30/11/2025
My name is Jasper, though I’ve been called many things.
Some I wouldn’t repeat - even if horses could speak your language.
I need to tell you something honestly right from the start:
I was not an easy horse. I know this because I heard it said hundreds of times, across four barns in six years: “He’s not an easy horse.”
As if difficulty were a moral failing. As if I had chosen to become the way fear shaped me.
Let me explain how a horse becomes “difficult.”
For around 60 million years, my ancestors survived by noticing everything. A flicker in the grass. A shift in the wind. A sudden movement in the corner of the eye.
Our amygdala - the part of the brain that processes fear - is highly developed and wired for rapid response. We’re designed to react first and think later, because the horses who paused to analyse didn’t live long enough to pass on their genes.
I was three when the trailer accident happened.
The details don’t matter - a blown tyre, a sway, a metal box that suddenly wasn’t travelling in a straight line anymore.
What matters is what it taught my nervous system:
Enclosed spaces mean danger.
Restraint means pain.
Loss of control means death.
After that day, my brain couldn’t separate a trailer from the accident. This is called fear conditioning - one traumatic event forming neural pathways so deep that anything similar triggers the same chemical storm: adrenaline, cortisol, the full body surge of survival.
My heart rate would leap to 180 bpm at the sight of a trailer ramp.
I would rear, strike, fling myself against walls - not because I was bad, but because I was terrified.
But humans don’t often see terror. They see behaviour.
“Difficult,” they said.
The first barn tried force. When a horse can’t flee, he fights.
When he can’t fight, he freezes.
They backed me into the trailer with whips and ropes. I taught them what real panic looks like.
Someone got hurt.
I got sold.
The second barn tried a more "natural" approach, which for me meant being chased in circles until exhaustion took over. Learned helplessness is often mistaken for cooperation. A horse who stops fighting hasn’t necessarily stopped being afraid - he has simply learned that nothing he does changes anything.
I loaded that day, trembling so violently my muscles cramped.
They were pleased. My nervous system was not.
The fear didn’t fade. It spread - tarps that moved, tight spaces, vets with needles, unexpected sounds, firm hands on a rope. My world became mapped with invisible landmines I couldn’t explain.
“Dangerous,” they said. “Unpredictable.”
By eight years old, after two more barns, something inside me had begun to shut down. Chronic stress does that. It suppresses neuroplasticity - the ability to learn new patterns, to try new responses, to imagine safety.
Then I arrived at Sarah’s farm.
She didn’t try to do anything with me that day.
Or the first week.
Or the first month.
Instead, she stood at the fence and breathed.
Horses are master readers of physiology.
We smell pheromones. We sense heart rate shifts.
We pick up micro tension long before humans feel it themselves.
I could smell that she wasn’t afraid of me.
This alone was… unusual.
Some days I crept within ten feet, then spun away with my heart thundering.
She never chased.
Never pressured.
Never crossed the boundary I set.
Here is what I was learning, though I didn’t yet have a name for it:
Safety isn’t the absence of scary things. Safety is the presence of choice.
Two weeks later, I touched her palm with my nose.
Oxytocin released in both of us - the smallest gesture, but the beginning of a bond. She smiled, lowered her hand, and walked away.
She never asked for more than I could give.
The trailer sat at the edge of the property.
Not hidden. Just… present.
Each day, a little closer. This is called systematic desensitisation - exposure below the threshold of fear so the nervous system can learn:
Trailer near → nothing bad happens.
Trailer closer → still nothing bad happens.
It took months.
2 months before I ate hay inside with the ramp down.
4 before I stood in it. 6 before I travelled two kilometres down the road and unloaded into a field where she let me graze in peace.
But this wasn’t just trailer work. She was teaching me something much bigger:
I had agency.
I had a voice.
My signals mattered.
Every flick of my ear, every tightening of my poll, every breath that came too sharp - she noticed. And she responded.
This is how mammals heal:
Through predictable, consistent attunement.
My cortisol lowered. My startle softened. My behavioural flexibility returned. I began exploring again - something I hadn’t done in years.
One day, I walked into the trailer on a loose lead rope, heart steady at 48 bpm - a calm horse’s rhythm. She rested her forehead against my neck, and her shoulders shook.
“You’re not difficult,” she whispered.
“You were scared. And nobody listened.”
Sarah didn’t “fix” me with a technique or method.
She didn’t have magic hands.
She had time.
Patience.
Attunement.
And the radical belief that my fear was valid.
She let go of her timeline and honoured mine.
I am twelve now.
I load quietly.
I stand for the vet.
I can handle tarps, clippers, tight spaces - all the things that once meant terror.
But most importantly:
I’m curious again.
I have returned to myself.
My nervous system remembers joy.
The other day, a young mare arrived at our barn.
She rears when someone approaches with a halter.
She strikes when cornered.
I heard it again:
“She’s difficult.”
Sarah smiled - the same soft smile she gave me four years ago.
“No,” she said.
“She’s scared. And we’re going to listen.”
This is what I learned.
What Sarah gave me.
What I need you to remember:
Difficult is so often just traumatised.
Dangerous is so often just unheard.
And the opposite of fear isn’t courage - it’s safety.
Safety built one choice at a time.
One boundary respected at a time.
One moment of listening at a time.
We are not machines that break.
We are living beings with nervous systems shaped by experience - and capable of healing when given the conditions for healing.
Whether we stand on two legs or four.
My name is Jasper.
And I was difficult…
Until someone gave me the space to become something else.
by Gaylene Diedericks (fictional story)
