LS Horsemanship

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Stokesley
LS Horsemanship

Equine behaviour consultant. Kind horse training with a focus on healthy movement and a relaxed mind.
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03/01/2025

I enjoyed reading all of your stories and thoughts on my post last night, it gave me a lot to think about this morning while I was doing the yard.

I had one of those mornings where I was so aware I was in a moment that I will look back on fondly forever. Everywhere was extremely frosty but with lovely strong sunshine. I let the horses into the main field while I cleaned up after them and filled all of their haynets. Then I headed out into the field to do a little bit of training and filming with them.

They both came straight over and were keen to interact with me. There was just such a peaceful vibe around them, Lenny is rarely an affectionate horse, but today he really seemed to lean into me. They just felt content and happy and it was a feeling I wish I could bottle forever.

Lenny then proceeded to knock my tripod over with his nose 3 times before he was banned from the backstage area. Their curiosity and personalities don’t bring me frustration, they make me smile.

They then headed back in to the freshly filled hay boxes and stood contentedly munching while I rasped their hooves. I cut up one of the “Christmas” apples my dad bought for them (which was meant to be a Christmas Day only apple but has turned into a “just a few a week” apple because he loves giving them treats) 🍏 and scattered the pieces into the hay for them to forage for.

I sit here thinking about what really brings me joy with my horses now and honestly its not the riding or even the training. Its Dan’s quiet whicker when he smells the apple in my pocket, its Lenny trotting over from the top of the field when he sees me coming with his dinner, its watching them sleep together with their herd and quietly munch on hay in the winter sun. I realise I get my satisfaction from providing for them and seeing them thrive emotionally.

Both of my horses have compromised bodies and for this reason I no longer ride either of them. To the general horse industry they are “useless” and have no value, but they are everything to me. They are amazing and gentle and curious and opinionated. What a privilege to know them just as they are. They are so, so loved here. ❤️❤️

I feel so relieved knowing they have a safe home for life here with me. They’ll always have their friends, plenty of forage, lovely soft places to sleep and lots of hedgerows and enrichment to explore together. The idea of ever passing them on makes me feel sick. I will never understand how we can treat our horses as so disposable. Just today I’ve seen 2 adverts looking for homes for horses who can no longer be ridden. I genuinely wish I could open a sanctuary for all of these unwanted and “broken” horses, and just let them have a safe place to land.

I’m feeling very sentimental and had my first little cry of the day this morning at the yard and my second one just now writing this post. 🥲

Pictured is Lenny who is definitely not about to knock the tripod over again 😅🥰
I would love to see photos of your loved horses in the comments.

02/01/2025

Horses owe us nothing 🐴

I am baffled by the way I used to think about horses, I would always bleat the “horse first, sport second” line, but it wasn’t true, not really.

Anything that made me feel uncomfortable would be justified away in my head, I’d find others who would also validate that line of thinking and dismiss anything to the contrary.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed this page for a while that I don’t agree with the idea that horses must do a "job" for their life to have value and for them to deserve to have their needs met. The idea that the horse, who had no choice in who bought or sold him and never agreed to any of this, should provide what we think we’re owed makes me really frustrated.

I’m going to tell you about a conversation I had with someone several years ago that I still think about to this day. They wanted help with their severely nappy horse. This horse had been retired from a very intense life of showing with significant arthritis and they had been told by the vet that he could only work in straight lines. They were struggling to even get him out of the gate. Along with all of his joint issues, the horse was overweight and the rider, in my opinion, was too heavy for him in his current condition.

We talked back and forth for a while as I tried to explain my ethos and how we needed to look at the bigger picture. They described how they’d had another trainer out who had got on and essentially beaten him with a whip and it still didn’t work.

We just kept talking in circles as they’d keep coming back to “what would you do to fix the problem though?” I explained about positive associations and building confidence with hand walking. They told me they couldn’t hand walk him as they also had joint issues. I then gently suggested that seeing as he was quite loudly telling us he wasn’t feeling okay about being ridden and we knew he had several chronic pain issues that we should perhaps think about whether continuing to ride him was appropriate.

