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

LS Horsemanship, Stokesley (2025)

16/10/2025

How have you been conditioned to be around horses? 🐴

My dad had no involvement with horses in his life until I became interested, he has been around them a little over the years, I even got him on one once (which he hated and got off after 2 minutes of walking 😅). Since I moved the horses home over the last couple of years he has become much more involved in caring for them. What I find so interesting is how he naturally behaves around the horses having not been indoctrinated into the industry at all. His only experiences are working around our settled herd mostly with the horses loose and at liberty. He has not been exposed to chronically stressed horses who aren’t having their needs met.

He hasn’t done a lot of leading with the horses, because of our setup he used to just bring them in one at a time with no headcollars on with some treats in his pocket and they would all willingly oblige and understand the routine.

Now we are at a place where headcollars are required to take the horses through the farmyard it is interesting to see how different his instincts are when leading to what most of us have conditioned into us. There is absolutely no urge in him to back the horses up, if they pull or veer towards a certain direction he tends to go with them like you would a dog wanting to investigate. What I find the most interesting is that when he is trying to guide or correct them, he is so gentle. He has such a healthy respect for them there is nothing in him that even considers yanking or pulling them harshly or shouting at them. In return the horses are very safe and gentle around him.

I was trying to figure out why it seemed so unusual to me that his instincts weren’t to try and dominate and assert himself. I’ve realised its because from the start most of us are told we have to be so firm and perhaps even rough with horses to keep them under control. Its certainly what was around me all of the time when I first started learning about horses.

My dad’s only influence with horses has been me, and these days the way I behave around my horses is very different to years gone by. I rarely “catch” them to do anything within their living space, they are comfortable with what we ask of them and therefore safe to be around. They come and go as they please and they associate people with nice things happening.

In the past I was a drill sergeant, my first instinct around any horse was to back them out of my space and chase/shove them away if they tried to engage or happened to step towards me without me asking them to. I didn’t even really think about it, its just what I did out of habit. If a horse didn’t like something I was doing I would keep doing it until they gave in. My horses didn’t enjoy hanging out with me very much and when given the choice would leave as they expected me to hassle them.

I don’t really put a lot of importance into “personal space” with my horses anymore, sure I ask my horses to move a little if they’re in the way, but I enter their space sometimes and other times they enter mine, it is no problem. If I don’t want them to in that moment I simply quietly ask them not to or I disengage with them, I don’t need to push them around and make them stand to attention. When I first meet a horse now I see if they want to engage with me, I don’t insist on it and I don’t feel entitled to their bodies. This has kept me safer than any of my old “teach the horse to respect you” training ever did, because the horses feel safe around me and I also don’t put them in situations that set them up to fail.

We can absolutely teach boundaries and leading positions without having the horse feel like the space around us is lava and if they dare to slip into it they’ll be met with a flag/stick/rope waved up into their face.

Its interesting how often I meet new clients and they apologise for their horse engaging with them by perhaps nuzzling or nudging them while we’re chatting because they’ve been told by others that it is so rude. I have to explain it is absolutely fine, it is not rude and the horse is just feeling frustrated or anxious, perhaps we step away and stay out of their space while we chat. We’re all so indoctrinated into thinking any sort of interaction not on our terms is rude and dangerous, its not. It is completely normal for horses to interact with their environment and not stand like robots.

Our habits can be so hard to break, especially when they come from a place of worry about being out of control or hurt, but we can’t expect our horses to be relaxed and feel safe around us if every step out of line is met with a harsh correction.

Have a think about this next time you’re leading your horse. How aware are you of what you’re doing? If your horse stops to look at something, do you just pull or do you perhaps yank sharply to get their attention? Could you maybe pause with them and leave slack in the rope and give them a moment? When they’re ready could you invite them to walk on with you with the gentlest pressure you can and release for one step? Can you recognise when you’re feeling stressed or frustrated around your horse and stop and take a deep breath before you react?

