Hannah Morgan Horsemanship

12/13/2024

It's here 🎉🎉

My e-book "A Trimmer's Guide to Horse Training" is going live today. If you follow the blog, you can read the whole first chapter for free right now!

https://hmhorsemanship.com/products

https://hmhorsemanship.com/blog-post-modern-horsemanship

12/09/2024

When they're aging in reverse 😍

Jack is back on the feed, because he just keeps blowing me away with his capacity for improvement! This older guy had pretty low and under-run heels when I first started trimming him in February of this year. Less than a year later, we've gotten those heels under him, and it's created a cascade of changes in his whole body! The flaring on the lateral heel is particularly interesting, since I didn't ever really do anything to try to "fix it". I gave him a balanced trim every four weeks, his owner got him in some padded hoof boots, and he did the rest! It's a good potential example of how excess unworn hoof tissue or an imbalanced trim can create leverage which leads to distortion over time.

I'm excited to see the changes in his body too. You can see a bit of a contraction along his top line in March. He's using tension in his neck to hold himself up. He tended to stand "over" his front legs, something I see a lot accompanying long toes. In the recent photo, he just looks so much softer. His front legs fall perpendicular to his body, the dip in front of his wither has softened significantly, and his wither has come up a bit so that he looks more squarely balanced over his limbs instead of pushed out over the front. You'd hardly know he was a senior citizen!

12/06/2024

This week on the blog, my hot take on choosing a boarding barn!

Also, this is the LAST WEEK to preorder my book "A Trimmer's Guide to Horse Training" at the discounted price before I publish it on Dec 13. Next Friday my blog subscribers will get to see the whole first chapter 👀

https://hmhorsemanship.com/blog-post-modern-horsemanship

11/25/2024

Post-Modern Horsemanship..

I struggle with social media. I hate being subject to the algorithm, I hate seeing peers lose access to their accounts and lose years of hard work. So I'm going old-school! I'm moving my writings over to a blog format, to better control my own content and create a space that feels a little more manageable. I'll still be here letting you know what's happening, but if you enjoy my more in-depth writing it'll be on the blog!

It's free, I only ask that you sign up. I've called it "post-modern horsemanship", because that's what my work feels like now. I've pursued so much education and have learned a staggering amount about horses and horsemanship. Given what I know now, the big question looming in my mind is...what now? Where do we go from here? How do we change the industry in a way that honors horses and our work with them?

This blog is going to be grittier and more raw than my social media page has been. I want to tell real stories from this industry, and let you in on the big questions I have as a professional in this space. If you've followed my work, or appreciate my thoughts, I invite you to come with me!


https://hmhorsemanship.com/blog-post-modern-horsemanship

11/18/2024

I have started doing some consulting with other hoof care pros, and it has been so much fun! Here's what Erin had to say after consults with two of her clients. If you're looking for a second opinion, or you're a pro who would like another set of eyes, reach out! I love taking the whole horse into consideration on tough cases. I travel within ~ 1 hour of Brevard NC, and have some remote options in the works.

11/11/2024

A happy update for this OTTB rescue who’s had me scratching my head for the last 8 months. The first photo was our first appointment. This was perhaps the most distorted foot I’d seen yet, and the last 8 months I’ve thrown everything I know into getting this mare to hold onto her foot. As you can see in the second photo, it seemed like her hoof just crumbled no matter what I did. I put her back into glue ones that first day, then we transitioned her to cloud boots, and there was a cycle in casts as well. She was on a forage based diet.

What I *didn’t* think of when I looked at this horse was cushings. Her brilliant owner caught it, and sure enough she tested positive. I’m kicking myself in hindsight sight of course, but you can bet it’s an oversight I won’t make again! Don’t underestimate the role of underlying metabolic issues in hoof health. That diagnosis and corresponding treatment is the change from the June photo to the November one. Not much else changed. Hoof tissue has an incredible ability to heal given the opportunity. This mare has taught me so much, and I’m relieved she’s feeling better.

10/29/2024

Exciting news!!

This horse-first guide to hoof care and handling has been my passion project for over a year now. I see many horses struggle with hoof care, and I've been able to use my behavioral and physiological knowledge of the horse to help create lasting change. I want gentle, efficient handling to be accessible to every horse, owner and hoof care pro!

This guide is nearly 60 pages long, packed with training philosophy, practical techniques, exercises to help horse and practitioner succeed in hoof care, and case studies from my own trimming practice.

It's available for the discounted pre-order price of $39 until I publish it on December 13. Get it here:

https://hmhorsemanship.com/products/p/a-trimmers-guide-to-horse-training

10/15/2024

I love continuing education. It would be easy to teach a particular method, but I'm so glad I found a teacher in Ida who's guiding principle is the horse. Every foot, every trim tailored to the body it belongs to and informed by anatomy. Even if you have no aspirations to become a hoof care pro, do yourself and your horses a favor and learn from her if you get the chance. As always, it was a refreshing and inspiring weekend!

