrible endeavour for the horses and humans. Milo wore his FormaHoof hoof moulds completely down to nothing and I’m sure was very sore. But, he did everything I asked despite his fear and pain. I completely expended his entire emotional piggybank and I think it was the last straw for him after years of doing his best for me.

He needed to be treated for grade 3 ulcers, refused to go forward both under saddle and on the ground and presented with hoof soreness, particularly in his right front. X-rays on all hooves, ankles, stifles and hocks showed nothing. He’d had previous back x-rays and those showed nothing. The move was the save for an MRI, give him previcox to keep him comfortable and have a lengthy period of time off in hoof rehab and hope that would fix the issues.

That started what would be nearly 2 years of mostly time off rehabbing hoof soreness in the field, doing some flat and ground work but largely just existing as a horse and doing stretching/physio exercises.

His hoof soreness made him move around less which aggravated his issues and made him more aggressive to other horses in the herd. He was more crabby and stressed. As he started to let go of the hoof and body soreness this got easier and he became much easier to work with in training and in the field. He was clearly happier. The way he approached food in training became less anxious. He actually begun to willingly want to move forward.

When I did get an MRI, it showed the best case scenario. No significant damage to any inner structures with the vet hypothesis that his lameness was related to chronically poor hoof pastern axis angle and deep bruising.

His continued hoof and full body rehab has proven this hypothesis correct and he continues to get better.

Using food rewards to counter condition all of the negative associations Milo had developed with riding due to his history of chronic anxiety and pain has been my saving grace. It has quite literally helped to bring back the joy he feels in moving and helped me to have him willingly engage in exercises to rehab his hooves along with a locking stifle, both of which benefit from movement.

Prior to this full body reset Milo was a horse who post-trail-ride-from-hell would bite at me if I tried to mount him. Not for girthing or anything else, just for mounting. He made it clear he wanted nothing to do with it. He stopped wanting to be caught in the field. He was cranky during feed time to people and the other horses. He didn’t want to move or play with the other horses and spent most of his time standing and eating, gaining weight due to lack of movement. Even with food rewards, he didn’t want to move forward at liberty or under saddle.

Leading up to his MRI, I was worried he would need to be euthanized over some horrible chronic injury due to the lengthy time period of his on and off issues and the lack of findings we’d had in imaging. I was hesitant to believe that shoes and hoof angles that I’d seen in many, many other horses like him, could contribute to a problem to this degree.

But, as time has passed, it seems to be true. You really can see your horse do a complete 180 with a science based approach. You can really resolve lamenesses and issues that you believed to be chronic and career ending. You can really see changes that you believed to be impossible.

Milo isn’t perfect and he is definitely still rehabbing from the damage done to his body from chronic stress, hoof issues and more but I can see the changes in him everywhere. Every aspect of his personality has softened. He is so much happier. His body looks healthier, his legs look healthier. He looks like he has gotten younger, rather than older, despite the fact that he will be 11 years old this year.

I used to sneer at people who suggested a more holistic approach. I thought some horses just needed shoes and refused to believe there could be soundness concerns with a metal open heeled shoe since everyone seemed to do it. I didn’t think free choice forage or herd socialization was necessary. I thought food rewards made for aggressive horses.

But, I was so incredibly wrong.

And, I’m so thankful I realized that before it was too late to offer Milo a better life and fix problems that I contributed to causing for him.

I’m so thankful that Milo is willing to forgive me and start to find enjoyment and safety in working with me again, after I drained his emotional piggybank following years of taking more than I gave back to him.

I’m hopeful that I’ve finally begun to repay him sufficiently and not be so gluttonous with my expectations of him if I’m not offering much in return.

Judging by his behaviour, I think this may just be the case.

This is a longwinded way of saying that the fear mongering towards rewards based training and changing of the status quo in the horse world is rooted in ignorance and lack of desire to accept change. I used to be guilty of doing it and the feeling is intimately familiar.

As someone with a “crazy” horse who I could have used to justify all sorts of harsh forms of training and harsh training gadgets, I’m here to say that none of that stuff actually helped him. It just continued to deplete his emotional piggybank until he couldn’t take it anymore. If I had let him down when he hit that point, he could have ended up just like thousands of “broken” or “problem” horses do: at the auction, ready to ship for meat. And it would have been 100% my fault for having tunnel vision in training and making decisions selfishly instead of doing the necessary work on myself to be better.

The crazy horses are misunderstood. They’re the horses who snapped under unfair pressures and are honest and persistent enough to keep telling you this. They shout and they shout, even as they get yelled at, beat and mistreated for it. They don’t shutdown, they keep fighting. Humans hate these horses because they are difficult. They use these horses to justify their abuses, but these horses are this way because the abuse and neglect. It’s a perpetual cycle driven by humans who would rather continue to harass animals than look within and work on themselves.

A lot of the problems humans run into with horses are caused by our refusal to train the animals in front of us. They’re flight animals, yet so much of what we are taught to do with them revolves around denying this very nature. Studies continue to get churned out, identifying clear issues in modern horse training and care, but the industry denies them.

Organizations like the FEI contribute to this, claiming that “[horse] welfare is paramount” in their rulebooks, but doing nothing to acknowledge the growing welfare concerns from equine ethologists and other professionals in the equine science field. These empty claims that welfare matters are persistent, despite the growing research depicting clear trends of the industry’s inability to accurately assess welfare of horses.

Welfare isn’t an opinion.

It isn’t what we humans decide what we’d like to see.

It is what the horse feels.

It is the horse’s reality.

Not what we decide to rewrite of it using our big, egotistical predator brains.

It is exceptionally easy to fall into denying information that is difficult to hear. I did that to Milo’s detriment for longer than I would like to admit. My biggest regret with delving into science based horse training is the remorse I feel for being hyper aware of the mistakes I made for so long but not having started fixing them earlier. It’s hard to see the damage that you’ve done and not be able to go back in time to lessen it.

There is a lot of merit to seemingly “extremist” takes like the anti-open heeled metal shoes movement (aka barefooters) and the clicker trainers or “treat trainers” but it is being deliberately suppressed by our industry, making it comfortable for the masses to vehemently deny what is factual information that would benefit them and there horses.

People who do subscribe to rewards based methods are often mocked and labelled as inferior for doing it, despite the incredible lack of evidence proving that it is inferior to pressure and release. Being ostracized by the community for this is often enough of a deterrent for people to never want to try it, or to give up early.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that highlights the success of rewards based training across all different species of animals, horses included. There is little evidence showing it makes animals more aggressive. There is, however, plenty of evidence depicting a greater risk of injury to humans from stressed horses and higher concentrations of stress hormone release in horses in high pressure and/or punishing programs.

