http://www.lshorsemanship.co.uk/

LS Horsemanship, Stokesley (2025)

08/09/2025

with Yasmin Stuart Equine Physio

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07/09/2025

Your horse is not just a body 🐴

I’m always talking about how behaviour is never standalone and we should be looking at the whole picture including addressing any pain/discomfort. But we can also get lost here, becoming so focused on “fixing” the horse’s body that we lose sight of the rest of their needs.

I often meet horses who are extremely averse to being touched by humans due to previous experiences and trauma, yet in our effort to help their bodies feel better its tempting to go all in with the bodywork. As you may have experienced yourself, sometimes massage and bodywork is uncomfortable, especially if you’re sore and tense. A horse cannot understand this they just know they hate it. Its scary, unpleasant and they aren’t being listened to. In these cases it is best to work on helping them feel better around humans first and then choosing a body worker who understands behaviour and has more in their toolkit than hands on work to support you.

Another huge frustration of mine is how quick we are to prescribe box rest as if there aren’t huge negative consequences to it. Confining a horse to a tiny box, often alone, for days at a time not only affects the horse emotionally, it also negatively impacts every system in the body. Horses thrive on movement, as soon as we restrict that we are putting them under a lot of stress. Maybe your horse's leg will heal faster, but at what cost to the rest of his health? There are much better alternatives to box rest if we think outside the box a little, pardon the pun.

A client horse of mine had become extremely sharp and dangerous to handle and ride, he was diagnosed with kissing spine and they went through with recommended surgery. They were given a rehab plan with the physio of building up long lining and various hills and raised poles etc. Throughout this the horse was aggressive in the stable, they had to cross tie him to do anything with him and he would frequently rear when they were trying to do his rehab. The physio was coming out every 4 weeks and “releasing” the soreness in his back, he was cross tied and restrained for this as he would try to kick and bite. They were essentially told they needed to stick to the 12 week rehab plan to the letter as it was the only thing that would help him and if it didn’t work the kindest thing was to put him to sleep.

They contacted me as a last resort, seeing as nothing had “worked” and we were at the end of the road, I asked them to humour me and just stop everything. No poles, no hillwork, no physio, no long lining. They had a horse who had been extremely chronically stressed, who had been in pain, who then went through a traumatic surgery, was screaming at everyone that he didn’t want to be touched and wasn’t comfortable, and being completely ignored because they were told this was the only way to help him and it was for his own good. Because of how he was feeling, all of the exercise they were doing simply wasn’t helping as he was so braced up he was just putting more tension back into his body and making his back feel worse.

We tweaked his management so he was out with his friends as much as possible, had ad-lib forage when he came in through the days and put him on some gut support. We added simple enrichment to his stable like slow feeders and carrot/treat hunts. The only thing they did with him for several weeks was to play treat scatters with him and some bucket games, where all he had to do was walk to the next bucket and eat out of it. The aggression stopped, he started to relax and his body started to feel better.

We then added a bodyworker back into the mix but with great care to listen to him and work within what he was comfortable with and started to do gentle in hand walking prioritising his emotional state. The great thing about working with the emotional state first is that, as if by magic, the horse starts to move better. We did lots of enrichment type activities where he could explore movement without it feeling anything like the training he was used to and then started using positive reinforcement training to ensure we didn’t slip back into his old negative associations.

He is currently comfortable out with his friends, happy to come in and spend time with his owners going for hand walks, clicker training, doing enrichment activities and being groomed, he never pulls faces anymore. They have decided not to try riding him again which I agree is the right decision in this case. 🐴

(This story is not about the horse in the photograph)

I will be doing a series of free Facebook lives discussing topics like this with Yasmin Stuart Equine Physio , the first one is tomorrow at 7pm, I will add the link in the comments. Hope to see you there :)

05/09/2025

“You’re not being a good leader” 🐴

The phrase so many of my clients have had bleated at them when they’re having behavioural issues with their horse and have sought help. Usually the solution they’re given to make them a “good leader” is to flap a flag at their horse or yank on the rope to punish them when they perform any behaviour that is undesired, with no sensible thought as to why that behaviour is occurring in the first place. As the horse quickly figures out how to get the scary, horrible behaviour from the human to stop, we’re told the horse is trusting you as leader now and is much happier. What is actually happening is the horse is being shut down and they still feel stressed, only now you’re another source of stress too.

