Affinity Equine Behaviour North Wales

17/09/2025

The difference between those of us who can ‘see’ and those of us who can’t, is the knowledge that suffering still happens in the absence of physical abuse. Even positive reinforcement can be aversive when used incorrectly.

If we don’t have the capacity for empathy… to live, see and feel through our horses’ eyes… then we will never ‘get it’.

14/09/2025

👌

There is no such thing as a Hard-Mouthed Horse...

I’ve had plenty of so-called lightbulb moments, but this one was more like a stadium floodlight.

Years ago, I had a “hard-mouthed” horse. He pulled like a freight train, and I wore my toned arms like battle scars. Before competitions, I’d strap my fingers to stop them blistering, and I even had a special notch on his flash noseband - my “war setting.” 😕

Weekly lessons, visiting fancy coaches, even Olympians - all gave me the same advice: try another bit.

So I assumed he was born that way. Some horses are “frustrating,” some are “hard-mouthed.” Right?

Then came the day I’ll never forget: mid flying change practice, his mouth bled. He hauled off, I wrestled him down, and I was horrified. Ashamed. Disgusted. And thank god I was, because that sickening moment rattled me out of the echo chamber of dressage land.😔

Not long after, I stumbled on a random YouTube video - not a dressage rider, just someone I’d have dismissed back then as “rope-twirling horsemanship.” But when your world’s been shaken, you listen differently.

Their message? There’s no such thing as a hard mouth. Horses don’t come out of the womb resistant - they brace to protect themselves when they don’t understand.

Then the kicker: horses don’t learn from the pressure - they learn from the release of it. You don’t teach by pulling harder; you teach by letting go at the exact right moment.

That’s when the penny dropped. My horse wasn’t softening when I released - I was just giving up because he was stronger. So the only lesson I’d ever taught him was: “brace harder, she’ll quit eventually.” I wasn’t guiding him to softness - I was literally training him to defend himself against me.🥹

So I saddled up, tried lateral flexion, and he bent the wrong way. Clear as day, he didn’t understand the bit at all. Forty-five minutes later, with some careful, conscious releases, I had a horse who was suddenly soft. 😳

That moment changed everything. It showed me how many so-called “horse problems” aren’t problems with the horse at all - they’re blind spots in our own understanding. And how easily we can be lulled into false confidence by experts who never question the basics...or maybe they were trying but it wasn't at a level I understood.🤷‍♀️

It’s my work to uncover what I don’t know and share what I learn - handing you shortcuts to avoid the bruised fingers, tight nosebands, wasted money, and the misery my horse endured. If you’ve got contact issues, rushing, or a so-called “hard mouth,” don’t assume that’s just your horse. More often, it’s a missing insight.

Also, it is proof you can learn extremely helpful things online ❤

This is Collectable Advice entry 22/365 of my Notebook Challenge. Save it, share it… and please don’t copy and paste and pretend it’s yours...missing this last bit of course 🙄

13/09/2025

This!

Not Naughty. Not Stubborn. Just Threatened.

The way I like to explain horse behaviour is simple: most of the “difficulties” people face with horses don’t come from some deep equine conspiracy against you. They come from one thing: the horse feels threatened.

I found this image of an ape riding a horse. The horse looks horrified - as if Godzilla just mounted up. And the tragic punchline? That’s often exactly what your horse sees when you climb aboard.

We humans love to overcomplicate things. We write essays about "stress releases" and "calming herbs", we argue over whether our horse is "sensitive" or just a "chestnut", and we spend small fortunes on gadgets designed by people with more marketing flair than horsemanship. But when you strip it all back, horses are embarrassingly simple: if they feel safe, they’ll try. If they feel threatened, they’ll try to survive.

Let me explain - and yes, I’ll use this image to do it.

This is the hardest thing for people to swallow: we can make the horse feel threatened.

The behaviour you call “naughty,” “stubborn,” or “difficult” is just your horse reacting to the primate clamped on its back like a panicked cat on a rollercoaster.

- Sit like a sack of potatoes and grip like a crab? Threatening.
- Move in the saddle like you’re auditioning for Riverdance? Threatening.
- Sn**ch, pull, or hang on the reins? Threatening.
- Force their neck into a yoga pose they didn’t sign up for? Threatening.
- Strap on tack that pinches, rubs, or restricts? Threatening.
- Demand pirouettes while they’re already internally screaming? Very threatening.