Humans are literally MORE at risk of dangerous behaviours from horses when they are stressing them out.

And yet, so many of us are taught to deliberately stress horses in the name of training.

I hope in sharing my story, I can convince people that they may just be getting lied to by the generally well intentioned beliefs in the industry that are rooted by blatant misinformation. There is absolutely no reason why using more rewards, more patience, more empathy and kindness in training will be detrimental to you or your horse.

There is no evidence of this.

But, being highly punishing and using painful training tactics and/or keeping horses in environments that don’t adequately meet there needs is incredibly damaging and has been proven to be so.

Don’t make the same mistakes I did for as long as I did.

Burnout And How It Almost Robbed Me of My Love For Horses

Grittiness and hard work is so celebrated in the horse world that oftentimes, people don’t even realize when they’re pushing themselves past their limit until it’s too late. Working long hours with little breaks and having the expectation that you’re to be at work rain or shine, healthy or sick, doesn’t really promote putting your physical and mental health first.

I didn’t realize what exactly I was getting myself into when I first started training professionally. It had been a long term dream of mine and in the beginning it felt like a dream, but then the reality of the pressures of the job started to creep in.

If I was feeling unwell physically or mentally, missing work really wasn’t an option. I was expected to be there, no one could replace my job. I often worked alone, so many clients didn’t really care if I came to work sick if it was between that and their horses getting worked. So, I pressed on.

I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place many times. The expectations of clients did not always align with what I viewed to be ethical. And, since I was still establishing myself, it was a lot easier for middle-aged clients who’d been in the industry their whole lives to pressure me into doing what they wanted despite the fact that they were paying for my expertise.

I tried to advocate for horses and voice concerns when they felt sore, showed signs of ulcers or had saddles that didn’t appear to fit, or maybe they didn’t get enough or any turnout…

But, the reality is, people don’t always listen. Often, they don’t.

They may make excuses to put it off, or they may blatantly deny that there’s an issue, claiming they’ve already looked into it or saying that their horse is just quirky and that’s how they are.

And so, I was met with the choice to either stand my ground for what I felt was right and lose clients, and thereby my income, or find some way to try to meet in the middle and offer the horse the most ethical handling I could in that situation.

I needed money and I needed to find ways to slowly encourage clients to consider my perspective, so oftentimes, I kept working. It made me bitter and resentful towards the jobs sometimes and made it difficult to want to go to work.

I hated seeing miserable horses who were stressed and begging for a change in their life. I hated working at barns where horses virtually only ever saw the inside of the barn unless they were going out to work. The horses were more reactive and dangerous to work with by far and I knew why and empathized with them, but their behaviours still endangered me, making it hard not to get stressed and frustrated, especially when I was blocked from finding a real solution due to their owner’s unwillingness.

I didn’t even realize it happening, but I feel into such a state of burnout and depression that more often than not, I was too exhausted to even want to work with my own horses. I went through the motions of feeding them and caring for them, but could seldom muster the energy to work with them. The fact that I no longer seemed to enjoy working with my own horses bothered me immensely.

Owners would often misrepresent their horses’ experience. Claiming they’d been angels for their first few rides, or that they’d only had a couple of months off when the reality was that they had definitive issues that the owner didn’t want to let me know about due to fear I wouldn’t want to work with the horse. Or, perhaps, they really were that ignorant to their own horses behaviour.

I could see horses exhibiting signs of stress that served as “tells” that they weren’t ready to move onto the stages of training that their owners believed they were ready for. I would try to express this, but would be shutdown.

I firmly believe that a lot of these older horse people leveraged the advantage they had over me with age and perceived experience and used it to pressure me to getting on their horses because they knew they could. And for a while, it worked, because I felt the need to prove myself and was worried about getting bad reviews and damaging my career.

I got on youngsters who were ready to jump out of their skin even though I would have preferred to do more days of groundwork. I would be thrown around like a ragdoll when they did react, luckily, I usually stayed on, but the act of being thrown about like that takes a toll on your body regardless.

I got on a 3 year old gelding one time, I’d done several days of ground work with him first and he seemed fine. He’d been broke before according to his owner and was “super easy and mellow.” He was stalled 20+ hours day, often the whole day. The poor thing had so much energy and nowhere to release it, it wasn’t his fault.

His owner decided she wanted me to get on him and told me this one day when I was prepping him for another ground work session. Again, she reiterated that he was fine and had only \had a small amount of time off so should pick up from where he left off.

I lunged him first, did some ground work and then we headed to the arena. She held him as I got on from the mounting block. I could feel his tension but assumed that like all of the other times, his reactions would be manageable.

I hadn’t even had time to put my feet into the stirrups yet. The horse took about one step before throwing his head down and broncing violently, his owner immediately let go of the reins and left me to my own devices.

I was rocket launched into the ground so hard I swear I left a crater. I tried to get up right away to catch my horse but as I tried to stand, the pain was so much I felt like I was going to vomit. I’d had some bad falls, but none that had felt like this. I had to take a knee and stay there, my hip and lower back aching.

The horse continued to bronc around the arena like a rodeo horse until he some how managed to get the saddle off over his head and neck, with the girth still attached on either side. Only after the saddle was off did he stop bucking.

His owner didn’t give me much of a second glance, she was clearly more worried about the horse despite that he’d not done anything to sustain injury and I was clearly hurt. She didn’t ask if I was okay, just said he’d never done that before.

This was an eye opening experience that led me to realize that some clients really did not care about my safety at all. I thought I’d broken my back that day and still struggle with on and off pain years later. All over believing the owner’s assessment of their horse.

As I learned more and tried to develop my education in the equine science realm, it became increasingly unbearable to exist in situations like this where the horses were so chronically stressed and their owners had no real desire to address it properly because they believed it to be normal behaviour.

I was starting to hate the very job I’d wanted for my whole life. I was cranky about going to work, chronically exhausted and body sore. Getting through the day took everything I had. I was depressed, lonely and losing my love for the sport but I needed money, so I kept on.

If I injured myself, I often had to work through the injury because I couldn't afford to lose money. I broke my hand one year, took a week off and then proceeded to gallop several horses a day in a wrist brace, hoping I wouldn’t displace the fracture and require surgery.

I worked through broken fingers, through soft tissue damage. Even head injuries, I would take a small break to try to at least get some semblance of rest, but then would have to press on because I felt I had no other choice.

My work was coming at the expense of my body and mind.

