Kindness is not incompetence

If the me from 10 years ago came across me now I’d have been rolling my eyes and thinking “she doesn’t have a clue, horses don’t work like that, my horse is fine”, I now realise that horses do work like that, back then I didn’t have a clue and my horse definitely wasn’t fine.

I knew how to make horses comply with my requests and I weaved whichever narrative made me feel comfortable about it in my head.

I convinced myself I was being kind and doing what was best for the horses, I was just doing what you had to do to train horses. Anyone with a softer way of being around horses made me uncomfortable, because if I acknowledged that perhaps they were onto something, I would also have to acknowledge the skillset I had was based on years of misinformation. So instead I scoffed and called people incompetent and silly for wanting to give their horses choices and train them with food.

We are going through an interesting period in the industry where kindness is seen as something to aspire to, you can see it used as a marketing and PR tool everywhere. Don’t mind about those blue tongues and spur marks, look at me giving the horse a cuddle and feeding him an apple! 🥰

There are many trainers with huge platforms that frequently show extremely stressed and unhappy horses going through training, but it is all explained away as good for the horse. That it is somehow the horse’s fault for their explosive reactions and they’re just helping.

We see words and phrases like kind, building confidence, saving their life, showing them leadership, connection, bonding, relationship, helping their brain, building trust etc. Yet if we actually look at a lot of this content without bias, we see horses being set up to fail by putting them into situations they aren’t ready for, then the drama (and great content) will happen. This just isn’t kind or necessary.

The reason you don’t see more ethical trainers sharing horses displaying this sort of behaviour, is that they don’t put horses into those situations in the first place. Then people use this as a critique that the more gentle trainer could never manage an actually “dangerous” horse. What people don’t realise is, most of the time the dangerous behaviour is human-caused, and you’ll never see it if you train below threshold and address what needs to be addressed.

If you need to be brave to ride a certain horse, I imagine that horse isn’t having a good time either. It is false that you need to get a breakdown to get a breakthrough, that someone just needs to sit through all the bucking and when the horse finally gives in they’ve helped the horse to feel better. Have they helped the horse to feel better or has the horse just given up trying to communicate that they’re struggling?

I watch a lot of these videos, and I see a lot of horses who are compromised in their bodies and horses who are really not okay emotionally. They are then trained and ridden in ways that are going to compromise their body further. If anyone comments it is explained away as the horse “just learning and it will come in time”, not sure how its the horse’s issue when the horse has nowhere to go but into the tight contact as they’re are pestered around the arena. But they're being patted and told they’re such a good boy when they finally comply, so its definitely kind training….

With so much information and learning available online, many amateur horse owners are extremely knowledgeable and switched on. When you have a large platform and are putting videos out as a professed behavioural expert, I think it is par for the course that people are allowed to ask civil questions and open up discussions.

Instead what happens at the first sniff of a critique, the trainer’s intense fan club jump on the commenter with cries of “here comes the turmeric brigade!” or “look at these armchair experts bet they can’t even ride their fat cob down the lane!”. Isn’t it interesting that we market heavily with kindness, but if anyone wants to open up a discussion about how perhaps things could be done more kindly, or talk about the stress behaviour they are seeing in the horse, they are silenced quickly.

If we are really for the horse, we will be happy to have these discussions.

If we are really for the horse, we don’t use getting the horse to comply as our only metric for success.

If we are really for the horse, we don’t repeatedly put the horse in unnecessary high-stress situations so we can show everyone how difficult and dangerous they are.

If we are really for the horse, we don’t ignore their communication and make up narratives to suit our own agenda and what feels comfortable for us. They do not have a voice, we must speak up for them.

I get it, I really do, because it used to be me. But if we actually want to do the best for our horses, we must have the integrity to admit that a lot of the accepted ways of dealing with horses are not good for horses, they’re good for us.

I challenge you to look at some of this dangerous horse transformation content through a different lens. Has the horse really come through the other side and now he loves his job and wants to jump with us all day long? Or is that just what we really want to believe, and the reality is inconvenient and uncomfortable?

We can set boundaries without fear and we can train our horses to do pretty incredible things without high-stress and explosions, but we need to really look at what is appropriate. There needs to be so much more education around not only behaviour, but what appropriate and healthy movement and posture looks like.

Kindness is not incompetence, it is actually much more complex and skilled to train with the horse’s emotional well-being in mind.

So many more of us are seeing through the stories we’re being told and actually seeing the horse underneath. We just have to keep planting the seeds. Change is already here.