LS Horsemanship

13/11/2025

SHORT NOTICE AVAILABILITY 🐴

Saturday 15th November - York/Wetherby route (1 afternoon slot)

Also regularly covering Teesside/Durham/Tyne and Wear/Northumberland/North Yorkshire

Equine behavioural consultant and ethical trainer - kind, horse-centred training and support.

Behaviour/ground work/ridden work/postural rehab/positive reinforcement training.

Please see my page/website for further information.

13/11/2025

Winter Issues 🐴

Winter can be really tough on our horses, and us, but I never used to realise just how influential the change in conditions could be.

Many people struggle with restricted turnout in the winter meaning more time spent stabled. Stabling horses for long periods makes it really difficult to meet their needs and keep them emotionally and physically healthy.

Every system in the horse’s body is designed to thrive on movement, it is not just stiffness in the joints we need to consider. The respiratory system, the digestive system, the lymphatic system etc all need movement to stay healthy. There is also a high cost to the horse’s emotional wellbeing when they are unable to have the freedom to express their natural behaviours such as socialising and foraging.

While I appreciate we cannot all have access to acres of well draining, suitable land, there are things we can do to improve things for our horses. Making sure they have plenty of enrichment and foraging opportunities, making sure they have the opportunity to socialise and perhaps creating smaller turnout areas in a yard or barn rather than individual stabling so they can spend more time pottering about and being with other horses.

The colder temperatures and wet weather can really affect some horses and it is important we treat every horse as an individual. Just because a horse can cope without being rugged doesn’t mean they’re comfortable, with the trend of clipping horses to help them lose weight we need to be mindful that we don’t let them get too cold. Sore, tense muscles from being too cold are no fun for anyone, especially when we’re then expected to work hard. Horses with muscle issues and arthritis may also benefit from being kept warmer, especially if their movement is restricted.

Something I hadn’t really thought much about until the last few years is mud. Yes we all know its annoying and I’ve always been worried about slipping and injuries. But I didn’t appreciate how much walking around in mud all day could put strain on a horses body. If you think about what its like for us to walk through mud, how much we need to pull and brace, it makes sense that it would be tiring for our horses. I really notice the difference in my horses who have physical issues once things get really muddy. Its important that our horses have access to some sort of hard standing or drier ground, this could look as simple as some rubber, stone or mud mats around your hay feeding area, people are doing all sorts of cool stuff with sheep fleece, wood chip and even cockle shells now.

The other huge concern with deep mud is the solid ruts that are created when it then freezes which bring their own problems.

I know winter can feel like a slog and it can be so stressful when you feel you can’t give your horse the ideal environment you would like to, but making small, realistic changes can really go a long way to improving their overall wellbeing.

We have had biblical rain over the last 48 hrs meaning I have made the decision to pull my horses off my clay land to stop them trashing it. I have managed to create a mostly mud-free corral area with mud mats and sand where they have access to their bedded shelter, plenty of hay stations and they can be together instead of shut away. This is much more preferable to my horses than being stabled and means they can still potter around as they please and socialise. Is it ideal? No, but if I don't restrict their access to the field now, they will churn it all to thick mud in no time and won't have any nice turnout space for the rest of winter.

How are you all coping with this intense wet weather? 🐴

10/11/2025

Busy afternoon trying to mud-proof the corral the best we can with what we’ve already got. The forecast for the next 10 days looks very wet without much let-up. I hope it’s wrong! ☔️☔️☔️☔️

I pulled up the mud mats that were under the bedding in my shelter as it seems to be doing just fine for drainage being on a slight slope and have placed them to create two mud-free rafts. I figured I’d rather have separate patches with smaller patches of mud in between as they’ll be easier to manage.

You can’t quite tell in the photos as the damp sand is the same colour as mud but we already have sand on a membrane all across the back. I’m sure it’ll all look less higgledy piggledy once the horses bed it in.

They now have a lovely deep freshened up bed in the shelter too. Eventually I hope to buy more mud mats but this will have to do us for this winter I think. Having somewhere I can close the horses in and save the fields when it’s really soupy will be a big help.