“I’ve already put so much money into him getting his joint injections and I've even moved off the yard I like so he can have turnout every day. He can’t retire because I can’t walk far and he is my legs so I can actually get out and enjoy nature. I just want him to go out walking for a few hours I’m not asking for much”

Isn’t it interesting how someone who cannot walk far due to their own pain cannot empathise with their horse having the same issues?

I hear similar things to this all of the time, everyone wants to put the horse first to a point. But when things start to get really complex and we realise we may not get the happy ending we envisioned our morals start to slide. I often get a bit of "but he has a really nice life I just want him to do this for me". A nice life should be a given, you are not owed damaging your horse's body because you spent money on him and met his basic needs.

I find it a really difficult line to walk as an ethical trainer. While I don’t want to alienate anyone from improving their horse’s life and learning a better way, I also don’t want to be an enabler to continuing to treat horses like crap. I realise that sometimes my line in the sand is in a different place to some of my clients, but that is something I have to navigate and question for myself all of the time. What am I okay with even if its not what I would do myself, and what am I definitely not okay with?

Any professional out there who is really for the horse knows how difficult this is to do. Its a really terrible business model and it makes you the fun police a lot of the time.

I’m not here to fix your horse, I’m here to help you understand your horse and make better choices. Times are changing and if I can just improve things for one horse then I guess it’s worth it. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

02/01/2025

Enjoy some frosty morning joy with Dan 🥰🥰

01/01/2025

My horse loves his job 🐴

You often hear “my horse loves his job” as a justification when anyone points out stress or conflict behaviours in a horse. Its a bit of a nothing statement, none of us can ever really know exactly how a horse is thinking, but we can see the obvious tells. If a horse loved doing something they wouldn’t actively try to avoid it.

My horse loves his job I just need to tie him up while I tack up so he can’t move away and I can avoid his teeth.

My horse loves her job she's just a nightmare to catch from the field when I come to ride her.

My horse loves his job he just goes to the back of the box when I enter with his tack.

My horse loves her job I just need someone to hold her or pin her against the wall so I can mount her safely.

My horse loves his job I just need someone to lead him into the ring/start box otherwise he naps.

My horse loves her job she just immediately has explosive diarrhoea as soon as she sees the horse box.

My horse loves his job he just needs "encouragement" from the lunge whip to load onto the trailer.

If this has made you feel cross or upset, I challenge you to just think logically for a second. Instead of coercing our horses into complying with us when they’re clearly telling us they’re uncomfortable, wouldn’t it be so much better if we improved things so we didn’t need to?

What is the first thing most horses do when the rider falls off in the ring? They try to leave, very few will continue trying to find the jumps or trotting perfect circles. I am not saying jumping horses is bad, but I am saying using “he loves his job” as an excuse to justify not addressing clear signs of discomfort is a total cop-out.

If you care about your relationship with your horse beyond what he can do for you, then its important to really look at what he is trying to tell you. Just because these behaviours are normalised doesn’t mean they’re okay. We can always do better. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

31/12/2024

Who’s seeing the new year in with their horses tonight? 🎆

Going back down later to make sure all okay with fireworks etc but seeing as it’s currently 50mph wind and horizontal rain I’m hoping there is none 🤞🥲.

Just fed them dinner, filled all their hay stations and swept the start of the flood out of the barn and of course all of them bar Lenny are currently outside 🤷🏻‍♀️☔️

31/12/2024

Fresh horses? 🐴

There are lots of videos being posted at the moment of people being frightened, bucked off and injured by their “fresh” horses.

I find it frustrating that there is still so much focus on how to make your horse jump better or make him perform lateral work while seemingly nobody is being taught to read basic and very obvious stress behaviour.

We praise people for managing to stay on very stressed and explosive horses calling it “good horsemanship”, but wouldn’t good horsemanship be not letting the situation escalate in the first place?

I have just watched a video of a YouTuber tack up their horse that is swinging around on the cross ties, have to be legged up while they’re spinning in a circle, jig-jogged sideways into the arena, kept jogging and occasionally spooking suddenly in the arena, really high head-carriage and tight rein contact the whole time. Laughing away about how “spicy” he is. They decide to put the horse into trot to “get the energy out” and of course the horse explodes and they fall off. They then get back on the horse and do the same thing and fall off again. The horse getting more and more stressed. At no point do they consider they perhaps shouldn’t get back on the horse until he’s calmed down.

