17/12/2025
Behaviour change is often mistaken for problem-solving. A horse shows us that something is hard, uncomfortable, or painful, and our instinct is to train the behaviour away. Teach them to stand. To tolerate. To cope. Behaviour is the thing to fix. Very often, nothing underneath has changed. The horse’s experience remains the same. We've added something that makes the behaviour we want to see more likely. Dig a hole and bury the behaviour you didn't like.
This approach is common, trainers are rewarded for it. If the behaviour stops, the case is resolved. The horse seems easier to handle. The client is reassured. The social media post is a success. From the outside, it appears to be effective training. But quiet behaviour is not the same as a problem solved. More often, it means the horse has learned that their voice will not be heard.
Training stand without asking why standing is hard. Loading practice instead of exploring what makes the trailer experience so difficult. Clicker training instead of checking for pain. The difficulty is this works, at least in the short term. It produces a horse who is compliant, predictable, and outwardly calm. For professionals, that outcome is strongly reinforcing. Nobody asks whether the horse feels safer. They only ask whether the horse is manageable. Easy. Willing. Biddable.
There is also a cultural layer. When a horse shows discomfort or resistance, someone will “gentle” them, and sort the behaviour out. This is framed as confidence, calm authority, or experience. In practice, it means overriding communication. The horse is saying no but the response is to prove that the human can make the behaviour stop anyway.
This approach is still widely admired. It makes my job, and that of the trainers I support, harder. It's so much easier to teach the horse some ''manners'' than to look at the function of behaviour. We all need to see behaviour as information, not inconvenience, and to resist silencing it before understanding it.
Ethical training requires us to accept answers from the horse that may be inconvenient for us. When we stop papering over the cracks, training becomes less about making behaviour disappear and more about changing the conditions that produced it. That work is slower, quieter, and less immediately impressive. It doesn't not always deliver a convenient “before and after” for social media. But it is the difference between a horse who endures their life and one who can participate in it.
For professional trainers, this matters. We are called in when behaviour has become inconvenient. The pressure is on us to make the horse ''workable'' again, to smooth things over. But if our skill begins and ends with making behaviour disappear, we are not solving problems. We are just managing optics. Ethical training asks more of us. It asks us to say when something is not ready to be trained, because the conditions for learning are not met.
The only way we can change the broader scene around equestrianism is to be honest; until we pay attention to what the horse is telling us, nothing will really change.