The more consistently gentle and predictable we are around our horses, the safer they will feel around us and the softer and safer they will be to handle. Don’t just train for compliance, consider how your horse is feeling always. The more we train with the horse’s emotional state in mind, which means considering the horse’s needs outside of the training too, the less we ever need to “get into it” with horses.

If you have any stories of becoming softer and changing your perspective with your horses I'd love to hear them. 🐴

Pictured is my dad doing some quiet training getting Dan used to going in a stable again after 10 years of living out.

13/10/2025

Little field update. 🐴

The horses are still strip grazing the paddock we made for them and they’re much more settled. Thankful for the calm weather this week it has really helped.

They now have the Jelka mat hardstanding and shelter in the “corral” then are free to come and go as they please into the paddock which I strip back every day.

We’ve started fencing a part of the track and hope to gradually strip graze it over the next few months. We don’t have a huge amount of space but hoping to make a figure 8 and add plenty of enrichment, can’t wait to give them access to the hedgerow.

There’s also space to do something around the shelter but we’ll have to think about how to fence it as there’s a lot of concrete just under the surface so we can’t get posts in.

It’s really nice to see them feeling confident enough to spend time in seperate places now and they are lying down to sleep out in the paddock as well as in the shelter 🥰🥰

11/10/2025

Welfare washing 🐴

Kindness is something that is valued by many horse owners now and it has become a strong marketing tactic. Unfortunately, whilst a lot of the language around horses has changed to sound kinder, often the training behind the words doesn’t quite add up. Kind, ethical, force-free, fear-free, stress-free, welfare, relationship, connection, liberty, bond, trust, confidence-building, leadership, partnership. All of these words/phrases bring up positive feelings in us, and if the training is being described to us in this way with a convincing narrative it can be easy to overlook what our horse is actually experiencing. Especially when chronically-stressed horses are so normalised we are used to seeing horses go through high-stress training all of the time.

So if we highly value our horse’s emotional and physical welfare, and we want to prioritise this over getting “results”, how can we recognise if the training is doing what it says on the tin and does align with our own ethics?

🐴 What are their values? Do they talk a lot about horse welfare, how to meet their needs and recognise pain/stress? Or do they mostly focus on how they can get your horse to do what you want them to while throwing in some pleasant-sounding descriptors?
🐴 Learn to read stress and conflict behaviour in horses - are the horses showing high-stress behaviour during the training? Do the videos show horses rearing, panicking and trying to get away? Is the horse genuinely feeling better or are they just learning to be compliant? Learn to read facial expressions well, look for tension in the face and eyes. If we’re seeing explosive behaviour in training we have pushed the horse too far regardless of what the end result looks like.
🐴 Ethical trainers look at the whole picture, the horse’s full history, management and living situation should be discussed and recommendations made as necessary. If someone has no interest in how your horse is experiencing the rest of their life and if their needs are met and they’re happy to just crack on and train them this is a huge red flag.
🐴 Learn to recognise what healthy musculature and movement looks like and you’ll be shocked by how many horses with behavioural issues do not have appropriate muscle to be carrying a rider. Do the horses in training look comfortable and well developed, or are you seeing weak, under-muscled and probably sore horses being put through ridden training and hassled to comply?
🐴 Ethical trainers will always have pain on the table when dealing with behavioural issues. We can never, ever rule out pain. You can easily work a horse through pain when your only metric for success is compliance. I see so many horses in training with behavioural issues who have very clearly compromised bodies, sometimes “pain memory” is mentioned as a sort of justification to ignore the horse and continue trying to make them comply. If a horse is acting like they’re in pain they are in pain and an ethical trainer will refer you to the appropriate professionals to help you figure that out. We do not need to continue trying to train horses who we suspect are in pain to "see if its pain or not". They've already told us, we don't need to wait for them to scream.

It can be so difficult to navigate this when we are so used to seeing horses that are in pain and chronically stressed being “fixed” and having seemingly fairytale endings. But once you learn to see what the horses are really experiencing you can’t unsee it. The uncomfortable reality is a lot of horses are traumatised, a lot of horses are in discomfort and a lot of horses are being asked to do things that are inappropriate for them in that moment. Compliance training is the norm its just described in different ways. If you really want to help your horse we have to go deeper than feel-good narratives.

