05/09/2025
Allowing a horse to disrespect your personal space is not kind or fair to anyone.
I do not enjoy, using harsh disciplinary action, but I’m also not going to get hurt- I will use any, and all means necessary to keep a horse from running me over…  so if we are in a setting, where a horse is spooky, or overwhelmed by all the other horses, and I am in a position where it is my job to keep everyone safe, I often times have to be way more harsh then I want to. Too often I have been in the position where I can tell the owner is not quick enough or athletic enough or skilled enough to protect their own space, with a horse who clearly doesn’t already understand that they are not supposed to jump on top of humans….  In the first 20 minutes of a clinic is a sh*tty time for a horse to have to learn that lesson, and the first 30 seconds of me meeting a new horse is a sh*tty time for me to have to teach it.  But in that moment, that’s my job. I’m not gonna let the 60 year old woman get run over and injured. And I’m not gonna let that horse spend its entire day emotionally distraught, because there are fuzzy boundaries and zero leader ship, and too much stimulus for him to handle on his own.  I can typically get horses quiet and trusting pretty quick, but sometimes the beginning isn’t pretty. And I can only hope that the owners follow through so that any discipline i deliver has lifetime benefits instead of one day worth of benefits. But of course, old habits are hard to break in new skills take a while to learn.
So this is what I absolutely beg of horse owners:
▪️ On the ground, learn how to stop and back up your horse without pulling on the lead rope.
- use body language
- Use a flag or a stick or the tail of the lead rope out in front of you if necessary
-  Skilled horseman can get it done without shaking the lead rope but it’s better to shake the lead rope, then do not learn it at all, so just shake the darn lead rope if you must.
▪️ Now that you have some kind of method for stopping the horse and moving him out of your space,  Please teach a horse to stop when you stop, plus granting you a bubble of space. Imagine that if a child was leading your horse, and suddenly stopped in front of them that your horse would be polite enough to stand there and wait.
▪️ Be aware of your own space and don’t allow your horse to constantly move it. I can’t tell you how often I’ll be talking to someone and their horse inches into their space and they take a step out of the way…. Over and over and over. To the point that we have moved a good 20 feet in under two minutes and the human doesn’t even realize it. Have some awareness. If your horses encroaches on your space, kindly move them. Do not teach them that you will get out of their way, because this literally teaches the horse to run you over!
If all you master is these three things you’ll have enough foundation to get by.  It will be some thing solid you can build from.