If they would’ve stopped at the tacking up and addressed the horse’s emotional state all of that could’ve been avoided. It has been so normalised to see highly-stressed horses that we think its fine and something you just have to ride through.

Riding is dangerous when we make stupid choices.

“Just keep going and hope they calm down” is not helpful for the horse or for the rider, although I appreciate “spicy” behaviour makes great content.

If you’re spending a large portion of time when riding your horse hanging off his mouth to keep him under control, emotional state aside, this is doing nothing good for his physical body or development.

If you consistently train and manage your horse in ways that prioritise his emotional well-being, he will be more able to handle stress and you will have plenty of “tools in your toolkit” so to speak to de-escalate these situations. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

31/12/2024

I think I’ve just replied to all messages/emails, sorry for the delay I still have Christmas brain. Please nudge me if I’ve missed you.

Booking for mid-January onwards Teesside, Durham, Tyne and Wear, Northumberland and North Yorkshire. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

29/12/2024

Avoiding conflict in training and why I think its important 🐴

We can create so much unnecessary conflict when we’re training with our horses. I think a lot of it boils down to believing there’s a way we’re “supposed” to do things. And if the horse isn’t complying with our requests we have to keep battling through and not “letting him win”, otherwise we’re going to ruin our horse. Well here’s a secret, your horse isn’t even playing the game, there’s nothing to win.

Its curious how we all want to think our horses love spending time with us and working, yet when we look at the common ways of training its all about getting the horse to comply with things he is clearly not happy about. Instead of battling with our horses, I like to take the path of least resistance, and while we may get there slower, hopefully we’ll get there with our relationship in tact.

I want to give a few examples, how they are commonly dealt with and how I would approach them to give you some food for thought:

🐴 Your horse naps out hacking and really doesn’t want to walk past a certain point. You’ve been told to kick and growl at him or even smack him with the whip. His protests escalate and he starts running backwards, trying to spin and eventually rears. He is very stressed. Maybe sometimes you’re even told to get a stronger rider on to make him go. Even if we eventually get him to comply, he just had a really stressful, horrible experience. He learned that you don’t listen to him and next time he is worried he is likely to escalate to panicking and rearing much more quickly because he will be anticipating your behaviour.

When a horse starts to nap, I will do nothing and wait, if I can feel they’re getting more upset or they’re not willing to go after waiting for a few minutes, I will then get off and lead them past. This is how you build confidence, there is absolutely no need to push the horse into rearing and scrabbling about. The more your horse has positive experiences like this where you kept him feeling safe, the more confident he will be out in the world and the less likely he will be to nap in the future.

🐴 You’re trying to get your horse to walk over a tarp in a “spook-busting” session. As soon as your horse stops to look you start pulling him forward and refusing to release the pressure unless he steps towards it. Your horse starts to panic, tries to pull backwards and even rears to try to get away. Eventually he realises there is no way out and walks over the tarp. None of this is confidence building, he just learned you don’t listen or help him when he is scared, he definitely isn’t having fun.

Instead we could let him sniff around the tarp as close as he is comfortable with, not putting pressure on. Let him investigate in his own time and if he wants to move further away let him. The explosive behaviour comes from the pressure. There are so many ways to low-key desensitise horses to things that can be fun for them too that don’t involve applying pressure until they comply. I love watching their curiosity build. Keeping everything calm and low pressure builds confidence and positive associations with new things instead of fearful ones.

There is so much more to training than achieving compliance. Every experience your horse has shapes his relationship and associations with you and the world around him, which in turn affects his physical body. Even if we decided we didn’t particularly care about our horse’s feelings, all of the bracing and stress is no good for their physical development either. You can’t have one without the other.

There is absolutely no place or need for high-stress and explosive behaviour in training. I don’t find it funny or cool and neither does your horse. If we take a step back and really start to question why we are being told to do things a certain way, we will often find the reasoning doesn’t make any logical sense once you understand how horses learn. 🐴

Pictured is little Holly building curiosity interacting with the environment

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

28/12/2024

Are you being confusing? 🐴

I think the most common approach we’re all exposed to when training with horses is pressure and release or negative reinforcement training, I’m going to be talking specifically about that sort of training in this post. It is a simple enough concept but in practice we don’t always realise that we’re not doing it well.