If we want to train ethically and have horses who actually feel safe and relaxed around us, we need to be consistently calm and predictable to be around. Coming in like a sledgehammer with your flag/rope/stick every time the horse dares to move a hoof out of line or god forbid nudge you with their nose makes you a scary, unpredictable and exhausting person to be around.

You might be thinking “well its dangerous to let my horse walk all over me and being hard on him is the only way I can get him to listen”. When we only look at behaviour as stand-alone and something to “fix”, putting the horse into the situation where we know they’re going to struggle just so we have the opportunity to correct them harshly, we are setting them up to fail and using this to justify harsh training methods.

If your horse is bargey/pushy/strong/difficult to handle they are not rude/bad-mannered/taking the mick, they are stressed. We need to look at what is contributing to this behaviour, reduce that stress-load and then train in small, easy steps that set the horse up to succeed. If the horse is exploding and becoming dangerous then we’ve already gone way too far.

One of my lovely clients bought a new horse back in the Spring, they tried and vetted him, but once they got him home they started to have issues leading him to and from the field, handling his legs and tacking him up. They had a well-recommended horsemanship trainer out and were told that the problem was their horse didn’t see them as a good leader because they were too soft with him and that he knew he could walk all over them. They were told “horses crave leadership” and the trainer then proceeded to spend an hour chasing the horse with a flag or whacking the rope clip up into his face if he dared to move without being asked. My client expressed concern about her horse pulling faces and swishing his tail when they approached him in the stable with his tack and was told that she mustn’t ever back off when he pulled faces as she was teaching him he could push her around.

My client was obviously really uncomfortable with what she was being told and reached out to me. When I first assessed the horse I found him to be extremely stressed in the environment as soon as he had to leave his field, he did not feel safe and this came out as barging and pulling. He really did not like being touched anywhere on his body and I felt his topline wasn’t healthy enough to be carrying a rider and could potentially be contributing to discomfort around being tacked up and ridden. As soon as you even entertained the idea of lifting his feet he became extremely upset, something my client said had gotten worse since the trainer had tried to make him do it. This horse didn’t lack leadership, he needed help.

I strongly suspected we were dealing with possible gut discomfort exacerbated by the yard move and the ongoing stress, alongside other discomfort in his body. We completely parked the idea of riding for now and we went into what I call “crisis management”, when you can’t safely handle your horse for daily tasks and welfare needs, we need to get on top of those things first. My first concern was making sure she could bring him in from the field safely, I didn’t feel clicker training was appropriate straight away so we simply taught him to lead between buckets on the floor and threw food into them as we reached them. We could quickly use this to teach him a pattern to and from the field with buckets on the way.

We tweaked his management making sure he had access to appropriate forage at all times and the owner chose to use a gut supplement to support him with the caveat that she would go to the vet if he did not improve. I also gave his owner simple enrichment games to do with him with no pressure. This and the removal of the high-stress training/trying to ride him meant his stress levels dropped quickly and within 2 weeks we had a horse who was in a much more trainable state.

I explained to the owner that when he pulled faces at us he was communicating his discomfort and it was important that we did listen to him and back off. Within a few weeks she was able to gently groom him without him being upset. We got a good bodyworker involved once he was more settled as trying to treat or assess a horse who is so defensive around being touched can be counter-productive. They found that he had some soreness under his saddle area and through his back end which was definitely enough to make holding his legs up uncomfortable.

