Just because a horse lets you sit on his back it doesn't mean he's ready to be ridden

There’s a misconception that horses are designed to be ridden. We think as long as they’re not lame or sick then they’re capable of carrying a rider. Maybe once a horse turns a certain age they’re good to go or a that a horse that’s been in work for years must be strong enough to be ridden without issue right? As long as they’re compliant then they must be ready to do the thing we’re asking them to do? Unfortunately this is not the case.

This is not a post about the appropriate age to back your horse, there are plenty of resources and thoughts on that, I want to talk about the other factors we need to consider before we continue sitting on our horse’s backs and expecting them to perform.

The backing process for most horses seems to be heavily focussed on having the horse accept tack, learn how to respond to cues, move with tack on and eventually accept a rider. I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent here about the backing process but usually this will look like lunging or long reining with tack on, then legging the rider up and doing that desensitising process, then great off we go, we start riding the horse and getting him to hack and do poles and circles etc.

It is great to have a horse calmly get used to tack and a rider, but here’s the issue, there is usually very little time spent developing that horse’s posture and musculature without a rider. Lunging an unbalanced horse around in side reins isn’t going to do it, neither is long reining about the place for a few weeks. We are talking slow, progressive in hand work that just takes the time it takes depending on the individual horse, you can’t run them to a schedule.

We might talk about just doing lots of hacking but it doesn’t really matter if its “just” hacking if carrying a rider at all is causing a horse to develop compensatory movement patterns because his body just isn’t capable of carrying a rider without doing so yet. We might talk about turning a horse away for a season, but again it doesn’t really matter if we then just crack on like before. A horse isn’t suddenly strong enough to carry a rider in a healthy way at 4 years old or 6 years old or 10 years old if we don’t do anything to develop that strength from the ground first.

Often the older horses are worse off, because they’ve spent years developing their compensatory way of going, and by the time I see them the wheels have really started to fall off. They’ve been playing whack-a-mole with the vet and their horse still just isn’t right, because we keep trying to stick a plaster on then carry on as we were. You’re never going to fix the foundation if you keep damaging it every time you ride. We need to stop doing the things that are contributing to the damage and start doing the gentle work to help it, only then can we start to see real progress.

It is extremely frustrating as an owner to be doing all of the supposedly right things and seeking professional help and not be told any of this. Unfortunately the horse industry is still very backwards and its taking a while to catch up with the information we have access to now. We are in such a quick-fix industry and this kind of thing is a really inconvenient truth, so I get why people push it away. Why listen to this idiot if the vet/bodyworker/instructor are telling you there’s nothing else you can do and to crack on? I get it, but just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t make it right, and maybe we should reflect a little on why the majority of horses are “broken” in some way by the age of 10. Isn’t it great that there might be something we can do to help our horses?

This is a huge reason why I don’t take horses in on training livery, I find it much more useful for the horse to stay at home, in their comfortable environment and work away slowly with all the time they need. I do not envy people who’s career depends on taking horses in for a few weeks training or selling them on, it is not a business model that works very easily when you want to centre the horse.

I find myself scrolling the sales ads and just seeing horse after horse with sunken necks and backs out jumping and doing dressage describing how great and willing they are, and they will be bought by a new owner and this will continue until they start to break down, as these horses pass 5 stage vettings all the time. I know because I meet them a few months down the line. We have to start looking at things differently if we want our horses to last.🐴