The idea is we apply pressure, then as soon as the horse responds as requested, we release the pressure. For example, you want your horse to walk forward, you apply pressure forward onto the headcollar, your horse takes a step forward, you release the pressure. The horse learns that to get the pressure to release, taking a step forward is the right answer. The horse seeks the right answer because he is trying to get relief from the pressure.

Two common examples I see of pressure and release not being used well:

🐴 Applying the leg aid for canter, the horse canters and you continue applying the leg aids “just in case” the horse decides to break back to trot. Your horse learns that even if he canters the leg aid doesn’t stop, so he listens to leg less and becomes irritated or even shut down about your nagging leg. A less confusing way to train this, is to apply the leg aid, then remove the pressure as soon as the horse is in canter. Only apply the leg aid again if he breaks back into trot.

🐴 Leading a horse with constant pressure on the lead rope that we’re often not even aware of. I’m such a stickler for this with my clients as they often have no idea they’re doing it. If we want our horses to be soft and responsive then we have to be mindful of what we’re actually communicating to them. When leading your horse around you always want to have slack in the rope unless you’re actively asking them to do something.

Even if we are good with our timing, there are more considerations than just being clear to the horse. If we want to train ethically and have a good relationship with our horse, we do not want to be adding pressure that causes high-stress, pain or fear nor deliberately putting our horse in situations where they will make a mistake so we can correct them sharply. This will quickly give your horse a really negative association with any pressure and training, even if it makes them compliant.

My rules with myself when training with pressure and release are to use minimal pressure, and release for the smallest try. If you’re backing your horse up, don’t keep the pressure on until he’s done 4 steps, release the pressure on the first rock back and build from there.

Next time you’re with your horse, slow down and really think about what you’re asking and how he is responding. Are you accidentally putting pressure on you aren’t aware of? It’s amazing how soft our horses can become when we become more self-aware and consistent.

We also need to be aware of how many of the common training styles don’t make any logical sense in that they can encourage you to use a level of pressure that is never fully released, whether that be through rein aids or leg aids. This quickly makes training a very negative experience for the horse.

I have a few foundational videos on this sort of training, along with lots of other good stuff, on my patreon subscription that you can find here: www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

28/12/2024

I am just sitting down to reply to my emails/messages, my brain checked out 3 days before Christmas 🥲

Arranging days in Durham, Northumberland and York area first few weeks in January.

Drop me a message 🐴

27/12/2024

Advocating for your horse 🐴

Your horse cannot advocate for themselves, they have to live in our world and rely on us to care for them.

Unfortunately in the horse industry pain/stress behaviours are normalised and seen as quirks/personality/behavioural problems. Many horses are managed in a way that is so far removed from their basic needs that we are used to seeing incredibly stressed and compromised horses, it has become the norm. Behaviour we should find alarming isn’t even noticed. People are taught to ignore the horse’s subtle communication and then when they shout louder it is seen as a problem behaviour that needs to be fixed.

The problem is the people who we’re told to look up to are still singing off their old hymn sheet. When you’re new to horses you’re supposed to be able to trust the yard owner who’s had a BHS approved livery yard for 40 years, or the natural horsemanship trainer everyone says saves horses lives or the eventer who’s competed at 4*. Surely all of these people understand horse behaviour, know how to give horses a species-appropriate lifestyle, can recognise signs of stress and train in the most ethical way possible right? That should be the case, but most of the time it just isn’t.

I remember being a horse-obsessed child at the riding school and being told to smack and shout at ponies who were nipping at me when being tacked up, “show them who’s boss.” These ponies stood all day tied up in stalls with no food, unable to turn around or see their friends, this was a BHS approved yard to the highest standard, as a ten year old child this was my introduction to horses and who was I to question these qualified professionals? I was told that horses were lazy, grumpy, naughty, bad-tempered, “just trying to get out of work”, cheeky, stupid etc. I’m sure we all have similar stories.

I remember handing my horse over to a trainer I looked up to and watching them continuously trot my horse on a small circle for 45 minutes to “soften them” and thinking, well it must be okay, they’re a top trainer and they seem confident and now the horse is looking softer.