Some clients helped bring the life back into me by actually listening to my suggestions and being serious about addressing their horses issues. This gave me faith and led me to having more confidence to fire the clients who wouldn’t do this, or let them fire me when I stood my ground and refused to do what they asked.

But, it still hurt. It still hurt to have clients measure my skill off of how quickly I could make their horse do something, not how well the horse did it, how relaxed the horse was or how it set up a foundation for the future.

It also meant that I had to leave behind a lot of horses who I’d bonded with and really wanted to help, and leave them knowing their owner was going to be motivated to pick a trainer who was more willing to push them through their issues instead of addressing the cause.

It was like losing a friend repeatedly. Sometimes, I would see horses for lease or sale later and find out they were still struggling with issues. Other times, I would see posts of them performing “well” accordingly to their owners but see their faces riddled with stress and could see that the horse certainly didn’t feel well.

But, there was nothing I could do about it. So, I had to tuck away that sadness and desire to help the horse and move on, trying to forget about them.

I was becoming increasingly more cynical. For every good client I would get, I’d meet several who would eagerly hire me saying that they were interested in my unique skillset to solve their behavioural issues, only to find out that they only really meant this if I could do it in their quick paced time line.

Such timelines almost always existed with horses who were sore or outright lame, rehabbing injuries, very out of shape and in some cases, obese, or who had significant mental and emotional health issues.

Their owners would start out enthusiastic and excited about the progress as I built a foundation, but as they saw improvement, they started wanting it faster and faster, not understanding that in order to build fitness and relaxation, I had to do it in little blocks at a time. I couldn’t just slam on the gas and go as fast as possible as soon as they started to do well, or this would cause regression.

They didn’t understand this, though, and they were constantly looking for speed even if initially they’d assured me they just wanted their horses to be happy, to enjoy work and to learn how to do things correctly.

The horse world is always in a rush. Finding people who aren’t going to rush you and pressure you to get to a certain finish line regardless of how it’s achieved is difficult. The clients who are like this are special gems, worth their weight in gold, and I can always make the most difference in their horses because of how adaptable they are.

Year after year, I grew more tired and jaded. I started saying no to new clients more. I lessened my client load because I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Riding 10+ horses a day almost every day, rain or shine, cold or heat, was taking its toll on my physical and mental health.

I didn’t even have the energy to really have a life outside of work. I isolated myself from friends, making myself lonelier and lonelier, because I had to choose work or leisure. I didn’t have the energy for both, so obviously work came first because I needed money to live.

As I developed my business, I got more choosy about clients. It definitely became easier once I had more clients and more of an income outside of horse training, as I developed my brand and started to sell products as well. This was freeing, because I didn’t have to be so worried about money that I had to continue abusing myself in order to make income.

I curated my clientele more and more, being choosy about who I would stay with. I started to stand my ground and stay firm in decisions that I thought were best for the horses. I did this even though my voice shook and even though clients would make veiled threats about finding someone else to do it, or make a dig about me moving too slow or being over sensitive about their horses needs.

But, I stayed firm on my decisions because I figured that doing so would help lead me to clients that wouldn’t fight me when I told them their horse needed their saddle refit or that they had a slight lameness that should be looked at by the vet.

I lost clients I enjoyed working with initially and most of all, lost horses I adored. However, I was able to retain my integrity and that was a pretty good feeling, being able to stick to my values without fretting about going broke.

This past winter has been a healing journey for me. I’ve taken as much time off of regular riding than I ever have. It’s been so good for helping to heal chronic injuries and soreness. It’s been good for my mental health and has helped me to enjoy working with my own horses again.

It’s brought me a new perspective on my job and how I want to show up in the horse world. I was so burnt out because I wasn’t being authentic to myself and letting other people make decisions for me took a mental and physical toll I didn’t realize at the time. In some cases, I think I was in a state of learned helplessness because I really did feel like I had no other choice.

Giving myself my power back by making my own choices is what healed me.

Recognizing the fact that the horse world doesn’t model healthy work behaviours was healing as well.

Riding through injuries isn’t cool.

Ignoring your body when it’s telling you to slow down or take a break isn’t cool.

Making people feel like they’re less of a rider when they put themselves, their safety and wellness first isn’t cool.

A dedicated rider is one who recognizes that their health and wellbeing is as important as that of the horses they work with.

I’m glad that I’ve taken a hiatus from taking on regular clients. It has brought me happiness and peace that I’ve been missing for a while and has allowed me to reevaluate how I want to do things in the future.

To make the most difference in the horse world, I think my next move is going to be sticking to mostly doing clinics because it curates the type of clients who are expecting to have me work with them and their horses on that particular day, and then take what they learn to apply themselves in the future. There is no expectation of a certain timeline. The goal is merely improvement, not a specific destination.

And I like that.

I like working with people who respect my craft and are coming to me for my perspective, not to try to make me fit into a mould they’ve made for me with their expectations.

Sometimes loss is a blessing. Sometimes removing people from your life that don’t see eye to eye with you is what you need to do for your personal health.

Training horses is great but I’m no longer willing to burn myself out and let it suck the life out of me in the way I did for so many years.

I’m no longer going to endanger my body by rushing scared horses that the owners themselves wouldn’t get on. I’m not their crash test dummy and a client who doesn’t value my safety is not someone who deserves my services.

Burnout is common in the horse world, but it shouldn’t be viewed as normal.

We should all normalize taking better care of ourselves and not glorifying making work our entire lives.

The Horse World and How it Untrains Riders’ Empathy

Riders are trained with high pressure negative reinforcement and positive punishment, too.

I think this is why so many people respond with anger when they see longstanding traditional practices meeting rightful critique as we learn more about how to care for and train these beautiful animals in the most ethical way possible.

When you first start riding, you usually do not go into it wanting to hit or yell at horses. The first time your trainer tells you to ”spank” your horse with the whip or yells to “KICK HIM HARDER” you likely felt discomfort towards it or maybe resisted and didn’t want to.

Then your trainer will consistently apply the aversive pressure of yelling things like:

“GET AFTER HIM!”

“YOU ARE TEACHING MY HORSES BAD HABITS”

“YOU CANT LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS”

“He’s a horse, he’ll barely feel it!”

Then, when you finally give in, usually pink cheeked and embarrassed from the scene conversations like this can cause in public, you’re rewarded:

“Great riding! Way to go! Way to show him who’s boss!”

Compliments from someone you view as much more experienced than you and whose approval you crave, reinforcing the idea that getting after your horse and viewing behaviours as objectively “good” or “bad” is a good thing.

Positive punishment can be in by way of verbal digs from your trainer or if you don’t listen, then telling you to get off their horse or embarrassing you in front of peers.

