"You can't make a horse do anything they don't want to do"

This phrase and similar are so often used to justify doing things with horses that are perhaps inappropriate or even harmful to the horse. It is a lazy defence to avoid having to look further into some uncomfortable truths.

Here are three things my horses did today that they didn’t want to, but did without hassle because I have trained and conditioned them to do so:

🐴 Followed me in off the tasty long grass and back into their grass-free area knowing I would shut them in

🐴 Dan allowed me to block him from Lenny’s feed with my body when he finished his first

🐴 Let me pick up and handle their hooves even though they were being irritated by flies, unsettled and wanting to be left alone

If we were purely talking about physical strength my horses could easily have ignored and barged through me and refused to co-operate with any of those requests. But they didn’t, because horses are very compliant animals. We need to respect this when we’re training our horses, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

I didn’t recognise it at the time but so much of my previous training with horses was based on threats of escalating pressure/pain/fear. My horses were soft and responsive because they really didn’t like what happened if they weren’t and had learned how to avoid that. Don’t step in front of me or you’ll get something flapped in your face, don’t slow down or you’ll be tapped/chased by a stick, listen to me and react quickly or I’ll scare you. That’s not a partnership and it certainly isn’t giving them any choice.

“You can’t make a horse do anything they don’t want to do” but here are 700 training methods showing you how to make your horse do stuff he doesn’t want to do and make it clear to him that no is never going to be an acceptable answer because you’ll just keep persisting until he gives the right one.

I often think of horses who are jumping large fences and I can see the logic in thinking the horse would just stop if they didn’t want to as its such a huge effort. But if that horse has been trained and conditioned from day one, from being first ridden and nothing but forwards being an acceptable answer, to going over poles on the ground and going over the pole being the only acceptable answer. By the time you’re doing a course of jumps that horse has been conditioned to think that he must always go between the wings, going around isn’t an option. If he gives any answer except going over the jump he is hassled until he complies and goes over the jump. So yes, horses will do things that they don’t want to do that requires a huge effort from them because they don’t think they have a choice.

You only have to look at those extremely fatigued event horses who eventually fall because they’re so exhausted and they weren’t pulled up by the rider. They are conditioned to always go, so they do, even if they can’t do so safely.

Now I’m not saying I think jumping horses is necessarily bad or wrong, I’m just saying we need to be careful around our narratives of horses “choosing” to participate, they do it because we trained them to.

If we want to train ethically and have our horse be co-operative rather than compliant, we need to think carefully about what we’re asking them to do, how they feel about doing it and if its appropriate for that horse at all in this moment. 🐴

Photo of Dan "willingly" going over a jump when he had hock pain I wasn't aware of. He jumped anyway, because that is what he had been trained to do.