Before long, your horse isn’t just threatened under saddle - they’re threatened at the mounting block, when the saddle appears, or when you walk into the paddock with that “today’s the day we nail it!” look in your eye.

When horses feel threatened…
- They become hypervigilant, nervous, spooky.
- They turn resistant, anxious, reactive.
- They buck, rear, pig-root, strike, or charge—because when you’re a prey animal and someone feels like a predator, the natural solution is to make them regret that life choice.
- And the chronic fallout of being regularly threatened? That’s a story for another day—but let’s just say it isn’t solved with a new bit and a tub of magnesium powder.

So what can we do?

It’s not rocket science. (Or pseudoscience, for that matter. 😎)
- We teach.
- We train.
- We manage their health.

Above all, we help the horse understand, feel comfortable, and feel secure. That’s it.

Horses are ridiculously easy to train. We love to say they’re “prey animals” as if that excuses everything, but really, so are we. Their gift is being wired to notice threats - and their brilliance is that they learn faster than you can scroll through Facebook. Honestly, they’re easier to train than dogs. You just have to know how.

And that’s why I’m here. Not because horses are complicated mystical unicorns - but because they’re simple, and humans are the ones who make it complicated. Once you learn how not to feel like Godzilla on their back, you unlock the part where they are brave, trusting, and extraordinary.

We’re all just primates doing our best. The shift comes when you learn how not to be the monster in the saddle. And that’s easier than you think.

👉 Check the first comment - I’ll point you toward some resources that actually work.

This is totally counting as Day 15/365 of my notebook challenge—where I spill good ideas straight from my obsessive notebook collection. Collect them, share them, scribble them in the margins of your own life. Just don’t copy-paste (plagiarism is so last season).

⚠️And if the satire stings a little—don’t be offended. It’s meant to both sting and be funny. That’s how we crack things open enough to actually see them. ❤

12/09/2025

She’d put her face against mine asking for a treat so I put it on cue 😍

11/09/2025

Desensitisation V’s Flooding – PART 2

Desensitisation involves learning, which can only happen when they don’t already feel in danger. Whenever they perceive they’re in danger, the only thing that can happen is fear conditioning leading to coping strategies like freeze or learned helplessness. If nervous system emergency actions such as bucking or bolting occur, they are reflexive emotional responses, not conscious decisions, we cannot counter condition these in the moment, the positive learning opportunity has passed.

These are simply resolved by not pushing the horse over their coping threshold in the first place. If we were to utilise desensitisation to resolve bucking, it wouldn’t involve bucking, or trying to get the horse to buck, it would involve tiny exposures to the fear that triggers it, done in such a way that they don’t feel afraid enough/the need to buck in the first place. Bucking and bolting are symptoms of a nervous system response, not a behaviour we can directly modify.

Desensitisation is the process, and counter conditioning is what we are achieving in the mind of the individual, they go hand in hand. It only works with careful environmental set up for conditioned (learned) fear, or in the moment for milder fear responses, and it NEVER involves using aversive equipment. The moment we rely on aversive equipment, we move into flooding.

Examples of flooding are:

Cross ties to prevent movement whilst bathing or clipping, etc (forced to endure through the fear with no escape - freeze)

Holding on to the lead rope whilst waving ridiculous things over their heads and bodies till they stop squirming (no escape leads to freeze).

Taking them to shows or competitions where we need to use chain head collars or worse for control (im going to take you to a place where you’re terrified, then use pain to suppress your fear response).

Repeatedly insisting they go back towards the spooky corner/object after multiple meltdowns only to let them leave once we’ve successfully forced them to stay there and coerced their head down under the ridiculous pretence this is relaxation (relaxation is a state of mind, not a body posture).

Repeatedly coercing them into a lorry where they panic or paw in desperation and keeping them there only to let them out when they stop (stop showing your fear and ill provide you with relief)

Strapping a saddle on for the first time and letting them buck it out (there’s a predator on my back, my life is in danger, I cannot escape this)

Using a strong ‘contact’ to make them ‘concentrate’ on us in a spooky arena (they now fear what the human is doing more than the spooky arena)

Join up (ill make you run around with no escape until your exhausted and your ONLY option to make it stop is to come to me)

Using the reins to stop the horse from turning around or getting away/more distance from a scary thing, and forcing them to stand there whilst still terrified until we allow them to leave again after the misconception that dropping their head an inch was relaxation (blocking escape and forcing exposure).

