Are we missing the obvious?

One of the most common scenarios I get called out to is the horse who has had veterinary investigations, extensive rehab and dedicated care from their very conscientious owner, but things still aren’t going well and nobody can seem to figure out why.

Stress behaviour in horses is so normalised and there is so much widespread misinformation around behaviour, some of it being spread by highly-regarded professionals, that we can be missing the fact that our horses are struggling emotionally. We put it down to them just being a “hot” or “spicy” character. But we can try to rehab the physical body all we want, the horse is not going to thrive when they’re living in a state of chronic stress.

Earlier this year I met a horse, I’m going to call him Fred, with an extremely caring owner who had been eventing him at BE90, he had started to refuse to load and was changing behind in the canter. They promptly took him for a lameness work-up and found some mild changes on his back x-rays and diagnosed SI pain. He was also scoped and treated for stomach ulcers. They diligently followed the vet’s treatment and rehab plan, had their bodyworker, their farrier, their saddle fitter and their trainer on board and did everything “right”. After a couple of months the vet declared Fred sound and the body worker said they were happy with his back and he was brought back into his normal-level of work. Unfortunately his behaviour did not improve much.

Fred’s owner contacted me feeling like she had exhausted every avenue, upon observation I could see that she was very quiet and kind around him, but I could also see a horse that was living in a chronic state of anxiety and wasn’t coping well with his life at all. Fred’s day looked like spending his day in a small grass turnout paddock alone with no enrichment beyond the short grass, he then came into the stable overnight with a big hay net. He was taken out of the stable and put in cross ties to be groomed and tacked up. He would chew on the cross ties slightly and pull a few faces. During training his owner had been encouraged to ride him in a short contact and I noticed he was constantly over bent and compressed through the neck. He was very obedient but the whole picture just looked braced and uncomfortable.

We took all the tack off and just spent some time seeing how Fred responded to things, he really struggled to stand still and just be with us. If you introduced his tack or tried to groom him he would move away. His owner was shocked as she didn’t see any of these behaviours in the cross ties, Fred had learned he couldn’t really say no in there. The way Fred’s rider was being encouraged to train him was inappropriate for his body and posture, this is such a huge issue within the industry, but riding any horse with a compressed neck is not going to be good for them. All of these things together were resulting in high-load of chronic stress for him every day.

Fred’s owner moved to a yard where he could have a friend in his paddock with him and added enrichment to his paddock and his stable. She stopped putting him in the cross-ties and started to work with him loose in his stable so he was able to communicate and say no, this reduced his stress hugely around being groomed and tacked up. We used positive reinforcement to start improving his associations with these things.

In terms of riding his owner has completely changed the way she approaches things, we started with a lot of quiet groundwork and enrichment games to create more positive associations with the training space and to help down-regulate his nervous system. Once he was feeling better we were able to re-introduce riding and develop a new, more sustainable way of working together to support not only a strong body but also a happy, comfortable horse.

Fred was unable to thrive as he was living in a chronic state of stress that nobody was recognising, so many of these horses are seen as “quirky” or “just a sharp competition horse” because they’ve seemingly always been this way. If we can step out of our conditioning and really look at what a horse is communicating we can learn to support our horses beyond just trying to fix their bodies.