We are now at the end of the summer and she has a horse who is calm and leads well, she can groom and handle his feet with no issues and as we have gradually developed his body he is now comfortable to be tacked up at liberty. She has just started riding him for short periods a few times a week.

I see cases like this again and again, and all these clients want to do is what’s best for their horse, yet they are misled, patronised and told their kindness is the problem. We have to speak up and stop letting people justify treating horses like this in the name of “helping” them. It has been normalised and praised for too long.

Compliance should not be our only measure of success. 🐴

04/09/2025

“Its not pain he’s had everything checked” 🐴

When people post about issues they’re having with their horse, any mention of it being a physical problem is often met with “he’s definitely not in pain, he’s had everything checked”. More often than not they mean they’ve had his teeth looked at, his saddle looked at and some kind of bodyworker have a look at his back. Unfortunately there are more parts to a horse than the back and the teeth.

Sometimes people have gone further than this and have dutifully taken their horse to the vet for a work-up and nothing of note can be found. The absence of significant lameness does not mean a horse is pain-free. Alarmingly sometimes pathology will be found and the vet will deem it “not significant enough” to cause the behaviour, this is so harmful and we absolutely cannot judge how much pain a horse is experiencing from looking at imaging. Sometimes you need to look deeper and find the right vet/professionals to help you do that.

If we pursue something as a purely behavioural issue when there is underlying pain, at best we end up with a miserable, shut down horse performing the task regardless and at worst we end up with an even bigger problem in the long run. We’ll also end up with a horse that has learned humans will ignore his attempts to communicate so he either needs to shout louder, or put up and shut up.

A factor that is even more difficult to navigate is that all professionals aren’t one and the same, so you can end up thinking you have had things checked properly by a relevant professional, and they’ve actually missed something. For example, it is not unusual for me to go out to a client who has tried their best by getting a made to measure saddle fitted and yet it is clearly causing the horse discomfort and doesn’t actually fit at all. It is also not unusual for me to go out to a horse who has been “cleared” by a bodyworker that I find to be sore and uncomfortable. I will always listen to the horse’s opinion above anyone else’s.

Having said all that, there are so many other factors that can be contributing to chronic tension and compensatory movement patterns in our horses that can be causing them to be sore and uncomfortable. Often their living situations are causing chronic high-stress and many of the common training methods cause high-stress and discomfort. My body wouldn’t feel great if I was forced to compress my neck and carry a weight around on my back to the point of fatigue. If we can assess the horse as a whole and improve other areas in his life, we often find we have a much more comfortable horse.

You are ultimately the only one who truly has the power to advocate for your horse. If you feel something is wrong, even if you’ve had “all the checks”, seek out professionals who don’t dismiss your concerns and are willing to help you look a little deeper.

If I had a pound for every horse I’m told has been cleared for pain, who turned out to actually be in pain, I’d be able to panic buy a lot more hay in for the winter. 🐴

I’d be interested to hear your experiences with being told your horse is fine only to later find out they were in pain.

04/09/2025

Looking for a quiet pony to join my two boys on our small equicentral/track near Yarm.

Shelter and hard-standing area. Perfect for a retired older pony you don’t want to be stuck in a stable all winter.

Ideally needs to be able to eat some grass. Must be very good with electric fencing.

DIY basis/helping each other out/open to options would consider a retirement livery type arrangement.

Message me if you want to chat.

03/09/2025

When training issues aren’t just training issues 🐴

I would be as bold to say that training issues aren’t just training issues 99% of the time.

It is common when I meet new clients that they have had various professionals out, perhaps the vet, a bodyworker, saddle fitter, usually a trainer or two. They often feel like they’ve tried everything simply because we are made to feel like that’s all there is available. We choose a yard to go to and the horse just has to live there and cope with the rules, we choose a bodyworker and trust that if they say our horses are fine then they are and we choose a trainer who says they’re kind, ethical and a behavioural expert so we trust that they are.

