24/01/2026
My sadness about the human world that horses have to live in.
I’m very lucky to work with dedicated clients who I’ve known for years. Watching the relationships with their young horses develop into a trusting bond as they grow older together. It’s a special and privileged position, to be the person that’s helping to bring awareness to their friendship.
My struggle which I want to talk about is firstly that I don’t see myself as a ‘trainer’ this is because so often the horse doesn’t need training, it’s the human that needs to become more aware of what the horse needs. If a horse doesn’t have their emotional needs met, they struggle. I usually get a phone call when someone is struggling with their horse but the problem they bring to me is so far from what really went wrong for the horse, when the horse’s needs weren’t met sometimes years prior. My heart sinks as I can see they have learnt to survive, they’re hardened up, they’ve blocked us out, they don’t want to look at us unless we have food, they’re upset in the herd, they can’t sleep in their stable. This hardness that I see in the horse is so far from the beautiful essence of horse that was present when they were born. The reason they changed was because of the difficult human world they live in.
My first employer was a man called Tom Barnes, he came from a show jumping family. He had won the Puissance at the London International Horse Show Olympia when he was in the junior team. The only reason I know this is because he had etched a line in the yard wall to represent how high that winning jump fence was. It was only by asking his wife what the line was that she then told me, otherwise to this day I’d have never realised. Tom was before the days of the internet and mobile phones. He was a humble man who really was only concerned by what his horses thought of him. I was 14 years of age when he took me on as a Saturday girl to help at his yard. We were not allowed the radio on while we were with the horses. Tom barely spoke. He was though always aware of where I was in the yard and what was happening amongst the horses. Most of Tom’s answers to my questions were “The horse will teach you”. Being in Tom’s environment taught me to listen to horses, observe not just look at horses and to work things out for myself, to tune up my intuition and notice what Tom was doing that was working well for his horses.
At 46 years of age, 42 years since I first rode a horse, 30 years since I started working with horses full time. When I reflect back over my life so far with horses, I believe the biggest favour we can do for our horses is, wait for it!! To STOP TALKING. If we stop talking we are more likely to start listening and this opens the door to becoming more aware for our horse’s sake. I go into some livery yards where the radio is blaring, people are shouting and horse are calling. There is literally no space for the horse to relax. The entire environment is vibrating and the horse’s nervous systems can’t let down. The horse sees being around us as an unsafe zone when we participate in these noisy environments. I hear people shouting over the radio. A horse’s language is through feel, all of this noise is stressful to most any animal.
I believe that social media is encouraging us to think we can get instant changes when we see 30 seconds clips of how to achieve something with a horse. Most of these clips give us ideas of things we can ‘do’ less so are there clips helping our relationships with horses regards how we need to ‘be’. In reality to help our horses it is us who has to first change and the first step is to observe and listen your horse. We can only do this when we stop talking and start listening to cultivate awareness in ourselves, for our horse’s sake.
Your horse is your teacher, you are the student and a trainer you employ is really just the interpreter between you. The only one who has all the answers is your horse, if you’re quiet enough to hear them.