09/11/2025

Is "useless" the worst thing a horse can be? 🐴

I have just seen a horse advertised for sale and it has made me feel so sad.

23yo mare for sale, easy to do, retired with tendon injury, not sound but could do some light hacking

The accompanying photograph shows a horse with a horrendous sunken topline, long, cracked, under-run hooves and a worried, anxious face.

Horses are treated like they're disposable and we have normalised it. Old, lame horses who people don't want to pay for in their twilight years, so they sell them as "light hacks" to squeeze the last bit of "use" out of them. Young "problem" horses who get passed from trainer to trainer only to have them put down and replaced with a new one when they can't be made to be "useful" quickly enough.

For many people a horse who can't be ridden in some way isn't worth keeping alive. I find this attitude so callous. I cannot cope with the thought of my own horses being passed around and treated like this.

I hope as time goes on horses are seen more for the sentient, intelligent, emotional animals they are and disposing of them at our convenience becomes a thing of the past.

I have 2 "useless" unridden horses at home and I am so glad I can keep them safe for the rest of their lives. I love spending time with them, they give me so much just by existing.

I'd love to hear about your unridden horses and their stories. 🐴

This is a photo of my horse Lenny enjoying some grass tonight. He is 20 years old and has been with me for 20 years 🥲. I retired him from ridden work at around 7 years old due to his orthopaedic issues. It never once crossed my mind to "get rid of" him. He now enjoys, and is very good at, clicker training and enrichment activites. He loves having lots of soft places to roll and he loves eating 😅❤️.

08/11/2025

Perfection is the enemy of good 🐴

Besides the obvious pain, environmental and chronic stress issues many horses are dealing with, the way we train is often actually hindering our horse’s progress, despite the effort we’re putting in. In the pursuit of perfection we are actually potentially stifling our horses.

I have bumbled my way through many different training ideologies over the years. Beginning with the most conventional route of fiddling with my horse’s mouth until they gave to the pressure of the bit and became “round” and “soft”. This I would say is still the way most horses are ridden despite all of the evidence as to how harmful compressing the horse’s neck like this is. At the time I was told this was “working through from behind”, you fiddle the head soft then you ride forward. Deeply unpleasant for the horse and definitely damaging.

I eventually stumbled into the “correct” biomechanics territory and thought I had found “the thing”. I spent my time tapping my horses with sticks, obsessing over where their head, neck and poll were and drilling slow lateral work. My horses were definitely moving in healthier ways than they were before but it wasn’t particularly enjoyable for them. I imagine it mostly felt like I was irritating them and they were relieved when the session ended.

I then thought I had found the holy grail in positive reinforcement training and got really into luring with targets. Did the horses enjoy this? I would definitely say so. But the unskilled way I was training was creating a lot of arousal and frustration. I was focusing on manipulating the horse into different postures or over raised poles not realising they perhaps weren’t appropriate at the time. I was a messy clicker trainer who didn’t understand how to keep horses calm around food.

In all of these explorations I was micro-managing the horse’s body and not giving a huge amount of thought to their emotional state or letting them have the autonomy to explore that movement themselves. Do this, move this shoulder here, no not like that, yes only like that, no stop that’s too far, slow down, no not that much, you’re trailing your hind leg, your neck is an inch too low, no don’t stop, keep walking, no now you’re crooked go straight. Sounds pretty stifling.

Now I’m not suggesting we all just sit on our horses and do nothing, but there is so much more out there than the conventional training of micromanaging the horse’s every move. We cannot get truly functional, healthy movement like this. We will always be causing brace and compensation as we cannot possibly feel the horse’s body as well as they can.

So what am I suggesting? I now think along the lines of how can I get the horse to explore this movement or do it willingly, not do it because I micromanaged and irritated them into it? Of course I also question if the ask is appropriate at all for that horse in that moment.

My favourite way to get horses to start exploring movement is through enrichment activities, just allowing the horse to explore, forage and problem solve has such a positive effect on the body and their emotional state. This is a great base to work from.

