Williams Lake Trail Riders Association

11/12/2025

11/12/2025

Horses differ in their sensitivity, as well as their motivation.

This means that when you use any pressure, you’ll need to identify each and every horse’s innate or acquired sensitivity.

If the pressure used is consistently below a motivating level the horse may habituate and require more pressure in the future, inducing negative affect.

Conversely, using pressures that exceed the motivating level is also a recipe for poor welfare.

Good horsemanship has always been about tuning in to the precise motivating level of pressure for each individual. An experienced horse person can often determine a horse’s sensitivity simply through touch and grooming.

Andrew McLean - Modern Horse Training: Equitation Science Principles & Practice, Volume 2

📖 Available for purchase on our website!

11/10/2025

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A tough topic about an even tougher decision.

It would be easier if they just made the decision for us. Laid down to rest one warm fall afternoon surrounded by their herd mates, never to wake again.

Easier also is in the face of dire emergency, where the only choice is clear, the path to quick mercy.

Unfortunately for us as horse owners, there are blessed few who have that decision made for us. Most of the time, it’s up to us to make that last call.

The majority of us are left with the horses who served us well right up until the end, maybe even enjoying years of retirement. When you see them out in the pasture and wonder, “is this the end, or just a bad day? A bad few days?” “Oh – they look perky today, maybe things are looking up. What I thought I had to think, I don’t have to – today. It’s a good day.”

But the writing is on the wall. Their eyes are less bright, their weight hard to keep. Their gait shuffled, surviving, but no longer thriving.

All symptoms of the fact you have the hardest decision of your life to make, and soon. I wish it on no one and grieve the day I have to make the decision I advocate here for; the decision to let them go on a good day.

We are having a blessedly long and beautiful fall, but time is waning if you are only beginning to contemplate whether your trusted partner can face another barren, brutal, frostbitten winter.

You are the only advocate your horse has. His health is and has always been in your hands. In loving him as hard as you have for all these years, I hope you can love him hard enough to let them go on a good day, while there is still time.

11/09/2025