And just a note to say I don’t think most people who are marketing this way are deliberately trying to deceive people, I truly believe people are doing the best they can with the information they have, or they’re wrapped up in a lot of cognitive dissonance like I used to be. This is why it is so important to move through those uncomfortable feelings and keep seeking further knowledge, even if that knowledge isn’t what we want to hear. Then we can make the best choices for our horses, instead of the best choices for our feelings. 🐴

10/10/2025

Autonomy 🐴

Giving my horses as much autonomy as possible is something that has become very important to me and has improved their quality of life and our relationship so much. Notice I said “as much autonomy as possible” not letting them do whatever they want at all times no matter what.

Lets take an example horse, this horse is stabled in a 12x12 box, he is given loose hay in a hay bar in the corner, he is turned out from 8am to 4pm by himself in a small, square paddock fenced in with electric wire, some days there is no turnout and he goes on the horse walker for 30 minutes twice daily, when he is groomed and tacked up he is put in the cross ties. This is a horse with very, very little autonomy. The only choices he is able to make for himself are which part of his stable or paddock to stand in which both offer very limited choices for him. He is unable to walk away from being groomed or tacked up so his communication is often missed or ignored. He has no choice but to keep walking on the horse walker no matter how he feels about it. None of this is enriching and it is all probably quite stressful.

So how could we improve things for this horse and give him more autonomy?
Of course our ideal would be to turn him out in a bigger area with some friends, but there are also lots of other small changes we could make to improve his quality of life.
🐴 We can give him different foraging stations around his stable by adding nets/feeders/enrichment in different places
🐴 We can add a scratching post in his paddock so he can relieve any itch he has
🐴 We can add different foraging options such as safe branches, herbs and hay stations
🐴 We can add a water buffet so he can choose which water he’d prefer to drink
🐴 We can add shelter so he can choose whether to be inside or outside
🐴 We can stop putting him in the cross ties to do things with him so he is more able to communicate with us
🐴 We can hand walk him instead of putting him on the walker so he can make choices and perhaps graze and browse

Of course the dream would be to have acres and acres of suitable land to let our horses roam free, but don’t let perfection be the enemy of good, just because we can’t have it perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our absolute best to make improvements where we can. My horses are currently restricted to a small hard standing with a shelter and a small attached paddock while I strip graze our new field. Given the choice they would absolutely choose to be out eating all of the long grass, but unfortunately this would probably make them sick, so I don’t allow them to do so. I still make sure the area they are confined to is as enriching as possible, they still have lots of choices they can make within that area.

The area where people really struggle with the idea of autonomy is training. We have all been indoctrinated into thinking that micro-managing and controlling a horse’s every move is the only way to train successfully. Whether its traditional/natural horsemanship/classical it is all compliance training. All conventional training is based around us just telling the horse what to do and when to do it. There are no choices for the horse, just right or wrong, and the only right thing is compliance.

I am not saying we should never ask our horses to do anything ever, nor am I saying its bad to train them to do things. I just find horses can enjoy spending time with us and training so much more when we allow them to voice their opinions, listen to how they’re really feeling about things and actually offer them safe choices. I absolutely love setting people off with enrichment activities for this reason. It is often the first time for many horses that they have any been given the freedom to make their own choices and explore while a human has been around.

This is one of the many reasons I love positive reinforcement training so much, when it is done well and with skill it opens up a line of communication with our horses that I didn’t realise was possible. I do pretty much everything with my horses at liberty now, I can "catch" them, rasp their hooves, groom them, clip them, rug them etc. I don't need pressure to make them stay, I give them so many choices they know they can leave if they feel uncomfortable. They stay because they feel safe, not because they have been conditioned to by aversive pressure. This takes time and patience to build.

Giving horses more autonomy also means you might not like the choices they make because it will show you how they truly feel. It takes much more time to actually improve a horse's negative associations with something than to apply pressure to get compliance.

