15/05/2025
Galloping, Bucking, Not Broken: The Greatest Lie Horses Ever Told 🐎💥
You step into the paddock, coffee in hand, expecting a peaceful morning and a whiff of horse breath that says “all is well.” ☕✨
Instead, your horse is on the wrong side of the fence, looking smug and oddly unscathed—or worse, still tangled in wire. You cut them free, patch up a scratch or two (or marvel at the miraculous absence of any), and thank the gods of lucky escapes.
Crisis averted.
Or is it? 😬
Here’s the problem: the real damage doesn’t always bleed.
Over the years, I’ve met a string of horses who’ve all survived this advanced-level self-sabotage. They’ve jumped a gate (well… tried), crashed through a fence, slipped on a slope, flipped, twisted, crushed or compressed themselves in ways that would make a chiropractor cry and a vet sigh while reaching for the X-ray machine (which, by the way, won’t show the damage either). 🏅💀
The horse recovers. No visible limp. They run. They buck. They play.
You think:
“They’re fine! Look at them go!”
But they’re not fine. Not even a little bit.
Enter: The Invisible Injury 🕵️♀️
What you can’t see—and what many professionals miss—is the slow-burn catastrophe hidden deep in the horse's body.
Ribcage. Pelvis. Sternum. Neck. Stifle.
The kind of stuff that doesn’t light up on X-rays or respond to your carrot-stick-wiggly-wand of trust. 🥕🌀
It’s the kind of discomfort that turns “walk, trot, canter” into “grimace, flinch, explode.”
And here’s the kicker: the horse doesn’t limp. It compensates.
Because horses, unlike people, don’t throw dramatic tantrums and demand cortisone shots. They quietly adjust. They twist, tighten, avoid, or overuse other parts of their body to keep going.
They are the masters of stoicism.....until you put a halter on.
You ask for a transition, a bend, a float trip, or—God forbid—a trot circle. And suddenly—
You get emotion.
You get resistance.
You get confusion, agitation, blow-ups, shut-downs—
Every spicy ingredient in a full-blown training meltdown stew. 🍲🔥
The Spiral Begins 🌀
The owner thinks: “I’m doing something wrong.”
The trainer thinks: “We need more groundwork.”
The horse thinks: “Kill me.” ☠️
Eventually, the owner moves on—new trainer, new method, new online course promising the horse will “choose joy and connection.”
But the problems persist.
Cue spiralling shame, rejection of all prior knowledge, and a desperate descent into rabbit holes of essential oils, a connection-based enlightenment facilitator, and equine shadow work. 🧘♀️🌿🔮
When in fact, what they really needed was a bloody good vet and bodyworker, and someone to say:
“Hey, maybe your horse’s inability to pick up the left lead can’t be fixed with trust exercises and lavender oil.”
The Warning Signs We Miss 🚩
Here are the red flags waving harder than a liberty trainer at sunset:
The horse becomes emotional, reactive, or weirdly robotic.
What should be simple feels charged, unpredictable, and unnervingly fragile.
Training progress flatlines, no matter how much effort you throw at it.
The horse starts avoiding halters, floats, mounting blocks—or life in general.
The problem isn’t always psychological.
Sometimes, it’s a bloody rib.
Or a pelvis rotated like a cheap IKEA table leg. 🪑
But we don’t look there—because the horse looks fine.
It bucks in the paddock! It gallops!
It must be okay!
Nope. That’s not health.
That’s compensation.
It’s adaptation with the odd short step.
Or worse—when they can’t limp because everything’s uncomfortable.
That’s when it gets really insidious.
What Happens Next is Predictable… and Sad 😢
These horses often get labelled as:
Difficult
Shut down
Disrespectful
“Needing more wet saddle blankets”
Or… “Needing a softer approach”
Or… “Not aligned with your energy” 🙃
No one considers the simple truth:
It hurts to do what we’re asking.
Not in a “don’t feel like it” way.
In a “my sternum’s fused to my shoulder blade and I can’t rotate left without seeing stars” way. 🌟
They suffer in silence while we rotate through training ideologies like a midlife crisis through motorcycles—all because we never asked the most obvious question:
“Has this horse ever had an accident?”
Because if they have—if they’ve failed to clear a gate, slipped, fallen, crushed, or tangled in wire—it may have changed everything. Not just the body, but the brain.
Pain messes with movement.
It makes easy things hard.
It turns willing horses into wary ones.
And it ruins good humans who start to believe they’re not good enough.
What You Can Do Instead of Losing Your Mind 🧠➡️🧘♂️
Take my good friend Tami Elkayam’s advice:
If something happens, write it down in a diary. ✍️
Even if they seem fine.
Then, if things start getting weird months or years later, don’t reach for your third liberty course or $800 worth of chamomile pellets. 💸🌼
Consider that maybe—just maybe—your horse isn’t emotionally broken, disrespectful, or traumatised by a training method.
Maybe those fractured ribs are hurting when you do up the girth.
Before You Burn It All Down… 🔥🚫
Before you give up, throw out your halters, block your last five coaches on Instagram, or trade your saddle for an oracle deck… pause.
Reflect.
Is it possible your horse is trying—but simply can’t?
Could it be that what they’re resisting isn’t you—but a physical reality no amount of groundwork or paddock bonding can fix?
Is it time to stop blaming yourself, your horse, and everyone you’ve ever learned from—and instead… dig deeper?
Because sometimes, the source of your training failures, your emotional spirals, and your eroded confidence…
..was a bloody gate.
That your horse didn’t clear.
That day. 🐴💔
If this switched on a lightbulb 💡, hit share. Pass it on.
Disclaimer: This is satire. Humour helps people read long posts they’d usually scroll past—so they don’t miss something that might actually help them or their horse.
Feel like tone-policing? Fabulous. Write your own post. That’s where your opinion belongs.
📸 IMAGE: My Aureo—the horse who taught me this lesson...even the bit about lavender oil 😆