What I often come to find is a horse who’s living situation is causing them to be chronically stressed, a horse with a compromised body very much not helped by living in chronic stress and a horse who has been taken into a training space and had pressure applied in various ways trying to make them comply. We could obviously go into so much more depth here but hopefully you get the idea of what I’m saying. None of this is helping the horse and until we address that chronic stress and help their body there are going to be behavioural or training “issues”.

This is really hard to recognise as so many horses are living in chronic high-stress, they must be fine if they all live like this, right? Many horses shut down to cope so that’s why we see that the training “works” you’ve just got to keep applying enough pressure until the horse gives in. We’re told that the horse is now happy and relaxed in their work, but actually they’ve just learned that its easier to comply than be hassled and that they have no choice regardless of how they feel about it.

There are two parts I focus on that make the biggest difference to horse’s behaviour and wellbeing quickly, neither of them are training:
🐴 Getting their management the absolute best we can to ensure their needs are met, this is way more complex than just turned out or stabled. We need to ensure they have appropriate company, appropriate forage (long stem fibre every single day, yes even if they’re fat), comfortable places to lie down, freedom to move and feeling safe in their living environment.
🐴 Stop doing the things that are causing them high-stress. When having behavioural issues we’re often putting the horse into high-stress situations again and again in a bid to try and solve the issue, when actually all we’re doing is compounding those negative associations. We need to stop trying to modify the behaviour and start to help the horse feel safe again. This usually looks like doing enrichment activities until the horse is feeling better and is happy to engage with us. Then we can start training again in a more positive way.

Of course there are lots of other considerations here, but those are the two biggest parts to having a horse feel better significantly.

When we’re having training issues we need to think, are we looking at the whole horse and their life or are we just taking the horse into a training space and trying to modify behaviour with no thought for anything else?

We want quick fixes, we want to ride the horse now. Unfortunately when we bought a horse we bought a sentient being with their own physical body, thoughts and emotions, yet we have been conditioned to think we are entitled to use them however we want. There is constant justification and pressure from the people around us that the horse is “fine” and we just need to crack on. But if we truly put our horse’s needs first we aren’t always going to be able to do what we want with them and we need to trust our gut and seek out people who can actually help us and our horses.

We can’t just want to feel good about it and speak in platitudes, we have to actually show up for our horses and do what needs to be done for their welfare and quality of life, and sometimes that is hard and sometimes that is uncomfortable. Our horses cannot advocate for themselves, we’re all they’ve got.🐴

I'm doing a series of free Facebook lives discussing topics like these with Yasmin Stuart Equine Physio , the first one is on Monday 8th September at 7pm. I'll leave the link in the comments.

01/09/2025

Horses talk if we actually listen 🐴

No this post isn’t about animal communication/horse psychics.

Something we often say, me included, is “oh I just wish horses could talk it would be so much easier”. And I absolutely stand by this when perhaps wanting to know where exactly my horse is feeling pain in his body or if he is feeling unwell. But when it comes to reading behaviour, we find our horses are talking to us all the time, or at least communicating with us, and we’re often told to ignore it.

I sometimes think if horses could actually talk with words we really wouldn’t like what they have to say, and we’d probably be encouraged to ignore it and make them shut up.

I read so many posts asking for advice on different behavioural issues and the comments are full of ways advising the owner how to get the horse to shut up and comply. We need to learn to listen.

I have a client who’s horse would catch fine but started planting his feet and refusing to come in from the field. She was given all sorts of advice about using pressure halters, making him back up, chasing him with a flag or running him in circles and even only turning him out in a small starvation paddock so he’d be desperate to come in for food. All suggestions on how to hurt, scare or make him uncomfortable him until he complied with her request. Not one of these suggestions considered the most important questions:
🐴 Why doesn’t he want to come in?
🐴 How can we improve things so he does want to come in? (not how can we make it horrible for him not to)

We looked at the whole picture with this horse and the first thing of note was that he’d be in the stable with limited hay which would run out hours before he was let back into the field. So he knew every time he came in he’d be stuck in his box with nothing to eat for long periods of time.