Giving our horses autonomy where we can and building it into the time we spend with our horses is so, so valuable to them. It reduces their stress levels, builds their confidence, helps them feel safe and will improve their relationship with us. 🐴

09/10/2025

Availability 🐴
Saturday 11th October - York/Wetherby route (1 space)
Monday 13th October - Richmond/Catterick/Northallerton route (2 spaces)
Friday 17th October - Whitby/Scarborough route (1 space)
Sunday 19th October - Wakefield/Leeds/York route (2 spaces)

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.
www.lshorsemanship.co.uk

08/10/2025

Hero complexes don't help horses 🐴

There’s an emotionally manipulative trend of using the excuse of “saving” the horse to justify treating horses badly. As if the horse should be so grateful that we’ve decided to give them a chance rather than put them down.

This is the defence of the people responsible for that horrific video of an extremely distressed horse left with their head tied to their chest and a dummy on their back for several hours, I think the video is still up on David Marlin’s page if you don’t know what I’m referring to. They say they “saved” the horse from the meat man because he was a bolter and this is the only way to “help” him, therefore its justified. They don’t see anything wrong with what they did and they will continue to do it.

Firstly, whilst I understand this is still the thinking of many horse people, I find the narrative that a horse needs to be “useful” to be allowed to stay alive really gross. As if the only two options are rideable horse or death. Those are choices humans make, there are many choices in between the two which include appropriate veterinary investigations, ethical behavioural rehab or a non-ridden life. If we’re deeming a horse healthy enough to be put through training, then clearly we think that horse is comfortable enough to live their life out in a field. I would have much more respect for people if they were just honest and said they only value horses if they can use and ride them instead of pretending what they’re doing is best for the horse.

Secondly horses with extreme behavioural issues are usually in significant pain or are traumatised, usually both, that is why they have extreme behavioural issues. The idea that these horses just need someone willing to battle through with them and then they’ll be all fixed and happy is a fantasy. What is actually happening is either the horse shuts down and complies and just internalises the extreme stress they’re under, or they damage the horse further and the horse ends up being put down anyway. Or they sell the horse on and an unsuspecting buyer ends up picking up the pieces later on.

You see the “saving horses lives” narrative a lot throughout the industry when horses are having behavioural issues, we all love a fairytale. But what are we saving those horses from? We didn’t rescue them out of a horrendous situation to give them a safe home where nothing will be asked of them anymore, we’re just giving them one final chance to be “useful” to us and patting ourselves on the back for it. I’d much prefer to see support go to wonderful places like. Irish Horse Welfare Trust who are rescuing horses from really dire circumstances and nursing them back to health whilst advocating for ethical training. I did a talk with Shelley last year which I’ll link in the comments.

I know this is the industry and I know for a lot of people they decide it is “too expensive” to keep a horse they can’t ride, but I don’t have to agree with it, that’s a sentient being with their own emotions, experiences, wants and needs, it makes me really sad. I have two horses in my field at home who are “useless”, they have happy, enriched lives and they bring me joy every day. I hope more and more people start viewing horses like this.

There are lots of things I used to do to horses, that I no longer think are ethical, because I was so deep in the belief that making a horse useful was the best thing I could do for them. I used to Bute horses and continue to ride and work them to “see if it was pain or not” because I didn’t understand pain, their bodies or behaviour. I used to get really hard on horses on the ground to make them safe to handle with no thought for why they felt the need to behave that way in the first place. I shut a lot of horses down without even realising that’s what I was doing.

I think it would be great if we could let go of the narrative that the only possible happy ending looks like the horse getting back in the ring and winning ribbons. There are lots of different happy endings, and the happiest ones from the horse’s point of view are the ones where their needs are met, they get to live with friends, forage and freedom. The riding part is just for us.