We can be so much more creative with our training and can make it really fun for our horses too. Some ideas to get you started:
🐴 Enrichment playgrounds - allowing your horse to explore freely and choose what they’d like to investigate, you can set things up to encourage various movement choices
🐴 Hand walks/hacks - hacking in areas you can safely allow your horse to browse, forage, sniff and perhaps even make choices on the route they take or the terrain they cover
🐴 Good positive reinforcement training - positive reinforcement training is a whole skillset of its own and I encourage you to not get carried away with getting your horse to do all of the things because he is suddenly so willing to do so, we want to focus on training calm around food and then thinking about what is appropriate to ask the horse to do for where his body is at right now

When we stop chasing perfection, and stop worrying about what our training looks like to others, there’s a whole other world out there of training that is not only actually fun for both of you, but really helps to improve their bodies too. 🐴

Pictured is a lovely dressage horse enjoying an enrichment playground with his rider on board. They have started incorporating this kind of training and are seeing improvements in his musculature.

07/11/2025

This is a fantastic post. It is a frequent topic of conversation between me and my other friends in the industry who are really for the horse. Everyone is marketing as ethical and kind now but the actions do not match the narrative. I am constantly seeing horses with poor musculature, significant pain indicators and clear signs of high-stress being put through inappropriate training to get compliance. They have often been seen by multiple professionals who have "cleared" them from pain and deemed it appropriate to crack on and ride them.

It is so harmful to horses and, the problem is, it is so normalised that its hard to get people to see anything is wrong. We are so used to seeing horses in chronic stress. We also feel entitled to use them and get what we want out of them regardless of how they feel about it. But it is sold to us as kind or confidence-building or "scientific". Tapping a horse with a stick until they perform a behaviour is scientific sure, but that doesn't make it ethical. Most "problem-horse" training is just compliance training, the industry has a really, really long way to go.

The inconvenient truth is many of the conventional ways we treat, train and think about horses are harming them.
Most horses I meet are varying degrees of anxious, chronically stressed, shut down and in pain/discomfort. There are no easy, quick-fixes that are objectively ethical if you are viewing it through the lens of horse welfare.

It is so easy to talk the talk, its not at all easy to walk the walk which is why so few are interested in doing it.

05/11/2025

I hope everyone’s animals are safe and not too distressed.

The boys were doing fine until something loud enough to shake the buildings went off behind the barn. They initially panicked and then mostly stood, stared and had raging diarrhoea from the stress.

Hate this night, there is no need to have them so loud.

05/11/2025

When the training makes things worse for the horse 🐴

There has been a change over the years from describing horses as naughty and dominant to actually recognising their stress, anxiety and trauma. However when we look at a lot of the training that is being marketed as ethical, it is still the same as it always was, apply pressure until horse does thing. Getting that horse’s behaviour to change as quickly as possible so we can feel like we have achieved a result, rather than really understanding how that horse is feeling and adjusting our approach accordingly.

There are so many click-bait videos online describing horses as abused or traumatised, then the training within them is unnecessarily highly stressful for the horse. All of the training is around applying pressure until the horse complies, often moving their feet or chasing them back out of “our” space until we get the desired behaviour.

The narrative will be that the horse was abused and traumatised in the past by someone else, some big bad wolf we can all blame, and maybe this is true. However nobody is seeing that, in this moment right now, they are also traumatising that horse by putting them under so much stress in the name of “helping” them. Further terrifying a horse to gain compliance is not helping them. At best it is shutting them down, at worst you’ll get bigger blow-ups and people will get hurt.

Putting horses into situations they find highly stressful and making them stay there until they give in is compliance training, it does not address any of the emotional issues the horse is dealing with and actually makes them worse. Often these horses are extremely sore and braced up in their bodies from being chronically stressed for so long, they need time to decompress and to learn to feel safe around people.