Cornering the horse in the stable or whilst tied up and putting the clippers on, only putting them off when they stop panicking (forced freeze response)

Shouting at a horse that wont stand still for the procedure/whatever we need to do to them (no escape and human becomes even more scary than the scary thing – freeze)

Any other thing you can think of, where they are afraid, and have no CHOICE but to endure it.

Whats makes flooding so much more complicated and difficult to see at times is that many horses won’t show any fear responses once a human has hold of them, they go straight to a learned freeze response, because they’ve learned anything else is fruitless or it just gets worse for them if they do, they’re already suffering from learned helplessness.

Basically, anything that involves them feeling a great deal of worry and us being relentless or forceful in our quest is flooding. It doesn’t matter whether we think their fears are unfounded or not, or ‘know’ they are safe, it’s not for us to decide, it’s about listening to how they feel.

We cannot possibly imagine what it feels like to be a prey animal with zero agency in life, surrounded by relentless predators with a self serving goal.

Repeated intense flooding causes immense trauma and often leads to a total shut down, where the horse checks out of life completely, it’s a step further from learned helplessness, it’s the brain’s way of protecting itself from the trauma, the horse doesn’t respond to scary things, offers no behaviour, isn’t very forward, and is indifferent to humans, including what gets done to them; most owners call this a bomb proof horse.

Learned helplessness is a form of depression that comes from learning we have absolutely no control over outcomes. This sums up most ridden horses’ lives. Whenever horses try to communicate, they are ignored, be it lifting the head whilst being schooled when something concerns them in the environment to check if they’re safe, only to be see-sawed back down into contact because they’re being ‘naughty’, a horse that dances out of fear when having their legs hosed only to be shouted at and slapped for being ‘naughty’, or a horse pinning their ears and being met with anger ‘because they’re being ‘not nice’ when they just want us to go away because we aren’t nice enough to them.

Every behaviour is communication and in the space of a month there could be a hundred incidences of being ignored and or flooding where the horse tried to communicate worry only to learn that no one cares, nothing they do makes a difference, no one is listening, s**t keeps happening regardless, and they realise they are helpless to save themselves, so they accept their fate and develop depression, and owners become happy that they finally have a ‘well behaved’ horse.

The irony is, unless it’s an existing conditioned fear from past life, we don’t even need to desensitise our horses. When their needs are met and our relationship with them is such that they feel listened to, their feelings are felt, they’re never pushed beyond their capacity to cope, and are allowed to say ‘no’, they develop the utmost trust in us and our judgement, so we become the anchor that helps them feel safe in any situation. They start to say ‘yes’ to everything, because they know we wont ask more than they can handle, and always know that ‘no’ is an option to them if needed.

If ‘no’ had been an option in that dentist’s chair, we’d have been much braver to see it through voluntarily and wouldn’t have left with trauma.

10/09/2025

Desensitisation v’s Flooding – PART 1

This is a very long post as there’s lots to cover so I’m separating it into two parts..

With so many subscription ‘trainers’ out there who don’t even know the difference, here’s what you need to know.

Desensitisation is a process of gradually exposing an organism to their fears in tiny exposures or from a certain distance that doesn’t cause overwhelm/the animal isn’t showing any fear responses. They must remain within the coping threshold of their nervous system so that it doesn’t block access to their cortex (thinking brain) to be able to learn and decide for themselves there is in fact nothing to fear, but they must be voluntary participants, and always have the option to leave/escape or say ‘no’ during the process if it gets too much. This means at any sign of fear we stop, and if they want to move away we allow them to, as far as it takes till they feel ok to try again.