It may even escalate to them forcibly doing the things you don’t want to or are unable to do.

Through this training, we are primed and condition to respond in a reactionary manner and not bat an eye over disciplining behaviours and escalating pressure to points where it causes horses high stress.

We are taught just to listen to authority and that the person you pay for lessons and training is inherently righteous, whether they can actually substantiate the process of their training and how it actually works or not.

We are taught not to question things because questions that our trainers don’t know how to answer are often met with anger.

We are taught that being a “good” rider involved being bossy, harsh and reprimanding our horses for displaying behaviours we don’t like, whether the behaviour is natural for the horse or not.

We are taught that being gritty and riding stressed out horses who are trying to unload us is something to be proud of.

That the bigger bit you ride your horse in, the more experienced your hands are and the more difficult your horse is. Look at how tough the horse I ride is and look at how I can boss him around and force him to work through his stress!

Our very value system is rooted in our ability to force a large, benevolent creature into doing our bidding rather than our ability to motivate our horses to do things we ask of them through partnership and mutual benefit.

Our value system is in our ability to ride through indicators of stress in training and signs that horse is struggling and do so without batting an eye and feeling for what our horse might be going through emotionally.

We are taught to view their stress as an inconvenience to us and thereby label stress behaviours as inherently bad and react to our horses as if they’re intentionally trying to defy us.

All if this is taught to us in a way that is so sneaky and insidious that so many riders don’t actually realize what has happened to them until they’ve lost many years to handling horses in a way that is largely ineffective and more stressful for everyone involved.

The goodness of a rider is in their ability to help stressed horses relax and become comfortable in their environments.

The goodness of a rider is in their understanding of the different timelines horses need and not trying to stuff horses in a one sized all approach.

The goodness of a rider is in their desire to use the softest equipment possible and not resorting to quick fixes like harsher bits or training gadgets likely to cause stress and pain.

The goodness of a rider is rooted in their empathy for their horse and their desire to do what’s best for the horse even if they’re mocked by other riders for us.

Many of us have had that goodness eroded away as we’ve gradually been pushed to be hardened against our will. It happens slowly enough that you don’t generally realize it. It’s a gradual conditioning in your early years as horse person.

Taking back that childlike enjoyment and appreciation of horses allowed me to develop more empathy and understanding in training.

Now, instead of taking pride in riding a stressed horse through antics dangerous to the both of us, I feel accomplishment when we avoid those antics altogether by not sending the horse over threshold when it’s entirety avoidable most of the time.

If horses are willing to do as much as they do for us when we demand it, take it forcefully and don’t stop often enough to consider their feelings, imagine what they would do if we gave them the same empathy, kindness patience and understanding they as animals so freely give us, even when we wrong them and misunderstand them on a rampant basis.

The room for improvement is extraordinary and I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of developing more empathy across the horse world.

Taking our relationships with horses from dictatorship to partnership opens the door for so much goodness.

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See my website for free resources, studies and more info on equine behaviour and training: http://milestoneequestrian.ca/resources

The Horse World Aversion to Treats

“Your horse is only doing it for the food!”

“You’re bribing them!”

“Shovelling food into them isn’t training!”

All of these are common thought processes in people seeking reasons to dislike modernizing training practices, particularly the idea of rewards based methods.

I am not sure why the idea of a horse doing something due to being intrinsically motivated by something they need (food) is such an aversive thought to so many humans, but here’s a question.

If the belief is that horses in rewards based methods only listen due to being bribed, then why do you think horses in pressure and release programs perform behaviour?

Let’s break down how pressure and release (R-) works from a behavioural science perspective.

“R” refers to reinforcer, reinforcers are what make a behaviour more likely to reoccur. The “-“ or “negative” doesn’t stand for “bad” but for “subtractive” in that something is being REMOVED in order to be reinforced.

Now, in order for the removal of something to be reinforcing to a creature, they have to not want it there in the first place, otherwise, if it was something they liked and wanted to seek, the removal of it would actually be punishing.

So, R- uses what we call “aversives” aka unpleasant stimuli that provide relief when removed.

This can range from really low level pressure, think of someone tapping you on the shoulder and then stopping when you turn around, to high levels of escalating pressure to the point it becomes punishing, think someone teaching a horse to lunge by swinging and chasing it with a whip (adding pressure) until it’s too scared to stay in the inner circle with the human, effectively teaching it that the only way of relief is to be away from the person.

So, if horses who do behaviours due expectation of reward are only doing it for food or due to being “bribed”, then why do traditionally trained horses answer to pressure and release?

It isn’t because they’re compelled to do the behaviour out of the sheer desire to do it, it’s because they get to alleviate discomfort by doing the behaviour.

Biologically, enacting a behaviour to alleviate discomfort is something seen in all sorts of animals, for example, feeling hunger or thirst pangs pushing you to go eat or drink, effectively ending the discomfort and reinforcing you to seek food or water when you feel those feelings again.

Pressure and release or “R-“ is not a bad thing in itself and it can be used effectively and in low stress ways, but the idea that horses trained with it have more motivation to want to do what is asked of them is a myth, their only real motivation is the desire for relief from pressure. The desire to escape from a feeling.

On the flip side, rewards engage the seeking system of the horse. You now have something they want and they’re learning when and what receives them that reward and start to learn to exploit the environment an offer certain behaviours to get that reward.

When the animal fears no punishment for the wrong behaviours but is consistently rewarded for the right ones, suddenly they’re going out of their way to offer you a million different things until they get the right answer.

Suddenly, your horse has gone from being the student who sits at the back of the class, never raising their hand or offering thoughts unless prompted, to the teachers pet at the front, excitedly raising their hand for every question,

Because it is more motivating for them. They get to receive something they like. They get to predict a positive outcome when they offer what humans want in training.

Pressure and release is not a bad thing but the comfort people have with using higher and higher amounts of pressure or having solely pressure based programs whilst there’s a mass discomfort over the idea of rewarding your horse is something we need to change.

The vast majority of horse people, even the ones most vehemently against rewards based methods, if you ask them, they either would support the idea of rewarding dogs with treats if they don’t have one, or if they do own a dog, I can almost guarantee you that there are at least several behaviours the dog was trained with positive reinforcement.

So, if we use it with dogs, who are predators and do actually consume meat, but don’t fear them trying to eat or “disrespect” us, why is there such an aversion to use them with an extremely passive flight animal that will almost always select the path of lease resistance?

It honestly makes more sense with horses to feed more food in regular handling and training than what we justify with animals who it is more traditional to use rewards based methods for.

