09/05/2025
When I say,” my horse comes first”….. what does that mean to you?
A HORSE PERSON?
I’m going to start with a bold statement…
A horse person is not an event rider, dressage trainer, team roper, barrel racer, carriage driver, racing trainer, ranch rider, horsemanship trainer, or any other horse pursuit you can think of.
I’ve been around horses since I was a kid. I began by working weekends at a riding school in Sydney, cleaning stables, yards, and feeding horses. And here I am now making a living as a full-time horsemanship clinician, travelling around Australia, the USA, and Europe.
When I was a kid, my love of horses focused on taking them to shows and winning ribbons. I loved winning. But by my late teens or early twenties, I realised something was wrong. It happened when I came home from a show with no ribbons. I felt cranky about it. It eventually hit me that for it to be a good day, I had to come home with at least one ribbon. I couldn’t go to a show, win nothing and still have a fun day just being with my horse. Something was wrong. That realisation changed my life.
Since then, I have spent my life working to be a better horse person and less interested in learning to be a better dressage rider, show jumper, polo player, team roper, etc.
This means that if you want to learn the nuances of teaching a brilliant piaffe, I am not the teacher for you. But if you want to get your horse to the stage where it is ready to offer a brilliant piaffe, trainers like me are the ones who will get you and your horse there.
Here’s why.
I’m sure most of you are aware of the publicity surrounding many top-level Olympic riders. There has been a huge outcry about the abusive and brutal training methods and equipment that has been reported. Why do these trainers use these methods? I believe it is because, like the teenage version of me, their love of horses is focused on their love of winning. Plus, being professionals, they are under the pressure of needing to make a living and pay bills. But, essentially, they are making their training about them and their success.
I believe it is the focus on winning that corrupts many people’s thinking that a problem with their horse is an obedience problem. When a horse approaches a jump with the brakes on, most riders see the issue as a lack of forward and disobedience to the leg. They then think the obvious solution is a lot more leg, spur, and crop to instill enough anxiety that their horse dare not stop at the jump. Very few take the time to analyse the cause of the problem. Most just resort to stronger aids to overcome what they think is the problem (disobedience).
But a good horsemanship trainer will look inside a horse’s thoughts and won’t see a horse with a disobedience issue. A horse person who is acutely aware of a horse's thoughts and emotions sees the problem that leads to the horse wanting to stop. A horsemanship rider will have a conversation with a horse about what the problem is and ask the horse how they can help.
I know it seems like I am picking on competition riders. Obviously, there are plenty of serious competitors who are first class trainers. Conversely, not all horsemanship trainers are good horse people. Labels are not the issue.
I recently watched a video of a horsemanship trainer teaching a client’s horse to stand still while he attempted to mount. When the horse showed signs of fidgeting, the trainer bent the horse’s neck with the inside rein and drove the hindquarters to disengage. He saw the movement as a sign of disobedience and was determined to make moving feel horrible to the horse. In my view, a good horse person would have identified the cause of the movement and made standing still feel good, rather than moving feel bad.
In another example, I saw a video of a trainer consulting with an animal communicator about why his young horse bucked when asked to trot. The consultation was a Zoom call. The horse was in a round pen and very agitated. While the communicator diagnosed spinal problems from a remote location, both the communicator and the trainer missed the fact that the agitation of the horse was probably due to the obvious separation anxiety it was experiencing. I was stunned they missed that. It was so obvious how the horse always stopped and called on the side of the round pen nearest where other horses were yarded. To me, this is another example where the horse was not consulted. The diagnosis and the treatment for the problem were a matter for the trainer and the animal communicator. Even though the horse had plenty to say it was largely ignored.
If you were to ask me what am I good at and what am I not good at here is what I would say.
I’m not good at teaching horses the nuances needed to turn a good dressage horse into a brilliant dressage horse, or a good cutting horse into an amazing cutting horse. Being brilliant at training performance horses is not my thing.
I’m not the best teacher of people. I think I’m sometimes considered blunt by new students. I try to never be rude or embarrass people. However, I am guilty of offering insights that some find “undiplomatic”. (Eg., it was once pointed out that “You can’t tell somebody their horse is not showing an interest in them). I try to be better all the time, but my teaching style is not for everybody.
But here is what I believe I am good at.
My biggest strength is in seeing and understanding the inside of a horse. Everything a horse does means something. Nothing means nothing. I see one horse with dilation of the left nostril, more weight on the right hind foot, relaxation of its p***s, staring ahead in the distance, right ear scanning, slow intermittent blink reflex. I see it all and in a moment I know what question to ask that horse to begin a conversation. And I know it is a different question from the one I should ask of a horse showing me all those signs, except its right nostril is the slightly more flared one instead of its left.
I believe this ability to see the inside and outside of a horse allows me to see the problem for what it is and to start a conversation with a horse to influence its thoughts and feelings. This is my one superpower 😄.
It’s not that I don’t make a mistakes. I do. There is hardly a day I don’t make a mistake. Sometimes there are horses I really struggle to have a back and forth conversation with. But I am doing better than I did last year and next year I will be doing better than I am this year.
My next strongest asset as a trainer and teacher is my ability to critically think through a problem. I don’t have a file cabinet full of methods. I look at each horse, each situation, and each moment, with an analytical eye and try not to make assumptions about a horse’s behaviour. A big part of my teaching is helping people become critical thinkers, like Sherlock Holmes, rather than just copycats of me or any trainer.
When we make our training about what we can get a horse to do for us, we miss out on the best part of being a horse person. When we make running barrels about how fast we can go or when we make performing a canter half-pass about what score a judge gives us or how high we can jump a six-bar, we miss out on the best part of being a horse person. But when we make it about how a horse feels and how we best prepare their thoughts and emotions for the barrels, canter half-pass, or six-bar, we know we have evolved into a person worthy of the title “horse person”.
Photo: Notice the blood from the use of spurs. In my book, not a horse person.