I remember the exact moment the rose-tinted glasses really started to crack for me. I was doing a jumping exercise I had been given in a lesson on my horse Dan to make him more careful, it consisted of essentially setting him up to crash through a fence until it sharpened him up. I felt so uncomfortable about it but it took him crashing through it and falling to his knees twice for it to actually get through to me. I turned to my friend and just said I wasn’t going to jump him any more and I was worried he was going to get hurt. This was of course framed as me just being a nervous rider, but it was a pivotal moment for me.

I then pretty much quit horses and worked in London for 5 years while my horses were turned away and I went for the odd hack on my days off. I think being out of the industry completely made it much easier for me to have an open mind when I came back. I started learning about all of this stuff I’d never heard of like behavioural science, posture, pain ethograms and positive reinforcement training, all things I didn’t have a clue about despite working professionally in the industry on many different yards for a decade.

New horse owners are some of my favourite clients, they are fresh, they are excited to learn and they are yet to be indoctrinated into the stifling and unhelpful conditioning most of us have been through in the horse industry. I have come to the uncomfortable realisation that most professionals, whether they’re aware of it or not, are operating through a lens of how to make the horse comply so we can use them, rather than understanding the whole horse, what they need and what their body needs.

If all you see day in day out are horses with compromised posture being ridden into tight contacts, you’re going to think that’s what horses are supposed to look like. If all you see are horses living in less than ideal environments showing “bad” behaviour, you’re going to think that’s just how horses behave, you have nothing to compare it to so why would you blame the environment?

I suppose the point of this post is to give people who are doubting themselves the boost to continue speaking up for their horses. The amount of people I meet who have been belittled by vets, farriers, trimmers, bodyworkers, trainers and the yard expert when trying to do better for their horse makes me really cross.

It doesn’t matter if someone is “more experienced” than you. Experienced in what? Keeping horses in really stressful living situations for decades? Making horses do stuff despite their protests? Ignoring a horse’s communication of discomfort?

You are ultimately the only person who can really advocate for your horse. It doesn’t matter if you just met a horse for the first time yesterday, he is relying on you and if it doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t. There are lots of horse-centred professionals out there now, you may just have to sift through a bit. My inbox is always open if you’re struggling for support. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

25/12/2024

When you’re trying to get a nice photo with the boys but Lenny loves your dad more than you 😅🥰🐴

We had a Christmas afternoon tradition of doing the horses together since we bought Lenny 20 years ago! We haven’t done it for the last 7 years since I moved down south so this is our first year back together and it’s so lovely to have them home 🥰🥰

24/12/2024

Merry Christmas from Dan and Lenny 🎄🎄

They’re having the absolute best time getting covered in mud and strip grazing the winter field 🐴🥰

Please excuse my pathetic fence, they’re so good about fencing they won’t go through anything 😅

23/12/2024

We need to stop ignoring our horses 🐴

We are constantly looking for fixes for our horse’s behaviour. And there are plenty of people happy to sell it to you.

How do I get my horse to stand at the mounting block?
How do I get my horse to stop biting when I groom her?
How do I get my horse to stop sn**ching the reins when I’m riding?

Often the advice given is to make it horrible for the horse to continue this behaviour, although it is usually wrapped up in a nice-sounding narrative about connection and trust or something or other. When we really break it down the training is actually just “hassle the horse until he does what you want, repeat until he stops trying to protest”.

I meet people who are so confused, because they’re trying their best to listen to their horse, but they’re being given conflicting information. They tell me their horse bites when they’re grooming them, but they don’t stop immediately because someone told them they’d be teaching the horse that biting gets them to stop. Biting should get you to stop, that’s a really big communication that the horse is unhappy with what you’re doing.

Every behaviour has an underlying cause, and ignoring that communication is not going to build a trusting relationship. It can build a compliant one where the horse behaves as you desire sure, but the horse is going to view you as someone who doesn’t listen and someone they cannot feel safe around.

If we take our earlier examples, mounting issues are almost always pain/discomfort or anxiety issues, adding pressure until they stand is not going to address any of this. We need to look way deeper.