Horses are trickle feeders. They’re meant to be eating on a near constant basis. Most of their daily time budget is eating.

Feeding them in training not only allows for this natural behaviour to occur more regularly, it can also fill the stomach and prevent acid splash and discomfort from high stomach acid in an empty stomach. This can effectively prevent or at least lessen the comfort of existing ulcers.

The drive to graze and forage for horses is so high that it makes perfect sense to exploit this in training if we’re honest with ourselves and lessen our firm grip on some of the weird ideas instilled into us from the time we first started to ride.

There are a lot of misconceptions and completely incorrect ideas that we are taught as equestrians.

Way too many trainers who are actively taking in horses and students have zero grasp of learning theory and behavioural science, something any decent animal trainer or teacher of humans needs to know very well.

It is way too easy for people who don’t understand how what they’re doing works on a behavioural science level to make up their own narrative and many people opt to do that, attacking the idea of feeding rewards out of fear.

Here’s the thing: across studies, CONSISTENTLY, we are seeing lower risks of behavioural fall out, stress, dangerous behaviours to humans etc in rewards based programs.

The majority of the concerns people use to try to derail the positive reinforcement movement are actually more applicable to traditional programs and the high rate of stress behaviours seen there or are more related to management of the horse, underlying pain etc.

It is pretty powerful evidence when you see similar trends of success across animal species when using rewards based programs.

“It makes horse food aggressive and pushy!”

You get what you reinforce, so if you’re finding this happening, please find a trainer who can effectively teach you correct timing and how to start because the issue in cases like these is not the method, it’s the application.

“It’s too dangerous to feed such large animals food, they can hurt you and need to be put in their place!”

I understand horse people love feeling big and tough but it’s time we take a seat and stop acting like we’re the only ones working with dangerous animals.

Zoos and animal sanctuaries for wild animals use positive reinforcement almost exclusively for teaching cooperative care practices (like participating in necessary vet procedures) and other every day behaviours they need.

They do this with powerful, heavy animals with the potential to hurt them. With more unpredictability due to their lack of domestication and in many cases, when these animals are more aggressive than horses.

They do it because it’s the most effective, successful and lowest risk to them as animal caretakers.

Hyenas, elephants, wolves, big cats, whales, seals…

You name it, they’ve trained it with food.

If you can train a wild animal who hunts and kills for a living to accept a treat in a safe way from a human, you can train a flight animal who strictly eats vegetation and has been domesticated for hundreds of years to do the same.

It just starts with being open minded enough to look at where the research lies instead of just listening to whoever yells the loudest.

There are few, if any, actual qualifications horse trainers need before they can offer services. Even the coaching certifications we DO have don’t focus on behavioural science or proof of any real grasp of learning theory in terms of how the horse learns, much of it is focused on how to write lesson plans for humans and how to use certain equipment, set jump distances etc.

If an understanding of learning theory and behaviour science isn’t a prerequisite for a professional in this industry, then you may have to outsource where you look for info and recognize you can’t put blind trust and weight in the opinion of a singular person simply because they say they know things.

There is a lot of misinformation in the horse world.

Undoing it first starts with an open mind, then conversation, then curiosity and further research.

Once you start to learn about the science behind training animals, aka the science of behaviour modification, you will be a force to be reckoned with. Concepts you used to struggle with you’ll soon understand and it will completely change your work with horses and other animals as you know it.

Lay into the science, learn and be surprised about the cognitive capabilities of horses and just how much they can learn if you motivate them the right way.

Welfare Discussion is Not a Personal Attack

A lovely OTTB I had 8-9 years ago. Poorly developed on the flat and rushed fences, I used a pelham that he did not need with a figure 8 and martingale so we could keep moving up jump heights.

Concerns about horse welfare are not a personal attack. People criticizing the mechanics of harsh bits is not a personal attack. Too often do people try to brush off relevant concern regarding outdated training and care practices in the horse world by labeling it as unkindness. This attempt to brush it off and label any information that they don’t want to believe as an “attack” undermines the relevant and necessary discussion on modern horse welfare.

It can be hard to learn about the detriments of certain practices that you were taught are perfectly acceptable. I’ve been there. It’s a very difficult feeling to grapple with and it’s often easier to go in denial. However, regardless of whether or not you alter your training or care practices, it is of the utmost importance to be receptive towards new research even if it just means you being more mindful while you engage in certain training practices, use certain gadgets or keep your horses in certain living environments.

The only way we can continually better our care of our horses is if we are honest with ourselves and open to learning new things, even if it is difficult.

 It is not an attack on who you are as a person when horse people speak out about current welfare issues in the sport. Even if you engage in the practices they condemn, they are condemning the practice. Not you being blinded to problems in the industry due to never being taught they are an issue in the first place. 

There is a learning curve, a steep one. After all, this is an industry that has misinformation being given to riders left and right. Physics of certain equipment downplayed. Behavioural issues ruled as “quirks” or stereotyped due to gender (mareishness), breed or labeled as the horse just being naughty.

The horse world is unique in how little value masses of people place in behavioural science and proven welfare practices. Experience and years spent showing or doing something of status in the horse world is viewed as superior to research by an awful lot of people. Then this mindset is passed down to impressionable new riders, eating up the info given to them by a professional who was also taught the whole “this is the way it’s always been” way from someone older than them.

It creates an echo chamber. An “us vs them” mindset between people who engage in more traditional training and care practices versus those starting to head towards science-based training and re-evaluating normalized management practices. 

This results in people feeling like they’re being labeled as abusers when information regarding things like modern stalling practices and the risks associated with that gets shared and people express concern for how long many horses spend in stalls. 

My old Arabian gelding showing a “whale eye:”. I frequently used twisted wire bits, draw reins etc to try to make him go into what I thought was a correct frame.

The reality is, it is just the practice being criticized. We need to share information to do better so we can stop the cycle of riders being introduced to stressed horses with stereotypic behaviours and/or pain behaviours as their first experience with horses. It causes them to normalize and ignore indicators of poor welfare practices, instances where the horse’s life could be immediately bettered in most circumstances, even just with vet care, enrichment or more thought. 

Many of us have been misled. Many of us have used practices that we now no longer believe in. The vast majority of us never intended to hurt our horses, it was the result of a culture that is normalized and entrenched in our community. 

The pervasiveness of this problem results in people viewing it as an impossible feat to do things a kinder way. To address behavioural issues without a harsher bit, more gadgets or more corrections. You’re taught that these things are normal. That horses are big animals who need to be put in their place or they’ll hurt you. And so, you hurt them first. Unknowingly creating a lot of the problems you are trying to fix. Never truly meaning to harm your horse.

