LS Horsemanship

20/11/2025

Who had snow today? ❄️🥶☃️☃️

Snow pony pictures required please 🐴🐴❤️

19/11/2025

Client story - loading progress

I met the wonderful ex-racehorse Christopher around a year ago and we have been working on helping him feel safer around people and in his own body. Christopher was a very stressy guy prone to exploding in big ways when he felt overwhelmed. He now lives a wonderful life out 24/7 in a small, stable herd with all of his needs met.

We have spent our time doing enrichment activities and positive reinforcement training with him and he has really come out of his shell and is able to cope with so much more without losing the plot. Christopher is dealing with some physical issues, as so many horses are, which makes it difficult for him to feel safe and relaxed. His lovely owner is happy to give him all the time he needs but needed to travel him to their new field before winter set in.

Christopher came to her with a reputation as the “worst traveller” and having seen his explosions when he gets stressed she was of course apprehensive about loading and travelling him. She has spent the last 6 weeks or so preparing Chris to make the short trailer journey to his winter field and I want to share with you what that looked like.

Initially the trailer was introduced to the environment and he was free to explore as much or as little as he wanted, he wasn’t forced to be in proximity with it. Due to all of the quiet work and rapport we have built with Chris over the last year he was surprisingly willing to walk onto the trailer, he however became very anxious at any sign of being restricted or shut in. So she allowed him to just stand and eat from a bucket with everything open, he was allowed to leave whenever he wanted to, because of this when he did leave he left calmly.

These training sessions were maybe 5/10 minutes at a time then he was given a break to go and graze or do whatever he felt like doing.

Gradually over the weeks we got him comfortable with being shut in, watching for signs of anxiety and allowing him time to come down from it instead of pushing on and trying to make him just deal with it.

He was uncomfortable with the idea of any of the bars being in so we got him comfortable with a barrier by using a soft bit of rope that we could release easily. We would load him, put the rope across, let him eat from a bucket for a while, take the rope down, walk him off, repeat. Quite quickly we were able to put the real breast bar in and he was fine. We repeated these steps with the back bars with someone feeding him by his head and ready to release him if they needed to.

We then started to get him used to the idea of the back ramp going up, this initially was just me lifting it a few inches of the ground then putting it back down to gauge his reaction. Again very short sessions and short duration to give him the best chance of having a positive experience to put into the bank.

When we started trying to shut the front up we got a bigger reaction, he immediately started to scramble his legs and get upset, we dropped the ramp to the floor straight away and he was able to calm down very quickly and continue eating. So we repeated lifting the front ramp a couple of inches off the ground watching him closely.

The really cool thing about training like this is the horse starts to feel less anxious just from the fact they’re learning you listen and the really bad, scary thing they’re expecting to happen (being shut in the box and left panicking) doesn’t happen. With a few short sessions over a few days he was coping well with the front being closed.

He made an uneventful trip to his new field last week.

So many horses are fearful around loading and travelling for so many reasons, the conventional way of loading by just presenting the horse to the ramp and applying pressure while they fight you until they go forward does nothing to help them feel safe, it can achieve compliance, but I wonder at what cost. The poll and neck are delicate structures and being put through extremely high-stress situations can cause lasting emotional damage.

There are no ethical quick-fixes and the inconvenient truth is a horse who is finding travelling to be painful, uncomfortable and scary is going to continue to not want to load given the opportunity. We have to look at the bigger picture, has the horse had a lot of yard moves? Do they have discomfort in their body? Have they been to the vets a lot? Do they find the way they are being ridden/competed too stressful and difficult?

Making a horse comply by applying pressure to their head until they come forward doesn’t address any of these things. It is also ridiculously unsafe to trap yourself in a confined space with a stressed horse who doesn’t want to be in there.

If we want to put our horses first we need to really think about why our horse isn’t loading, under which circumstances it is appropriate to travel them and how we can improve other areas of their life to help.

For Chris I imagine if we’d taken him to the vets or perhaps to a new yard away from his friends he probably wouldn’t want to load again, we’d have to spend time putting money back in the bank so to speak. But he did a short, uneventful journey and his friends were there at the end, so that will build his confidence. 🐴

17/11/2025

Stuck our spare camera on the floor at the back of the paddock and accidentally created a masterpiece ❤️❤️

17/11/2025

This needs to be said again and again and again. We cannot rule out pain and we should not be trying to train through blatant pain-like behaviours just because we tried a few basic diagnostics and came up with nothing.

Pain is a complicated beast with many heads -


It is possible for your horse to be in pain and:

Not have a head-nod hip-hike lameness.

Still be compliant.

Win a rosette.

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It is possible for your horse to experience pain which:

Doesn't respond to bute.

Only presents in certain scenarios, despite being "fine" at all other times.

Is provoked by what you are doing with them - even if you have the best of intentions.

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It is possible for your horse to be in pain and for there to be no way to image it or diagnose it.

Similarly, it is possible for your horse to be in pain despite imaging every part of their body and it coming back clean.

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The absence of disease isn't the only metric for health and happiness.

If you think your horse is in pain, there's going to be a reason for that thought. Please engage with professionals who care about yours and your horse's lived experience and want to support you in helping your horse to feel better.

We are out there and we do care ❤️

https://www.yasminstuartequinephysio.com/the-horse-posture-blueprint

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.🐴