I have just watched a video of a fearful horse being pulled around on a rope halter, you can see the horse doesn’t want to come near the trainer and is staying as far back as the rope allows. The trainer then stops abruptly and the horse takes an extra step as they were taken by surprise, so the trainer then repeatedly whacks a flag up into the horse’s face until they back up. Rinse and repeat. The narrative throughout is that this horse is scared and has been abused in the past and this is somehow helping him. All it is doing is teaching the horse that humans are definitely horrible and unpredictable to be around and definitely not to be trusted. You should not let your guard down around humans. It is however making the horse compliant and more convenient for the humans. This session went on for 2 hours.

It doesn’t always have to look this violent to be highly-stressful. I see extremely tense horses being repeatedly loaded, tacked up, being made to stand by a mounting block etc. Again and again, as if just making them stay in that situation and letting them know there is no other option will have them feeling better. This way of training completely ignores the horse’s attempts at communication and is why so many horses are being trained through pain and discomfort. No isn’t an option, the line is one way, you have to do this and its fine because I said so.

It is not enough to just recognise and comment on stress behaviours, you have to actually do something with that information if we want to train ethically. I see so many videos of people observing signs of high-stress and anxiety while training, and then they continue anyway causing more stress and often pushing the horse into exploding, then they punish them for that too and justify it by calling the horse dangerous.

So many horses are traumatised to some degree, so many of the normalised ways of treating, managing and training horses are highly stressful and frightening for them. We are so conditioned to control our horse’s every move and expect them to comply regardless of how they feel about it. There is a kinder way and a safer way. It just takes time and patience.

If a horse is traumatised, repeatedly putting them into highly-stressful training situations is not going to actually help them feel better. We are looking at weeks, months, years of allowing that horse to feel safe again. Which means really doing what is right for the horse and putting our own wants on hold. But that is inconvenient.

If our metric for success is simply getting the horse to comply regardless of how they feel about it then we are not going to be making choices that are in that horse's best interests.🐴

04/11/2025

What are we really doing? 🐴

Scrolling through my news feed I keep being shown dog training videos, I’m not sure why as I don’t have a dog but probably the mention of behaviour. I know a little about dog training through my excellent clinical animal behaviourist friends and it is so interesting to see the parallels with the horse industry.

The video that prompted me to write was of a dog who was terrified of people even in their own home. In the video the trainer has the dog on a lead in front of a crowd of people. The dog is cowering with their tail between their legs absolutely terrified. Their allegedly ethical solution is to use an e-collar and punish the dog unless the dog is looking towards the trainer. They don’t call it punishment but that’s what it is. If the dog moves or looks away from them they use the e-collar again. Quite quickly the dog learns that the only way to get the punishment to stop is to go near the trainer. Success apparently.

So we’ve taken a stressed animal with behavioural issues, put them in a strange, scary environment, filled with strange people and then applied pressure until they have complied. Sound familiar?

None of this is actually helping the animal feel better, they’re just having to choose between a rock and a hard place. Which is more unpleasant? Being near the person or the e-collar/flag/rope/plastic bag/whip? It is compliance training and nothing more. Getting the animal to perform the behaviour you deem acceptable without it mattering how they feel about it.

I have a real ethical issue with taking horses who are struggling even in their home environment with apparent behavioural issues and sticking them in front of a crowd in a strange place to be pulled around on a rope halter and hassled with a flag/plastic bag/whip in the name of “helping” them. This is just flooding and it is a fast-track to a very shut down, traumatised, albeit compliant, horse.

If your horse is bargey/bolting/nippy/rearing/won’t load/won’t stand at the mounting block etc this is anxiety/stress at best, but quite possibly discomfort, pain or trauma. Putting them into a stressful training scenario to “fix” the issues is making all of this even worse for them. Putting them through compliance training is just shutting them down.

I don’t know if it felt more confronting watching the fearful dog as we tend to recognise fear-behaviour in dogs more easily and therefore have more empathy. There is so much stress and fear behaviour in horses that is ignored or mis-labelled as disobedience. We are so used to seeing highly stressed horses we have normalised it. More and more as I travel this path a lot of the normalised ways of treating horses make me feel quite ill. I can’t not have empathy.