You don’t have to agree with all of the information you read, but you should be open to reading researched information even if it challenges your views. Even if you cannot immediately resolve the situation you’re in, even if you’re not ready to completely dive into the research, you can at least make a start by simply being more aware.

By simply realizing that prestige in the horse world, amount of ribbons one, amount of years experience does not necessarily equate to ethical practice. It does not necessarily mean the rider or trainer is adept at assessing equine behaviour. It doesn’t mean they’re using species appropriate care practices. They may think that they are because they’re doing what they’ve always been taught, but it doesn’t make it so.

This is why unbiased research is so important for working out ways to ride, train and manage horses in the most ethical manner possible with the resources we have available. Resources include our current level of understanding and ability to take in and apply the information we learn. 

A lot of people are not immediately ready to recognize the current state of the horse world for what it is and the honest, objective amount of welfare concerns there are. They choose to deny and carry on because the other thought is too painful to bear. 

This is often the first stage before people take off on their learning journey. Denial.

Regardless of where you are at or what your beliefs are, know this: When I criticize certain training and care practices, I’m not ruling you as a terrible person who doesn’t love their horse. I’m ruling you as someone who is making mistakes as a result of the environment they were taught in.

 I’m ruling you as someone who I hope really begins to honestly consider the realities behind certain equipment, training and management practices so you can at least go into using those very practices with an honest idea of their severity and the risk factors. Because, even if you change nothing, the sheer knowledge of something like “this is how the mechanics of my bit work” may cause you to unconsciously soften your hands or be more open to other bitting options in the future.

My first OTTB mare riding very behind the vertical.

Everyone is capable of changing but it starts with us taking that leap. And, trust me, I know it’s scary. In some ways, I miss my naivety from back before I was less aware of the impact of the training and care practices I believed in. Less aware of how stressed so many of the horses I loved were. Less aware of the subtler signs of stress on horses around me. Less aware of the damages that long term isolation from other horses or lack of ability to move around do to horses both mentally and physically.

Ignorance in a lot of ways was bliss because I couldn’t have empathy for things that I didn’t believe were bad. I never was forced to consider my decisions fully because I genuinely did not see the impact I was having on my horse. I’d be enabled by so many role models and trainers at every level from within my barn to figures in the community, brands, organizations… the whole industry. 

I did bad things to my horses and made mistakes that harmed them mentally and physically. I enabled myself in training practices that were not fair and were essentially me taking my frustration out on my horses. I was encouraged to do so by people I perceived as more knowledgeable and experienced.

But, you know what? I was never maliciously going out of my way to hurt my horse. Even when I punished them and “corrected” them for things, it was done with the intention that it would keep us both safer and wouldn’t damage our relationship. That was a fallacy.

I had bad horsemanship and a warped idea of what good living situations looked like for horses. But, I was never trying to be intentionally cruel, even if my actions were perceived as cruel by my horse. I don’t think I was a bad person back then, even though I did things I now condemn.

I have this same belief towards anyone, even as they vehemently defend poor training and care practices. Ones that I now know in my heart are researched and heavily linked to welfare deficit.

Even if they are not ready to take the information in right now, they are still capable of change. I won’t support them in their denial of more credible information. If they have credible information on their side, I think it is a great opportunity for discussion and learning. But, if not, which is in a lot of cases when people merely cite “experience”, I maintain my stance based on what I’ve learned with being honest with myself.

I don’t dislike you as a person just because I disagree with practices you may engage in. I have been there and I get it. I wish I had gotten out of that mindset a lot sooner and so now, I dedicate a lot of time to talking about major issues in the horse world in hopes of modernizing practices.

So, even if we may disagree, just know that rarely am I calling someone a horse hater or abuser when I discuss certain welfare issues. It’s merely talking about the reality of the impacts and how we can make change. Not a personal attack, more so a commentary to my past self. Saying what I wish I had heard sooner.

All of the horses in photos I’ve used for this post I genuinely loved as horses. I did unfair things to all of them because it was what I was taught to do, was what a lot of other people did and I didn’t know better. So, I continued to enable my impatience and unfairness with my horses without even being aware of what I was doing.

I see this in a lot of other riders still and I feel the need to share my experience because I whole heartedly believe it is possible to make the horse world adapt to be more fair to the horse and it would, in turn, better relationships between horse and rider and overall performance.

We know better. We can do better.

Modernizing Horse Care & Training Practices

Me ridinG my old arabian gelding ~13 years ago. Look at his clear pain face. this was before i had any awareness of how i was HArming him

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room in the horse industry: equine welfare and modernizing practices as we learn about the detriments of many normalized care and training practices.

Most, if not all, horse people are in the industry for the love of horses, even the ones who end up accidentally causing harm. The problem is, most of us struggle to find teachers and role models who teach us science based principles, emphasize reading equine behaviour correctly and model good management practices.

Because of this, we have crowds of well intentioned equestrians simply following what their idols, trainers and role models have told them to do, even to the detriment of their horses’ welfare, all while being blissfully unaware that there’s even a problem.

I know this because I was one of these people. Growing up, I had the whole stall and small individual paddock lifestyle normalized to me. Horses would go out for a few hours a day into paddocks slightly larger than their stalls and then would be back in the stalls for the majority of the day. There was a high instance of stress behaviours aka “stall vices” but I was taught that weaving was just the horses “playing” or dancing and that cribbing was just a quirk, rather than the indicators of high stress and poor management conditions that they were.

Being around chronically stressed horses made it difficult, if not impossible, to tell a stressed horse from a relaxed one. Unless the horse was completely over threshold and obviously reacting to stress, I would miss the signs because I had never been taught to recognize them. Even in instances where horses were being explosive, I would often view it as excitement, them “being bad” or them trying to push me around. I did this because this is what I was taught to do.

For years, I watched my trainers, barn friends and everyone around us at shows and other facilities engage in nearly identical practices. I watched horses go into the show ring with bloody spur patches. I watched my instructor knee horses in the belly if they bloated while being girthed. I watched her tie my horse’s head to his girth while he wore a kimberwicke bit at a show, to “teach him not to be heavy”. She left him like that for almost an hour, until his muscles were convulsing from over use.

I distinctly remember being uncomfortable but as a nine year old child, I assumed that I was the one in the wrong for feeling that way. My trainer was all knowing, the epitome of horse knowledge to me at the time.

I was taught to seesaw my horse’s face when he was “bad” aka always spooking and bolting due to lack of time outside. I was taught to kick hard or spank with a whip when he didn’t want to go forward because he was “testing me”. I was taught to punish first and ask questions later.

