"What's the point?"

Something several of my clients have been asked after our sessions together.

When we start moving away from more conventional training methods we can be met with perhaps mockery or even animosity from the people around us. Other people may see it as harmless fun, but don’t see any point to it. They don’t see it as anything necessary or important like they see riding, lunging and groundwork exercises.

When we limit ourselves to just taking our horses into a training space and telling them what to do we are missing so many opportunities to build their confidence, to build their curiosity, to build their problem solving skills and to allow them to explore movement without pressure.

I often have clients who have tried really hard to be more ethical and are training their horses with very gentle pressure but they’re still not seeing the progress they’d like to in their horse’s behaviour and emotional state. Our horses aren’t going to find any joy in movement if we’re always micromanaging.

Even when we are using positive reinforcement to train we can often be quite regimented and specific in what we’re trying to teach the horse to do. I’m not saying there is necessarily anything wrong with that, but we also need to be giving our horses the opportunity to explore for themselves, try things for themselves and make their own choices.

There are so many training methods out there that claim to be the secret sauce to a magical relationship with your horse whilst also making sure your horse does exactly what you want when you want them to. When we really look into it most training methods involve applying some type of pressure and then releasing that pressure when the horse does what we want. We are limiting ourselves so much if this is all we ever do.

This week in one day I did enrichment playgrounds with an elderly Fell pony, a grand prix dressage horse, a Spanish 3yo and a fresh off the track ex-racehorse. We learned so much about each horse just by watching how they chose to interact with their environment and they were all then in a better emotional state to do a little simple training. They all became calmer, started moving more fluidly and above all had a positive experience in the training space to put into the bank.

I’m often meeting horses who are traumatised and/or shut down to varying degrees, usually with compromised bodies, and no amount of taking them into a training space and applying pressure is going to actually help them feel better and come out of their shell. It can achieve compliance sure, but I’m not interested in that anymore.

I start with enrichment with every single horse I meet no matter their age, experience or issues, it is such an easy win and anyone can do it without needing much experience so it is easy to be consistent. We usually start with things like treat scatters, bucket games and enrichment playgrounds, I’ll leave a link in the comments if you want to learn more.

Next time someone rolls their eyes or makes passive aggressive comments towards the things you are choosing to do with your horse that perhaps look a little “different”, just know that you are putting money in the bank to develop a healthy, confident, resilient horse who enjoys spending time with you, not a shut down robot. 🐴