The saddest thing is if a lot of these horses were just given time to unravel and be a horse, got the right support for their bodies and then started again with their emotional state being the priority they might just be okay. Instead we're stuck in this quick fix world sending them from trainer to trainer trying to fix and calling it their last chance. We're really setting them up to fail. 🐴

06/10/2025

Dreamy afternoon 🥰

In the ten plus years of owning both of the boys (have owned Lenny for 20!) I’ve never caught them both lying down together through the day, they always tend to lay down through the night.

This afternoon after eating their dinner they both dropped down in front of me within 30 seconds of each other and I got to sit with them and enjoy the peaceful vibes ❤️❤️

I think they’re both exhausted with the stress of the move and didn’t get much sleep through the storm. The sunshine was lovely ☀️

06/10/2025

A rebuttal that often comes in the comments of my posts about treating horses more kindly is that it can result in making horses dangerous. I can see why people would think that when we’re looking at horses through the lens of them being an animal we need to control heavily otherwise they’ll realise they can dominate us. I used to look at horses like this too. I used to think the only way to make horses safe was to control their every movement when they were in my presence and never let them “get away" with anything. This is because I was used to working with horses who were chronically stressed, didn’t have their needs met and therefore weren’t in a trainable state.

The lens I look at horses through now is very different. Horses are gentle and extremely compliant by nature. If they weren’t extremely compliant we wouldn’t be able to do what we do with them. When a horse is presenting with challenging behaviour, my first question is why, and rather than diving in with a rope halter and groundwork exercises, I want to look at their management, their diet, their body, their chronic stress levels and how we can improve those things. If we can address those things, the horse will be in a more trainable state and the challenging behaviour tends to cease so we can train quietly.

If we don’t address those things the only way to make that horse comply is by using pressure until they learn there is no choice. If we do address those things then the door is open for us to train gently and more ethically as our horse is going to be able to stay under threshold and co-operate with us.

I think confusion can come when we think of scenarios where we can’t see any other option except to be hard on the horse to stay safe, that I’m somehow advocating for running away from your horse and never trying to take him out of the field again if he nips at you. Sometimes we are in situations where we have no choice but to perhaps use heavy pressure in the moment to stay safe, most of the time we are not in those situations or we can choose not to put ourselves in them. I used to deliberately put horses into situations I knew they would struggle with so I could “fix” their behaviour, I do not work like this anymore.

I want to give a clear example of a common scenario I come across which I hope will explain what I mean well.

Let’s say we have a young horse who came through the sales in Ireland, then went through a dealer in the UK and is now with their owner. They are stabled at night, they are on restricted hay rations that they finish before the morning and their field is very grazed down. They are being worked around 5 times a week with a mixture of hacking, lunging and schooling, they are weak, wobbly and are becoming increasingly spooky. They have become nippy and pushy on the ground and the owner just isn’t sure what to do.

Past me would put a rope halter on this horse and take him into the arena and start making him move his feet, I would do hind quarter yields, backing up, sending them out onto a circle and stopping them sharply. I would do this until I was satisfied the horse was “soft” and responsive to me. If the horse was pushy or nipped I would send them away from me sharply perhaps swinging the rope up at their face to protect myself. I put a huge focus on making the horse “park” well away from me and if they moved I would make that a very uncomfortable decision for them. I would get results and quickly. I didn’t realise it at the time but I wasn’t helping that horse, I was simply suppressing their behaviour, the underlying cause of the behaviour was still happening, I had just shut them down and made them compliant.

If I were to meet this horse now my first priority would be to improve the management so that this horse has appropriate forage available at all times, perhaps using trickle feeding options to manage weight. The horse has been through a lot of stress from moving homes several times and is likely to have gut discomfort we need to address. We would discuss the horse’s current chronic stress levels and how we could reduce them. This often looks like not riding/lunging the horse for the time being if they’re finding that difficult and focussing on enrichment activities that help the horse to down-regulate their nervous system and also build positive associations with people and the training environment. As the horse starts to feel better we would introduce training again, we would now have a horse in a much more trainable state who we won’t need to use heavy pressure with and we can quietly teach them how we would like them to be on the ground.