When something arouses enough fear, or once a fear has been developed, that stimulus will always trigger the same neural circuit to the amygdala, the threat centre of the brain, this is fear conditioning. These neural circuits cannot be ‘undone’, they are hard wired into the brain for life and often bypass the cortex completely. The only way to resolve fear is to build a new neural circuit that leads to the medial forebrain bundle instead (the reward centre) by repeatedly pairing the scary thing with something good that releases dopamine which changes their negative association with it (counter conditioning), or a process called extinction which is repeated exposure where the individual again remains in a learning state, and it leads to no negative consequences (a form of habituation/getting used to it).

Both of these processes require considerably more brain power than the original fear conditioning did, and extinction usually takes much longer. The important part to remember here is that depending on the degree of fear, it usually takes many days, weeks or even months of repetition to form this new circuit and for it to become reliable, it certainly does not happen in one session.

Flooding occurs whenever an organism experiences fear/overwhelm, and discovers that saying ‘no’ and/or escape is not an option.

Flooding occurs whenever anything mentally or physically aversive becomes unavoidable. It’s subjective, determined by the individual, so we must rely on our ability to read the most subtlest of body language to gauge how the individual is feeling. Standing still, alone, is not a sign of comfort, relaxation or acceptance.

Flooding also happens whenever they begin to fear what we will do to them more-so than what’s causing the fear.

When ‘no’, and flight are not an option due to the lead rope, lunge line, cross ties, tack, stable, round pen, or us, it’s no longer voluntary, and the only option left for a trapped prey animal is to freeze, to which most people think the horse ‘looks like he’s ok with it now’.

In the wild, freeze is a state of shut down once they have been caught by a predator where the parasympathetic nervous system essentially shuts down the brain, slows the heart, breathing rate, and re-directs all the blood to the organs as a last resort for survival, hoping for the best, its tonic immobility.

The definition of trauma is being in a situation where we fear for our safety, with no means of escape or avoidance… and it changes how the brain works indefinitely (PTSD)

Flooding means we aren’t creating new positive neural pathways, we are tapping into the old one causing freeze, or forming new ones via the cortex to the amygdala again that create negative associations. It can happen on many levels and repeated milder instances of flooding leads to learned helplessness.

Causing a fear response and or denying a fearful individual the ability to say ‘no’ or leave the situation will always be flooding, it will decrease trust in us, and lead to trauma or learned helplessness. Imagine being terrified of the dentist, getting strapped to the chair for the procedure, and being repeatedly ignored when we wriggled and beg them to stop for a moment because it was getting too overwhelming, resulting in them simply increasing the restraints to get the job done (because they know were ‘safe’), so the only option left for us would be to freeze and accept that our lives were in another’s hands. From the dentists belief however, we were ‘’ok with it in the end’ because we stopped moving/trying to communicate. Would we leave with more confidence for the next time, having been ‘desensitised’ because we survived, or would it increase our fear so much so, that we would leave forever traumatised at the fear of feeling trapped like that again?

Ill cover examples of flooding and more on desensitisation and learned helplessness tomorrow.

09/09/2025

If only I had a penny for every time I hear the words “I’ve done this for 30 years..”

Doing something for 30 years doesn’t mean we understand the science behind what we are doing. Ive been driving for 30 years, does that make me a mechanic or auto electrician?

Ive been riding for 35 and only ‘doing this’ for 7years, yet within 5 minutes of being around any horse and owner, the horse has already told me how they feel about the ‘relationship’. None of which the owner can ‘see’.

Those who use ‘experience’ as an argument don’t ever try to explain the psychology of why their methods work, opting to simply launch personal insults at anyone who would question it instead because the knowledge just simply isn’t there. Defensiveness is all there is.

30 years of knowledge on how to deal with horses when they’re hot, spicy, start to buck, get spookier, bolt or rear means we haven’t actually learnt anything, because we still cant ‘see’. These behaviours are normalised in this industry, when they are NOT NORMAL. They are FEAR responses that wouldn’t happen to begin with if we genuinely did understand the ramifications of what WE were doing and learnt to understand them instead of control them.

Most owners and ‘trainers’ in this industry cant even differentiate between desensitisation and flooding, theres a HUGE difference and should be a bare minimum requirement to understand in any animal training, but this industry is unregulated.

Blaming the horse, and getting an ego boost from ‘fixing’ their behaviours which are considered some form of battle to conquer for over 30 years just means we haven’t learnt a thing in a world that continues to evolve beyond us.

08/09/2025

Love this!