Horses who bite when you groom them again usually have pain/discomfort issues or really negative associations with being groomed. Punishing that communication by continuing to groom until they quit protesting is not going to address any of that.

Horses who sn**ch the reins are trying to relieve discomfort. You can imagine how it would feel to sn**ch on something with metal in your mouth, if your horse is doing this he is not doing it for fun. He is uncomfortable whether that be from fatigue, discomfort or just inappropriate riding and training. If we fight with the horse until he stops resisting, we are again shutting down his communication and teaching him we do not listen. That horse is not going to have positive associations with being ridden.

We need to start looking at things differently if we genuinely want a good relationship with our horses, not just one that we feel good about while our horse just puts up with it.

I’m going to write some more in depth posts on specific issues otherwise this one will get way too long.

Instead of asking “how?” we need to start asking “why?”🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

20/12/2024

Kindness is not incompetence 🐴

If the me from 10 years ago came across me now I’d have been rolling my eyes and thinking “she doesn’t have a clue, horses don’t work like that, my horse is fine”, I now realise that horses do work like that, back then I didn’t have a clue and my horse definitely wasn’t fine. I knew how to make horses comply with my requests and I weaved whichever narrative made me feel comfortable about it in my head.

I convinced myself I was being kind and doing what was best for the horses, I was just doing what you had to do to train horses. Anyone with a softer way of being around horses made me uncomfortable, because if I acknowledged that perhaps they were onto something, I would also have to acknowledge the skillset I had was based on years of misinformation. So instead I scoffed and called people incompetent and silly for wanting to give their horses choices and train them with food.

We are going through an interesting period in the industry where kindness is seen as something to aspire to, you can see it used as a marketing and PR tool everywhere. Don’t mind about those blue tongues and spur marks, look at me giving the horse a cuddle and feeding him an apple.

There are many trainers with huge platforms that frequently show extremely stressed and unhappy horses going through training, but it is all explained away as good for the horse. That it is somehow the horse’s fault for their explosive reactions and they’re just helping.

Kind, building confidence, saving their life, showing them leadership, connection, bonding, relationship, helping their brain etc. Yet if we actually look at a lot of the content without bias, we see horses being set up to fail by putting them into situations they aren’t ready for, then the drama (and great content) will happen. This just isn’t kind or necessary.

The reason you don’t see more ethical trainers sharing horses displaying this sort of behaviour, is that they don’t put horses into those situations in the first place. Then people use this as a critique that the more gentle trainer could never manage an actually “dangerous” horse. What people don’t realise is, most of the time the dangerous behaviour is human-caused, and you’ll never see it if you train below threshold and address what needs to be addressed.

If you need to be brave to ride a certain horse, I imagine that horse isn’t having a good time either. It is false that you need to get a breakdown to get a breakthrough, that someone just needs to sit through all the bucking and when the horse finally gives in they’ve helped the horse to feel better. Helped the horse to feel better or has the horse just given up trying to communicate that they’re struggling?

I watch a lot of these videos, and I see a lot of horses who are compromised in their body and horses who are really not okay emotionally. They are then trained and ridden in ways that are going to compromise their body further. If anyone comments it is explained away as the horse “just learning and it will come in time”, not sure how its the horse’s issue when the horse has nowhere to go but into the tight contact as they’re are pestered around the arena. Being patted and told they’re such a good boy when they finally comply, so its definitely kind….

With so much information and learning available online, many amateur horse owners are extremely knowledgeable and switched on. When you have a large platform and are putting videos out as a behavioural expert, I think it is par for the course that people are allowed to ask civil questions and open up discussions.

Instead what happens at the first sniff of a critique, the guru’s intense fan club jump on the commenter with cries of “here comes the turmeric brigade!” or “look at these armchair experts bet they can’t even ride their fat cob down the lane!”. Isn’t it interesting that we market heavily with kindness, but if anyone wants to open up a discussion about how perhaps things could be done more kindly, or talk about the stress behaviour they are seeing in the horse, they are silenced quickly.

If we are really for the horse, we will be happy to have these discussions.

If we are really for the horse, we don’t use getting the horse to comply as our only metric for success.

If we are really for the horse, we don’t repeatedly put the horse in unnecessary high-stress situations so we can show everyone how difficult and dangerous they are.