So many horses are struggling with their living situations and it is so difficult to find livery that even offers any winter turnout in some areas of the country, so many horses also have underlying pain that is never discovered because the professionals they’ve seen haven’t managed to find it so the horse is “cleared of pain”. These two factors alone mean many horses never get into that nice trainable state so we’re left thinking gentle training doesn’t work and our only choice is to be harder on them. Its easy to justify this when this is the lens the entire industry currently sees horses through.

Gentle, ethical training is slower, takes more skill, more patience and sometimes means you find out the thing you were wanting to train your horse to do is inappropriate at the moment. You can see why the pull is so strong towards the other side, when you can quickly get compliance and crack on with having a fun time riding your horse. Especially when that training is marketed as kind, ethical and “natural”. Its just compliance training.

Advocacy is uncomfortable, we need to sit with this discomfort if we truly want to do what’s best for our horses. You are going to get pressure from all sides when you start to go against the grain. I often find people are all for being gentle and using positive reinforcement until the horse starts to say no or its inconvenient for it to take the time it takes. Cognitive dissonance is very powerful.

As always my inbox is open if you’d like to chat further, I want to cultivate a friendly community here for like-minded people, you are not alone. 🐴

05/10/2025

One napping in the shelter and one napping in the paddock 🥰🥰

So great to see this as the boys have been really unsettled by the storm the last couple of days, they’ve only been here 3 weeks and it’s hard for them to be in a confined area and also have no other horses here to let them know it’s okay. No more storms for a while please!

05/10/2025

Shutting down horses 🐴

I want you to imagine you’re really sore, you’ve perhaps got some hidden arthritis in your neck and the way you’ve had to compensate has made the muscles all down your neck and through your back really sensitive.

I also want you to imagine that you’re surrounded by people who you cannot communicate with vocally. They keep touching you and putting things on your body that make it really hurt and making you run around while you’re in pain. You now feel snappy and defensive about even the lightest touch as you know what might be coming, you are trying to communicate your pain to these people by pulling angry faces, trying to kick and snapping your teeth, they do not seem to understand and continue anyway.

A new person comes in and goes to touch your shoulder, you pull an angry face and he immediately starts violently flapping a flag on a stick in your face, you run backwards in fear but you can’t get away properly because he has you on a rope, he doesn’t let up, you eventually stop pulling the angry face and the attack stops. This is repeated again and again until the new person is able to touch you on your sore back and neck and you don’t react at all. You stand there with an empty smile on your face, as that is what you have been taught you have to do to get the horrible flag to stop. Everyone seems really happy with you now, you are still in pain, you no longer try to communicate.

This is what is happening again and again when we treat our horse’s communication as a stand-alone behavioural problem to be fixed. This is punishment and this is suppressing behaviour, it is not treating the cause, it is shutting the horse down and it is a horrible way to treat anyone.

People often justify this sort of treatment as necessary for “safety”. Horses that bite are so dangerous and it will escalate! When you start to look at pulling faces and biting as communication, you can see that it won’t escalate if you actually listen to what they’re saying and help them. If you continue to make stupid choices then yes the horse may have to shout louder at you to try and get you to stop.

Even if the horse isn’t in pain, a horse that is resorting to biting is highly stressed, we help them by addressing that, not by putting them in situations where they bite and telling them to shut the hell up or else. Nippiness in hand is a sign of stress, tension and frustration, it is not a bid to dominate you.

Sometimes I go out to horses with these issues and people are amazed their horse hasn’t bitten me as they have others before me. Its not magical, its not horse whispering its just listening and not feeling entitled to the horse’s space and body. Then the horse can start to relax around you, trust that you are going to listen and we can actually start to help them.

The industry is full of training like this marketed as ethical and good for the horse, its so hard to navigate when we are so indoctrinated into this idea that the only way to deal with horses is to apply pressure to them. There are so, so many other things to consider and most of it looks nothing like conventional training.

If your horse is pulling faces at you, they are desperately trying to communicate their discomfort to you, if you’re not sure what to do please reach out to someone who can help you figure out what’s going on, my inbox is always open. 🐴

LS Horsemanship

16/10/2025

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