Double standards in the horse world…

The number of people who have told me that I should teach all of my horses to ride bitted on the off chance that I can no longer keep them and they’re one day sold to someone who would lack the patience and tact to school them in a bit if that’s what they wanted is more than it should be.

But, if you reverse the rules and say that in order for horses to be safe and have a better chance of finding good homes long-term, they should all be able to be ridden safely bit less, many people will vehemently disagree.

“Not all horses can be ridden bitless!” They’ll say.

Well, why don’t we extend that same logic but in reverse for horses who go better bitless?

Why is it up to personal horse owners to alter their daily handling of horses in favour using harsher equipment to pander to the possibility that an impatient person may one day acquire their horse?

Why is it viewed as more of a weakness for horses to need “less” equipment than it is more?

I never see this logic used to chastise people who “need” to lead their horses in from the paddock in a nose chain for safety.

Or who cannot jump their horse without a gag bit without losing control.

Or who cannot school their horses in a soft snaffle at all due to how strong their horse is.

I also seldom see the same logic used to hold people accountable for riding horses into the ground and then discarding them when they develop lameness issues that render them unable to continue being used for their intend purpose.

So, why is it that being ridden in a bit is viewed as a necessary prerequisite for longterm safety of horses for future homes…

But not being rideable in soft equipment?

But not being emotionally regulated and relaxed?

But not developing horses in a way to decrease the likelihood of physical injury?

But not keeping and retiring the horses that people ride until their bodies give out?

There is a lot of hypocrisy and lack of consistency in the horse world but I think this is one of the most profound examples of it.

Where the solution is to pressure bitless riders into using equipment they’d prefer not to use instead of reforming the industry to allow bitless riders to participate across disciplines should they so choose.

Choice matters.

Patience matters, too.

A rider who is going to mistreat a horse simply because they’re not immediately perfect in new equipment is a bad horseman, regardless of the horse’s training history.

The issue there is the attitude of the rider, not the fact that the horse has or hasn’t had enough training in a bit.

At what point are we going to put the onus on the humans to be better horse people instead of making it the horse’s jobs to learn how to put up with poor handling?

Protecting horses and securing their future should involve altering the aspects of the industry that put them at risk in the first place.

And if we are being honest, it’s the attitude of the humans that are most dangerous to the horses.

It is the human’s job to do right by the horses.

Not the horses’ jobs to learn how to put up with human incompetence.

Why don’t we start holding humans even as a fraction as accountable for their behaviour as we hold horses?

06/09/2025

Many horses dont understand pressure because we dont release it at the right time, we dont release it at all or not enough.

When we learn how to use it correctly its not even ‘pressure’, its simply a form of communication through touch. A horse can feel a fly land on them, which means the pressure of a finger touch is enough to ask them to move away, but we back chain that even more to a pre cursor for the question we are about to ask, so that they learn our intention/what’s coming through body language and can cooperate before we even touch them.

Strong pressure creates resistance as it causes mental and physical discomfort that hinders their ability to learn and understand our request, which often leads to them zoning it out, its why most unskilled trainers will increase pressure by adding spurs once the horse is dead to the leg or a stronger bit because they have a ‘hard’ mouth. Its the opposite of the answer yet they just want that quick fix ego trip.

When we gradually increase the pressure because we are getting impatient such as squeezing more with legs or pulling more on the reins for the backup, horses will lean into that pressure not away because the only time they experience this in a natural environment is when a predator is holding them and leaning into that is how they avoid getting ripped open.

Pressure is always as light as possible and stays that way for as long as it takes till the horse works out he can control it by moving away. We immediately stop what we are doing the second they even think about the right answer. Impatience is what hinders the human ability to learn to communicate with horses.

03/09/2025

The comments on this trying to justify this as not cruelty just proves the lack of empathy for an animal that is simply a conduit to pleasure for these people. Coming to peace with the fact these horses suffer for the sake of human enjoyment means they’d have to give up that enjoyment in life. Its mind blowing how many humans are simply so self centred, it’s inhumane.

02/09/2025

Horses that don’t get daily unobstructed contact with other horses are Oxytocin deprived and are unable to co (or self) regulate their nervous system.

This means they will never be capable of rational thinking, and we are failing them as care givers.