If we are really not the horse, we don’t ignore their communication and make up narratives to suit our own agenda and what feels comfortable for us. They do not have a voice, we must speak up for them.

I get it, I really do, because it used to be me. But if we actually want to do the best for our horses, we must have the integrity to admit that a lot of the accepted ways of dealing with horses are not good for horses, they’re good for us.

I challenge you to look at some of this dangerous horse transformation content through a different lens. Has the horse really come through the other side and now he loves his job and wants to jump with us all day long? Or is that just what we really want to believe, and the reality is inconvenient and uncomfortable?

We can set boundaries without fear and we can train our horses to do pretty incredible things without high-stress and explosions, but we need to really look at what is appropriate. There needs to be so much more education around not only behaviour, but what appropriate and healthy movement and posture looks like.

Kindness is not incompetence, it is actually much more complex and skilled to train with the horse’s emotional well-being in mind.

So many more of us are seeing through the stories we’re being told and actually seeing the horse underneath. We just have to keep planting the seeds. Change is already here. 🐴

www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

www.patreon.com/lshorsemanship

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Enjoy some frosty morning joy with Dan 🥰🥰

Live with Lucy Chester Horsemanship

The joy of being allowed into a section of the winter field after a horrible few days 🎉❤️ Dan making his excitement everyone else’s problem 😅

Lovely to see the boys outside and playing together now we’re coming out of the storm, I think they both need to let off a bit of steam. Playing involves bitey face game and then Lenny aggressively rubbing his head on Dan’s butt until Dan gets sick of him 😅❤️ Let’s hope the remaining wind dries the ground up a bit but I’m not hopeful 🥲☔️

I’ve been closing off the “summer” section of our track all year as soon as it gets wet enough to create mud to see if I can keep it in use all winter without it getting rutty. I opened it back up this morning after a couple of days of very wet weather. While I appreciate we have had an unusually dry winter so far I’m hopeful it might actually hold up until spring. Even if it does get really wet, the great thing about not letting it get chewed up is I can safely open it on frozen ground without worrying about the horses getting injured on any ruts. Just a little video showing how chewed up the area the horses are on is getting after 2 days of rain, the summer track starts at the hedge row. There is some old hardcore under the mud in the winter area so it doesn’t get too bad, but none under the summer track.

Appropriate Training and Expectations

with Yasmin Stuart

Vet phobias 🐴 I was asked to work with lovely Harvey as, after a period of intense treatment for cellulitis, he had become so dangerous with the vet to the level that they refused to come out to him anymore. He was striking out with his front legs, kicking and aggressively biting to the point I believe he caused injury to a vet when they tried to pin him into a corner. It was also impossible to administer oral sedation via syringe. Harvey’s owner was understandably upset that her horse was not only so fearful but also worried that she wouldn’t be able to get the necessary veterinary care that he might need going forwards. When I met Harvey he was extremely suspicious of anyone except his owner going into his stable. We decided the most sensible goal was to teach him to accept a syringe orally so his owner could sedate him herself before the vet arrived and hopefully gently start to make it a less stressful experience for him. I always use positive reinforcement to deal with fear-based issues, there is just no way stressing a horse out more by moving their feet or flooding them with stimulus is going to make them feel better emotionally about the situation, even if it gets compliance eventually. It can also get people hurt. I stayed working in protected contact the whole time with him on the other side of the stable door, not only for my safety but for his comfort as well, having people in his space had become scary to him. I started teaching him simple hand targeting which he picked up quickly and seemed to enjoy. I then tried to do the same thing just holding an empty syringe in my hand and he immediately disengaged and went back to his haynet despite me working with extremely high-value food rewards. I just waited for him to engage with me again and eventually he was confidently targeting the empty syringe with his nose. There is such a positive shift in the horse’s emotional state once they realise they are allowed to say no and leave. The last thi

Behaviour and Management with Horse Weighbridge North East

A Chat with Shelley from Irish Horse Welfare Trust

Irish Horse Welfare Trust

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Live with Lucy Chester Horsemanship

Appropriate Training and Expectations

Behaviour and Management with Horse Weighbridge North East

A Chat with Shelley from Irish Horse Welfare Trust

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