When we really care about our horses we can feel desperate to get things right as we really want to help them. It can feel like if we don’t achieve something that feels good and clean and make progress every day then we are ruining our horses or doing things wrong. Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as following instructions with horses, they aren’t able to understand what we’re trying to achieve and in our quest for perfection we can actually make things harder on them and on ourselves.
I have always been someone who wants to do everything perfectly with my horses, in the past I felt certain training needed to be drilled otherwise I was going to ruin my horse’s “manners”. If he was spooky in the arena one day I would keep working him until he was back to “normal”, because I felt if I didn’t he would just get worse and worse. While I have long since moved away from these ideas about equine behaviour, I realised I was doing the same thing in my quest to improve posture/rehab horses.
It can be really difficult when you’re trying to help your horse and he just isn’t in the headspace to co-operate with the exercises you have been prescribed by your vet/bodyworker/trainer. It is all well and good to talk about the biomechanics, but if your horse isn’t in a place emotionally where he can do those things in a nice, relaxed posture, they are probably going to be detrimental.
A lot of the work I do now is focussed on helping horses find relaxation so we can then influence how they use their body. You cannot force relaxation and its definitely not going to happen if we’re getting frustrated about it. The more stressed we get, the more the horse can feel it and the whole thing becomes unpleasant.
I know we all imagine we’re doing this lovely thing for our horses when we start to get into this work, and they’re going to stand and relax and feel nice and we’re just trying to help. But he won’t stop calling for his friends, now he’s pawing the ground and he’s frustrated and he just shoved you with his head. It is natural to start feeling irritated and want to snap at your horse. This is where we need to work on our own emotional regulation.
We get so focussed on the horse that we forget we need to work on ourselves. Some of the best advice that helps me to frame it in my head is that “its okay if he doesn’t do the thing”, it can be quite hard to grasp that as a concept when you’ve come through more rigid training philosophies, but this really takes out the frustration because we’re not just trying to get to the goal and we can hold that space the horse needs without an agenda.
Most horses have been coping with their lives, their training and their compromised bodies for a long time, and when we start to unravel that it can be really emotionally difficult for them. They’re not being stubborn or impatient or rude, they’re finding it uncomfortable and its our job to help them through the best we can by being a calm, predictable presence and setting them up to succeed.
There is so much emotion wrapped up in our relationships with our horses. Weirdly for me I have endless patience with client’s horses, yet with my own I feel emotion bubble up more quickly, I think its a mixture of feeling such heavy responsibility for their whole lives and also the emotional attachment. I have to work much harder to regulate my emotions with my own horses.
Now that I look at horses differently, my goals are to encourage healthy movement patterns and positive experiences in our interactions. I know that high-stress situations are not going to achieve this. So if the horse is feeling stressed then maybe we change plans that day and just work on getting them to feel better. For example, if you’re needing to do some rehab walking with your horse and he’s high as a kite, maybe that looks like doing a bit of work in his stable and walking around the stable yard instead of taking him into the arena and having him explode for ten minutes before you get to any walking.
I am currently rehabbing my horse Dan and in an ideal world we would be doing some nice relaxed walking in straight lines. He had a fright in the arena last week and while I can get him to walk out on the line it is tense, wobbly, prone to explosions and not useful at all from a postural perspective. In the past I’d have persevered and just kept making him go until he eventually “got over it”. Today we played the bucket game for 5 minutes, which involves several feed buckets and him at liberty free to do as he pleases. He can either come and investigate a bucket and get the feed or he can choose not to. After 5 minutes of wandering round the arena having a lovely time I was then able to clip the line on and have a good, relaxed walking session, no drama and no unhelpful strain added to his compromised body. 🐴
Photo of Dan mid-bucket game, the cloud is a paid actor 😎
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