I learned that good horse management required a stall. Horses needed stalls, they loved their stalls. It was like their “little safe space” I was told. Even as they existed in 10x10 boxes with boarded up walls, nothing to do the majority of the time due to set hay feedings that they would consume quickly, leaving them standing around with empty stomaches for hours.

I was taught that group turnout was too dangerous and that it wasn’t necessary. For years of the beginning of my riding career, the idea of horses needing socialization never even crossed my mind. And so, I deprived my horse of the very things he needed most for years, all while having no idea I was doing it.

As a result, my horse was chronically spooky and had a bolting problem. It made me frustrated with him and more likely to engage in the punishments I was taught and consistently reinforced for when I did them.

When I did eventually move my horse to a farm with better management, where he lived out in a herd on 20 acres, his bolting problem immediately disappeared. Suddenly, he wasn’t spooky. This was eye opening to me and was the beginning of major changes in my horse handling as I knew it.

Many of the horse people who are now training the younger generations grew up learning during times where we did not have the internet access we do today. We didn’t have groups of horse people who were easy to connect with. We didn’t have the same number of informative, easy to find and read websites on horse care and management. We largely relied on word of mouth, what we saw and what our role models taught us.

And when everyone around you upholds the same, or similar enough, horsemanship, it creates an echo chamber of false information that you learn to never question because “everyone does it”. If you ever do question it, you’re quickly dismissed, sometimes even made fun of by your trainer. You’re told you’ll create a monster if you “let your horse get away with things” aka stop constantly punishing them for behaviours that never actually go away anyways because the underlying cause is never addressed.

The problem is that this type of training and handling is so normalized that you can see it anywhere. Go spend a day at any show and you’re guaranteed to see some unfair training practices. Be it a trainer laying into a horse with a whip in the warm up ring after a refusal, someone whacking their horse repeatedly with the end of a lead rope as the horse tries to run away, lunging horses for hours into fatigue, bloody mouths and spur marks, hyper flexion…. You’ll likely see something along those lines.

And if you don’t? Maybe you got lucky or maybe you’ve been taught to tune out a lot of these welfare issues we are now much more aware of thanks to the number of studies and scholarly articles now publicly available on horses.

You’d be hard pressed to go to any show and not find a horse who is exhibiting clear signs of stress or has a pain face.

I’ll take it a step further: you’d be hard pressed to go to any barn that has horses stalled for the majority of their day and not see stress behaviours or at least stressed faces and miserable shutdown horses.

Noticing the difference between the demeanour of my own horse and horses at my old show barns vs the ones at a place that did 24/7 group turnout was a huge culture shock. It was the most obvious and blatant way I could have been shown the importance of group turnout, there was no coming back from it, it was such a remarkable and clear difference.

And it allowed me to enjoy my horse more, it benefitted me directly, even without factoring in his welfare. I say this because so many horse people don’t want to change. They think that science based practices will lame their horse or make their behaviour worse despite the lack of evidence depicting that and in fact, more evidence depicting those concerns in relation to traditional practices.

If we didn’t have so many people upholding improper care and training practices, it could not be as pervasive. People actively engage in these practices and there’s people who watch it happy and say nothing, taking on the “not my horse, not my problem” Mindset despite the fact that welfare issues should be all of our problems.

People get reactionary and try to silence, personally attack and blame people for sharing information they feel targeted by. The number of times I’ve been personally attacked by strangers after sharing scholarly info on how many risks excessive stalling has, I can’t even count. They attack me, not the information. Not the equine scientists testing the info.

They want the info to not be shared. They don’t want to see it, because they feel triggered by it. This has resulted in horse people labelling the sharing of information as bullying, if the information targets biases they’ve yet to let go. It’s allowed horse people to carry the belief that science is optional, that they could have some miracle horse that this extensively researched information does not apply to.

It’s allowed for horse people to feel so entitled to their dissonance and their comfort that they view it as acceptable to try to intimidate people who advocate for change into their silence. They’ll insult your training ability: “if you believe insert science based practice here then you’ve clearly never handled a difficult horse” or “you’ve never trained a horse if you think that!”

Personal attacks on experience level are super common, even in instances where you’re sharing information you played no role in researching. The lengths people will go to to uphold this cognitive dissonance and refuse to consider new practice is troubling.

Most people who slam modernized practices like R+ and group living management practice haven’t even tried it, or haven’t given it a real proper try, before deciding it doesn’t work. Despite the overwhelming evidence proving it absolutely does.

The idea of causing their horse harm and/or having to change the way they do things is so aversive to them that they’d rather risk continuing to harm their horse than questioning practices that have been normalized by other people who share the same biases or were fed the same misinformation.

The horse world needs to change. Horses are depicted in so many abusive and cruel situations online with absolutely no shame. The amount of physical punishment used and justified for horses far exceeds that for other animals. People will even proudly gloat about how much they beat up their horses, garnering tens of thousands of likes and a lot of support.

This reflects poorly on all of us. It is going to be the undoing of the industry. The apathy, or worse, pride towards harshness to hoses is going to ruin us. To any normal person, it looks disgusting. It looks like we don’t love our horses and that they’re merely tools or vehicles for our personal pleasure.

To other horse people who’ve been there, we may understand the level of indoctrination leading to people being that way but no one else will see it that way and regardless, it’s the individual person’s responsibility to continue to learn and better their horsemanship, even if you had bad role models. It is your job to be open to reading credible information even if it conflicts with everything you’ve been taught.

Otherwise, the truth is that you don’t want to learn. That you don’t want the truth. That you’d rather engage in what is easiest for you over what is most fair to the horse and what is true info. And frankly, those of us who have decided to learn and reform our practice are too tired to coddle you.

I’m not going to lie to people anymore and say that the delusions they hold from misinformation are as justified as extensively researched and tested practices for horse training and management. If they want to hold onto untruths, no one owes it to them to hold their hand.

We need to adapt with the times. There are many normalized practices horse people have engaged in for decades that we are now well aware of being mentally or physically detrimental, or both. There is a way to make this world safer and more enjoyable for both horse and human.

The amount of stress behaviours that would cease to exist if we started to do an industry wide reform is something I think about a lot. The number of riders who would enjoy their horses more, with less frustration, if they addressed the actual causes of unwanted behaviour rather than just working to suppress the behaviour…

The problem is many horse people create a self fulfilling prophecy of unwanted behaviours because how they manage and care for the horse creates conflict behaviours that then inconvenience or endanger the rider and need immediate fixing that generally requires more suppression. They use the horse’s bad behaviour as a reason for needing harsher practices to not let the horse “get away with things” and assume softening practices could never work.