10/02/2024

I'm heartbroken for my corner of the world. I'm ok, everyone I know is ok. We got incredibly lucky that we were spared the devastation of nearby communities we know and love. Climate change is real. Community is life. People deserve support when they need it. Especially now, but every day too.

09/28/2024

Let's talk about stress, baby (Part I)

We'll start with the kind of stress that the horse's body is actually physiologically adapted to cope with. A horse in a herd is alerted to a threat. The nervous system processes the threat and induces a stress response that can include increased respiration, blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature. The herd flees, and puts a comfortable distance between themselves and the threat. One horse goes back to eating, then another. This kind of short, intense burst of stress is exactly what the horse is built to handle. In the wild, a horse is also capable of "closing the stress loop" by having the freedom of movement to allow to body and nervous system to move through stress.

So how is the stress response of our domesticated horses different than the example above? Chronic stress and acute stress take two different biological pathways to the adrenals, and the processes are modulated by different hormones. In that way, chronic stress is physiologically different than acute stress. Prolonged activation of that chronic pathway is what can lead to long term health consequences for our horses. We know that long term over-production of cortisol in particular can cause "aggressive behavior, decreased growth and reproductive capability, inhibition of the immune system, increased risk of gastric ulceration, colic and diarrhea" (Rutgers).

We should include that even measuring cortisol in our horses, though, is not always a reliable indicator of chronic stress. Studies have found that abnormally low cortisol levels could also be an indicator of stress and welfare issues. It could be that horses exposed to chronic, prolonged levels of stress experience a breakdown in the stress response system as a whole. In theory this leaves the horse less capable of coping with even the acute stress it's body is better equipped to deal with.

So why does all this matter? It matters for welfare, but it also has huge implications for our goals with horses. In the next part of this series, we'll talk about how a horse's stress impacts the expectations we have for them, and why prevention (as usual) is so critical!

09/25/2024

Breath (Exercise physiology part III)

We talked about how lactic acidosis and the resulting effects are triggered by a lack of oxygen in the tissues. Well, breathing is the way the oxygen gets there! So let's talk about breath, and why it's just as important for our horses as it is for us.

If you're an athlete you probably already know all this. For me, this has been a more specific education about things I'd always heard, but had never been explained to me. We know it's important to breathe. But do we really know if our horses are breathing? I'll tell you, I see a whole lot of horses that have abnormal breathing patterns for all kinds of reasons. This can have many effects on the horse (and humans too!) but for the purposes of this post, we'll focus on the metabolic ones.

One of the dysfunctional breathing patterns I see is over-breathing, in which the horse's respiratory rate is increased because they're habitually breathing shallow, or trying to compensate for periods of holding their breath during certain activities. It makes sense that this might be triggered by cinching up a girth, or carrying a rider. This is why it's important to know if our horses are breathing in a healthy way, so we can address it and keep it from becoming a pattern. Learn to take your horse's respiratory rate- you can look at the rise and fall of the flank, or hold a hand in front of the nostril to feel the expiration. If your horse is taking more than 15 breaths/min at rest, they may be "over-breathing". So what does that mean for metabolic health and fitness?

Over-breathing, akin to hyperventilation, is associated with reduced CO2 in the in the blood, which in turn results in lower oxygen available as well. If you read part I, you already know that lower oxygenation in the blood lowers the anaerobic threshold (anaerobic metabolism begins sooner at a lower heart rate, lactic acid begins to build up more quickly). Put this all together, and we can connect the idea that horses with dysfunctional breathing won't have the same potential for performance and fitness gains. Again, this makes sense but actually understanding the physiology behind it has been fascinating to me!

09/22/2024

Stress and anaerobic metabolism (Exercise physiology part II)

In the last post we talked about how anaerobic metabolism can lead to lactic acidosis and the affects that might have on the horse. Another important piece of this puzzle, because we are dealing with domesticated creatures, is stress and it's role in exercise physiology.

The point at which the body switches to anaerobic metabolism is referred to as the "anaerobic threshold", and as I said in the previous post, we can estimate that at baseline fitness that threshold exists just at the transition from trot to canter. But if we are more exact about it, that threshold is actually correlated with heart rate. Above a certain heart rate, anaerobic metabolism begins. One of the known affects of stress, especially the prolonged type of stress our horses face in a human world, is an increased resting heart rate. So it stands to reason that a horse experiencing stress would have a lower anaerobic threshold. It would take less exercise to induce acidosis.