Once you know I don’t know how you can look away. 🐴

03/11/2025

A slightly bedraggled, storm-weathered Lenny wearing his first brand new turnout rug for years ☔️😎

I always buy them the Rhino Wugs as they fit them both so well. I’ve got 5 now 😅 but the oldest ones aren’t particularly waterproof any more. He’s all ready for another night of 40mph wind and rain ✌🏻

03/11/2025

This is such a fantastic post. It is so normalised to coerce, nag and force horses into certain exercise in the name of helping them. Whether that be intense exercise for weight management or specific exercises trying to target muscle groups or rehab from injury. When we do this we are usually taking from the horse more than we are giving.

Something I struggle with in the industry is how many professionals insist that this sort of exercise must be done even when it is really inappropriate for that horse in the moment.

We can make so much progress when we choose to train with our horse’s emotional state at the forefront rather than just what we are told their bodies should be doing.

Forced Exercise is Inflammatory and Damaging.

It does not matter the exercise. It does not matter the movement. Be it a good solid 20 minutes of long trotting, a walk on a 20 meter circle, a Piaffer, or your very best Renvers. All physical exercises become inflammatory to the body when a horse is forced to do it.

Who decides, who knows if they are forced or not? I do not.

The horses do.

This is not my opinion, I share my colloquial understanding of long held facts about exercise physiology.

We all know the benefits of exercise. All studies point to regular, strenuous, effortful exercise as being key markers in longevity, health and wellness outcomes. When we regularly load and stress our bodies, raise our body temperature, and put effort into hard physical skills, especially when we feel uncomfortable doing them... there is a cascade of benefits created by the body. The body rewards you for stressing it.

With dopamine (key to activation), endorphins (euphoria, pain suppressant), endocannabinoids (calm, euphoria), serotonin (mood elevator, anti-anxiety), norepinephrine (energized, clead-headedness), brain derived neurotrophic factor BDNF (Brain growth and memory improvement), epenephrine/adrenaline (short term power, sharpening focus). Plus a range of anti-inflammatory processes clear the body of toxins, lymph fluid, strengthens bone, muscle, tendon... we benefit this way and so do horses, when we regularly put our bodies under stress in exercise.

I call this the "Body Rewarding Itself". Horses that have broken their own resistance ceiling will have a good relationship to the reward that comes afterwards, and this looks and feels like a horse with a work ethic.

The problem is- consent is key.

The same mechanical exercise or movement, when done through fear, duress or force in such a manner where the brain does not opt-in but does it because they have no other choice... all of those rewards are replaced instead with their dark cousins. Inflammation is now your norm rather that anti-inflammatory processes. Fatigue and fogginess is now your friend rather than focus. Metabolic dysfunction instead of regulation. The list goes on.

Equine vets are currently experiencing a crisis in the health of horses who have worked hard all their lives. Almost unexplainable metabolic and autoimmune diseases are plaguing these horses necessitating chronic medication use and early death.

I believe forced exercise, done in the name of the horses own good, to be one of the contributing factors to this.

Which is why the whole notion of light-force and diet-dominance is still so silly in my mind. Because if you are interested in your training having long term health benefits for your horse, mandating that you have earned your horses voluntary buy in to the exercise should be priority number 1. Not a luxurious or inane afterthought of hobbiests or people whose "kindness kills".

I will say it again.

Involuntary, forced exercise or movement is inflammatory and damaging to a horses health.

The same movement done voluntarily is anti-inflammatory and beneficial to a horses health.

Same rule applies to you.

Which is why the rhetoric of even quiet force is so dangerous. It is giving people permission to continue extracting movement out of a horse that slowly breaks down their health rather than build them up.

02/11/2025

How does your horse really feel about the training? 🐴

When I’m first speaking to people about the issues they’re having with their horses I ask them about the type of training they’ve been doing. Usually people tell me they have been doing gentle, kind, empathetic training with their horse but it just doesn’t seem to be helping. I always ask them to describe exactly what that training looks like and more often than not it is pressure/release based, perhaps involving flags/sticks/rope halters, and is focusing on getting the horse to comply to requests, usually with some narrative about connection/relaxation/confidence building. I used to train this way too, probably harsher than some, and I also used to think it was kind, ethical and necessary, because that is what I was taught, I didn’t look any deeper for a long time.