We then looked at his body and noted he was lacking appropriate muscle over his back which could potentially be making it uncomfortable for him to carry a rider, so every time he was being ridden he was having a negative experience.

I noted his immediate response to any pressure was to brace back against it and his owner described how she was encouraged to constantly nag and chase him as she was told he was “lazy” and “stubborn”. I didn’t think he was moving comfortably at all so I referred him to the physio who then referred him on to the vet where he was diagnosed and treated for hock arthritis and also stomach ulcers.

We changed his management to trickle feed his hay so he didn’t ever run out in the stable and we also added different enrichment for him. We also did lots of simple enrichment activities with him such as treat scatters and hand grazing walks when he came in so he stopped associating coming in with being made to work uncomfortably.

Working alongside the physio we quietly introduced some training around building him up so he was able to carry a rider more comfortably, this training looked very different to the heavily pressure-based training he’d experienced before and he was soon moving and feeling a lot better.

Throughout all of this the bringing in issues melted away, because they weren’t bringing in issues at all, they were a communication, he was talking to us.

Please stop and think when you start having issues with your horse, instead of just trying to “fix it”, we really need to be figuring out why. Horses don’t just do things for no reason. If we had simply hassled this horse until he complied and realised coming in was the easier option, we would have continued forcing an uncomfortable, sore horse to work, this happens all the time. 🐴

I will be doing the first of a series of free Facebook lives with Stuart Equine Physio on Monday 8th September at 7pm discussing appropriate training and behavioural modification, I’ll add the sign up link in the comments. I look forward to seeing you there, questions very welcome

31/08/2025

Another lovely obstacle clinic at Mount Huly, great bunch of horses today 🐴❤️

I’m winding these down for the winter now unless you have an indoor arena as the weather gets too unpredictable. They’ll be back in the spring!

29/08/2025

This photo making it look like I’m observing my giant horses 😅.

I was trying a little bit of the somatics exercises with Lenny but the horses had other ideas ❤️

26/08/2025

Mares are horses too 🐴

If we put 2 horses side by side showing the same stress behaviours, but one was a gelding and one was a mare, I guarantee being “hormonal” would be very high on the list of people’s explanation of the mare’s behaviour. While the gelding may have ulcers, kissing spine and other sources of pain thrown onto the table, its almost like mares are seen as a different species.

I find the way we speak about mares can have a particularly nasty under-tone, no doubt stemming from the misogyny ingrained into all of us from a young age. It leaves a really sour taste in my mouth watching people laugh at distressed horses “haha she’s so sassy, little witch!” who are just desperately trying to communicate their discomfort.

It is so normalised that mares are "grumpy" that we actually highlight the ones that aren't by saying they're "not mareish". We literally think its normal for mares to be stressed and upset and that's just how they are. I hate the term "mareish".

I have a client who’s horse started napping and rearing, after a basic trot-up and palpation of her back, for some reason I still cannot fathom, she was prescribed a course of Regumate “to see if it helped”. Regumate is not something we should be giving to horses lightly and with absolutely no solid evidence of hormonal issues, but I hear of this happening commonly when we have a mare who is showing behavioural issues.

Upon assessing this mare I could see she was on a very restricted amount of forage and also didn’t have adequate muscling to carry the rider comfortably. She was scoped and diagnosed with stomach ulcers, we of course implemented management changes then worked on building her body up again. The napping behaviour never returned as now she was comfortable. This was such a simple, basic deduction from assessing this horse, and yet we jumped straight to a hormonal issue and disregarded anything else simply because she was a mare.

I am of course not saying mares cannot have hormonal issues. This idea of “oh she’s just hormonal”, okay, if that is the case she is likely uncomfortable, perhaps she is in pain and she is not up to training today, it is not a justification for ignoring the horse and carrying on. Grumpiness and irritability usually come from pain and stress, it is not stand-alone. I know if I’m feeling grumpy and irritable I want to be left the hell alone.

