Horses talk if we actually listen

No this post isn’t about animal communication/horse psychics.

Something we often say, me included, is “oh I just wish horses could talk it would be so much easier”. And I absolutely stand by this when perhaps wanting to know where exactly my horse is feeling pain in his body or if he is feeling unwell. But when it comes to reading behaviour, we find our horses are talking to us all the time, or at least communicating with us, and we’re often told to ignore it.

I sometimes think if horses could actually talk with words we really wouldn’t like what they have to say, and we’d probably be encouraged to ignore it and make them shut up.

I read so many posts asking for advice on different behavioural issues and the comments are full of ways advising the owner how to get the horse to shut up and comply. We need to learn to listen.

I have a client who’s horse would catch fine but started planting his feet and refusing to come in from the field. She was given all sorts of advice about using pressure halters, making him back up, chasing him with a flag or running him in circles and even only turning him out in a small starvation paddock so he’d be desperate to come in for food. All suggestions on how to hurt, scare or make him uncomfortable him until he complied with her request. Not one of these suggestions considered the most important questions:

🐴 Why doesn’t he want to come in?

🐴 How can we improve things so he does want to come in? (not how can we make it horrible for him not to)

We looked at the whole picture with this horse and the first thing of note was that he’d be in the stable with limited hay which would run out hours before he was let back into the field. So he knew every time he came in he’d be stuck in his box with nothing to eat for long periods of time.

We then looked at his body and noted he was lacking appropriate muscle over his back which could potentially be making it uncomfortable for him to carry a rider, so every time he was being ridden he was having a negative experience.

I noted his immediate response to any pressure was to brace back against it and his owner described how she was encouraged to constantly nag and chase him as she was told he was “lazy” and “stubborn”. I didn’t think he was moving comfortably at all so I referred him to the physio who then referred him on to the vet where he was diagnosed and treated for hock arthritis and also stomach ulcers.

We changed his management to trickle feed his hay so he didn’t ever run out in the stable and we also added different enrichment for him. We also did lots of simple enrichment activities with him such as treat scatters and hand grazing walks when he came in so he stopped associating coming in with being made to work uncomfortably.

Working alongside the physio we quietly introduced some training around building him up so he was able to carry a rider more comfortably, this training looked very different to the heavily pressure-based training he’d experienced before and he was soon moving and feeling a lot better.

Throughout all of this the bringing in issues melted away, because they weren’t bringing in issues at all, they were a communication, he was talking to us.

Please stop and think when you start having issues with your horse, instead of just trying to “fix it”, we really need to be figuring out why. Horses don’t just do things for no reason. If we had simply hassled this horse until he complied and realised coming in was the easier option, we would have continued forcing an uncomfortable, sore horse to work, this happens all the time. 🐴