I have a client pony who is unridden as her owner is too tall and bought her as she has no interest in riding, she enjoys spending time caring for and hanging out with her. Her mare is super sweet and calm but she wanted help improving her posture as she was very braced up and over-developed at the bottom of her neck. This pony lived out 24/7 with all of her needs met, she would go for in hand walks a few times a week and also have an in hand lesson with a classical dressage-type instructor every 2 weeks. The mare made very slow progress in our sessions, she found putting any length in her neck difficult and would go back to bracing up by the next session.

After a few months, their instructor couldn’t come for a while, I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but suddenly the pony made big progress, she wasn’t braced up again by the next session, she was happier to move and she was moving so much better with more flow. Still unbeknown to me, their instructor came back and the next time I saw the pony she went to the back of the box when her cavesson came out, this was extremely out of character. I queried with the client if anything unusual had happened, which is when they told me about the lesson they’d had and how her pony had been quite reluctant to do anything. She showed me a video of the lesson and the instructor had the pony on a short contact, gentle tapping her with a schooling whip to get her to leg yield, shoulder in and various other school movements. The pony’s face was tense, her neck was braced up with nowhere else to go and she tail swished often.

Given the fact that this pony struggled to walk in a straight line with a relaxed neck, asking her to do any sort of lateral work like this was going to be uncomfortable for her and was forcing her to brace and develop compensatory movement patterns. Mystery of why she was hardly improving solved. Anything we were achieving in our sessions was being taken away again in these sessions because these exercises were not appropriate for her yet.

It is a phenomenon I see often when we start giving horses more autonomy and allowing them to move in ways that are comfortable and appropriate for them in that moment. They can protest quite loudly when you try to go back to your old ways now they know there is another option.

There doesn’t need to be whipping, spurring, yanking and shouting for a horse to find something unpleasant or even scary. Training can look calm and no drama and the horse can still be finding it extremely stressful. We are so used to seeing extremely stressed horses showing explosive behaviour during training that the quieter signs of stress and conflict seem like nothing to us. Once we get really good at reading behaviour it becomes obvious how our horse is feeling without them having to shout loud about it.

Of course quietly tapping a horse with a stick is not in the same realm as whipping a horse to cause pain, but I imagine your horse would rather you do neither. There is also the history of training to be considered, a lot of horses have been trained harshly at some point, those associations with that equipment linger. People will often claim its kind because they “don’t even have to touch the horse with the stick, just knowing I have it is enough for him to behave differently”. If your horse’s behaviour changes simply because you are carrying a stick in your hand, then that is because he sees the stick as a threat, if he didn’t, his behaviour wouldn’t change just because of its presence. I don’t think feeling threatened makes for a relaxing training environment.

When all we have in our training toolkit is varying degrees of pressure and tools to implement those varying degrees of pressure we are hugely limiting ourselves. When we train like this we are actually making it harder to read our horses because we are stifling any communication the horse is trying to offer us. If we have a horse who seemingly doesn’t like being caught, doesn’t like being groomed, doesn’t like being tacked up and doesn’t like being mounted we are left playing detective. Are any of those things actual issues for the horse or is it all part of associative learning and the horse just finds the training that comes after unpleasant, difficult or scary?

We have to listen before the horse needs to shout at us. Is your horse reluctant to catch? Do they stop eating or move away when you come in with their tack? Or do they perhaps eat more frantically? Do they turn their head away when you present their bridle? Or start yawning? Do they walk reluctantly to the training area? Are they tense or hesitant at the mounting block? All of these are signs that something isn’t right. If we can start to not only recognise how our horses are feeling but actually listen to them and adjust our behaviour accordingly, we can start to get to the bottom of what is troubling them and actually help them. So many people tell me they recognise signs of anxiety around tacking up and riding in their horses, but they continue to tack up anyway because we’re conditioned to think its ridiculous not to.

Horses are really good at communicating with us if we can learn to let them. If we truly want to do what is best for our horses then we have to start looking at things differently. Is that training appropriate for this horse at this time? 🐴