Another thing to note is that often horses who are having hormonal issues improve hugely when we improve their management to be more species-appropriate and reduce their chronic stress-load, just like us.

This is absolutely not a generalisation of all mares, but I have anecdotally found that mares tend to be quicker to express how they’re feeling, which I’m sure plays a huge part in their unwarranted “difficult” reputation. They’re just harder to bully.

Have any of you had your concerns dismissed because your horse happens to be a mare? 🐴

Picture is of a much younger me with a beautiful mare I had on loan called Zerlina, she was sweet, kind and gentle with both people and other horses, just like all mares can be if given the opportunity.

24/08/2025

The Scapegoating of Novice Horse Owners 🐴

I have had these comments on my posts enough to write about it. It will be something along the lines of “people should have to take a test before they’re allowed to buy a horse!” or “if these novice owners didn’t buy horses we wouldn’t have these problems”.

They frustrate me for two reasons
1) It completely disregards the whole point of my posts which are always talking about the systemic issues that run through the entire horse industry from the top down
2) Novice/inexperienced horse owners are some of most conscientious and clued up when it comes to behaviour and welfare as they haven’t spent decades being indoctrinated into the industry norms

The “people should have to take a test” ones make me laugh, a test from who, who would be judging this test? I’m not going to name organisations but I cannot think of one in the UK I would trust to uphold high welfare standards given what goes on. If we’re looking at the five freedoms model of welfare most “approved” livery yards struggle to meet those standards. So who would be judging whether you’re fit to own a horse and based on what exactly? It reeks of elitism.

What about the high-end competition rider who’s horses get 4 hours of individual turnout per day and spend the rest of their time alone in their stables, do they pass the test?

What about the rider who has owned horses for 50 years, feeds their horses cereal mixes and lunges them in tight side reins, do they pass the test?

Neither of those people are novices.

Most of the novice horse owners I meet have their horse’s needs very high on their list of priorities, they have done their research and are very aware of what those needs are. They also tend to be the type of horse owner who really just love their horses for who they are and want to build a good relationship. They’re in a much better position to be making good choices for their horse’s welfare.

When I’m posting about client horses who have been seen by different professionals and nobody has recognised that the horse is struggling or in pain, its interesting that its the owner who was seeking help who is blamed for not knowing enough, and not the professionals who are meant to support them.

Novice or inexperienced horse people are not the problem here. The entire industry has normalised high-stress and pain behaviours to a degree that we do not recognise them, some of the most traumatised horses I meet have come from high-end competition yards or from people who have had horses in their family for generations. Traumatised horses are the norm, shut down horses are the norm, horses in pain are the norm, we describe them as “fine” as long as they still comply.

I am very defensive of people who are trying their absolute best. Scapegoating them as just some “novice idiot” who has no business being around horses, when in reality their horses are more likely to better have their needs met, have much lower stress levels and have a better quality of life.

Time and time again I am meeting clients who perhaps are fairly new to horse-owning and are surrounded by very “experienced” people telling them they’re being too soft and their horse is taking the mick. Of course when I go out to assess the horse we discover a very stressed horse with pain/discomfort issues, which the owner already suspected but kept being told otherwise by the very “experienced” people.

If I was a horse I would very much like to be purchased by a “novice” person who wanted to learn all about me and build a relationship with me rather than passed through yards where the most important thing is that I perform and everything else is an after-thought.

I think its so exciting how much information people can access online now and how we can all seek out information for ourselves. I have met many clients through them reading my posts on here and recognising their own horses behaviour in them, I think that’s really cool and is a huge reason why I continue to write. I want to reach the people who are looking for a different way.

Are you new or new-ish to horses and have felt dismissed by people who’ve been around horses longer than you? 🐴

LS Horsemanship

08/09/2025

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