Starting to train and manage horses in a way that addresses WHY behaviours are existing rather than just focusing on making said behaviours cease to exist is how we better the horse world.

We love horses, right? So, why are we so set on upholding training and care practices that suppress their personalities, completely halt their side of communication and make it all about ourselves, stress them out, make them more prone to a number of physical issues as well as mental AND make them more dangerous to us?

Humans and horses can both win if we work on reforming the horse industry to consider horses as much as we work to consider human goals and desires. It simply isn’t happening currently and that’s a sad reality.

So, next time you see a post with information that triggers you or a post calling out industry wide issues, instead of commenting to plead your case of why you’re not like that / why it doesn’t apply to you or how “not all horse people are like that” consider this: Enough are and if you don’t feel the post applies to you, it shouldn’t be triggering. So, if you find yourself being upset any time you hear posts calling for better horse welfare, maybe it’s time to sit and think on why these posts trigger you.

For me, it was because they did apply to me and I wasn’t ready to realize where I was going wrong in my horsemanship, so I would deflect, deflect, deflect.

We cannot silence the discussion of better welfare if we want to improve industry standards. We need better education of horse people, better welfare standards in all barns and higher standards at all competitions. We can do better by our horses, we have extensive information showing us exactly where to start making changes.

Its time for horse people to put their egos and their personal comfort aside and let the horses have a turn having their comfort, wants and needs considered to the degree we have historically considered ourselves, the humans, first in the horse world.

Otherwise, we will be our own demise because those not brainwashed by horse industry-specific misinformation see our posts, now widely available to the public thanks to social media, and think we are all ignorant to welfare issues, think that we all find amusement in hitting our horses and guess what? They want to see our industry crumble because they fail to see the good in it.

They only see a huge number of people completely closed off to considering where they could do better and refusing to consider any rationale showing them why certain things are issues in the horse world.

We have to care enough to make these changes before it’s too late. If people won’t change until they have the threat of the industry losing its social license and going under held to them like a knife to the throat, our industry will collapse. If people only start caring about bettering and modernizing practices when they’re at the risk of losing everything, did they actually ever care at all or is it all related to damage control for their benefit?

It’s time to have more honest discussions about welfare and training practices in the horse world and how we can reduce the high instances of stress behaviours we see. We need to do it for the horses. They are voiceless and utterly reliant on us having the backbone to speak up, even when we so often are speaking to an echo chamber that does not value science.

We can make changes that directly benefit our horses and as a result, us. Happier horses will perform better, be safer to deal with and will enjoy being around humans much more. The proof is there

It’s time to seriously start talking about the desperate need for reform in the horse industry.

Are you ready for some self reflection and being open to information that may hurt to hear, if it will benefit your horse in a positive way?

Some scholarly resources discussing some of these common issues:

Study on high science based training limits stress and thereby injury to humans from horses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810043/

Study on tight nosebands and welfare deficits

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7552251/

Mouth pain in horses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7222381/

Investigating equestrians perception of horse happiness (spoiler: they often perceive stress behaviours as signs of happiness)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34416986/

The importance of free choice access to forage for horse welfare

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22444907/

Investigation on equestrian spur use

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1558787819300784

Negative and positive reinforcement compared for rehabilitating horses

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/37147132_Negative_versus_positive_reinforcement_An_evaluation_of_training_strategies_for_rehabilitated_horses

Bit related lesions In event horses study

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8044447/

Turning horses out not only betters welfare but improves environmental health

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/8991

Colic instance in horses

https://ker.com/equinews/colic-incidence-stalled-horses/

Comparing stalled vs pastured horses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466050/

Turnout time greatly reduces risk of soft tissue injury

https://thehorse.com/1101677/turnout-time-can-reduce-horses-risk-of-soft-tissue-injury/

Stereotypic behaviour in horses

http://www2.ca.uky.edu/agcomm/pubs/ASC/ASC212/ASC212.pdf

Horses stabled alone (stress study)

https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2015/03/20/horses-stabled-alone-stress-study/

Study on management practices

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159116301046

Consequences of stall confinement

https://thehorse.com/121297/consequences-of-stall-confinement/

Stress impacts learning study

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0170783

Learning theory and it’s application in horse training

https://oup2-idp.sams-sigma.com/authorize?auth_token=eyJhbGciOiJSU0EtT0FFUC0yNTYiLCJlbmMiOiJBMTI4R0NNIn0.H09FvJSWSVXFcY2MdHW-Cgm8Z87RKDHtuaURqvT9o_EgWLaZdENsvtwVVdKlHkC5k-73_rV3dt13cH7hqfkbIQH2ZBmJRw-Sy85PJAN4s3rbGqAuTtW9KW6SNCw0hYVB1z8LpHUFBoERHVRobaHjHx_2w3vCOQMqDuuVXcsBUZMGqYHTVWKkwmZfHctMTlhD_KhBA-3Q3rA-rzhkFMERuyuZJr5I-Zcgx0Tr-1xpnVub2Nn_V8xGdBVu5e1ReIVtg2pRFXHkPkYdyB6lkB5vv6U1cgbBUnyjYdbRsRDyA-bChqxDWnD529Mm0ki18BOH2zMDS1Hg0R_ap2mCFxfzmw.JZKtPSnI80hMOr17.Fk4NAzn-IL_I-LQIsFvgtMLTwxVyUmVT0YIfvLi-aKiaZmCzUaPrPeHq56MnEVP9FRKinCvV5RlakEy9QI5gJDGQBi5Hkfi0-1z1wiE1k7truZiFTiOiOyTF9WdXzU38EenZytK95656n-q48JKUDybonqxmo_ETvTqiu5BbHpicEjEgBD4_dFw8H4OUroayYMvQIJA2LqOq5syD1CW3BTT9Mkc.QxWeRlknDEk1Zbng2moLyw&ip_address=184.65.72.124&prompt=none&referrer_url=https://milestoneequestrian.ca/&response_type=code&scope=openid+profile+email+license_lite+profile_extended+offline_access&redirect_uri=https://academic.oup.com/HTTPHandlers/Sigma/LoginHandler.ashx&client_id=ACADEMIC&state=00796d3a-522e-4722-b22c-3b106434b8cbredirecturl=httpszazjzjacademiczwoupzwcomzjjaszjarticlezj68zj1zj75zj4703981

Assessment of stress in horses during competition

https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/69893/1/MariePeeters_abstract%20JVB.pdf