So, we can draw the conclusion that mitigating stress in our horse's lives has a direct impact on their ability to gain and maintain fitness! This is something I think we inherently know, but to have this concrete connection was huge for me. A horse living in a herd environment, with a species appropriate diet and adequate turnout will actually be physiologically predisposed to gain fitness faster and be less prone to lactic acidosis (via a higher anaerobic threshold). As good a case as any for performance horses! In the last part of this little mini series, we're moving on to breathing and it's vital role in this puzzle.

09/20/2024

DYSFUNCTION AND GASLIGHTING, REBRANDED

I’m going to be blunt…

If someone asks you to put your horse in a position of imbalance, and when the horse resists, that person says it’s OK, because things have to get ugly before they get better, or that’s where their weakness is, I don’t care who they are, that’s BS.

When the horse is giving us feedback that they don’t feel physically balanced or safe with what’s happening, no one should be able to convince us to disregard that.

We are our horse’s advocates, and if we can’t stand up and give them a voice, no one will.

We really have to stop being naïve.

The trainers who over-supple horses in the neck and convince riders they need to work through that physical brace, the guru trainers who overface horses and convince owners they need to work through that emotional brace, a lot of us as starting see how misguided that is, but that needs to extend to professionals in hoofcare and bodywork and rehab as well.

Dysfunction and gaslighting don’t just happen in the training world.

Pain is a survival mechanism. It tells us when harm is occurring

So is brace.

So no, your horse should not go through a painful hoofcare transition, and your horse should not experience pain from bodywork, or be expected not to brace when we unbalance them.

We see this all the time with hindquarter disengagement…

Horses brace, and resist, because it’s unbalanced, and it’s terrible for their joints to do repeatedly or at speed.

I’ve come to see that we do something similar to the shoulders, almost a form of ‘forequarter disengagement,’ where horses are forced to step out and ‘catch’ themselves.

This often goes hand-in-hand with over-suppling of the neck from side to side, but I also see it being done with lateral work or rehab work as well.

Anyone can throw a horse out of balance, and disengage their front or hind end, but it takes a lot of skill to guide them while keeping their physical and emotional integrity intact instead.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a threshold we have to approach in order to see and raise the level of the horse’s balance and development, and we have to work that fine line, so there will be moments where we tip into physical or emotional brace.

That’s the beauty of the French work I’ve been studying…

Not that we’re so afraid of imbalance that we never tip into it, but that we know no good work can be done there.

We have to retreat, reapproach, and I think this can be applied to the horsemanship side as well, the mental and emotional.

And overall, things should look better as we go, not just in the session, but day-to-day, and as we progress.

If things are getting worse, we need to slam on the brakes and reassess.

I’ll end by saying, we can’t rely on good intentions to inform us. We HAVE to listen to the horse.

A trainer, a farrier, a vet, a chiropractor or bodyworker, anyone can have the best intentions, and be a wonderful person, and be completely convinced that what they’re doing is what’s best for the horse in that moment, and have an incredibly convincing and well-researched set of beliefs, and still cause harm.

The buck has to stop with us.

We can’t just listen to the horse.

We also have to be willing to speak for them.

09/19/2024

What is lactic acidosis, and why should you care? (Exercise physiology part I)

I have begun to scratch the surface of exercise physiology and y'all, my mind is getting blown. I'm making so many connections and it provides so much context for some of the observations I've had about horses. This is the first part of a series, and I'm starting with lactic acidosis and it's implications.

Lactic acidosis occurs when lactic acid builds up in the body as a result of production surpassing clearance. Typically this is caused by impaired oxygenation in the tissues. When acidosis occurs, it lowers the pH in the bloodstream, causes stiffness in muscles and can affect neural function.

Lactic acid begins to accumulate during anaerobic metabolism, and in horses it can build up in as little as two minutes! The horse's spleen has a brilliant short term solution for this- in times of oxygen deficiency and anaerobic metabolism, the spleen can contract and release 40-50% more red blood cells into the body (red blood cells carry oxygen). Incredible adaptation!

Now imagine a horse in the wild. High intensity exercise would be used mostly to evade predation, and it would probably be rare that a horse would need to sustain it for more than two minutes. At that point they've either outrun the predator or succumbed. Then think about the exercise protocols for domesticated horses. Are we limiting high intensity anaerobic exercise to two minutes? Hardly! If we estimate that anaerobic metabolism begins, in a horse with baseline fitness, at the transition from trot to canter, how many of us are pushing our horses into anaerobic metabolism without realizing it? What does this mean for the horse?

It means sore muscles, an overworked spleen (hello racehorses), and possible neurological dysfunction. What can we do about it? Take more breaks! Build fitness slowly and in a species-appropriate way that perhaps fits more with our horses physiology. Limit canter or lope work to less than two minutes in any situation you can. In the next few posts, we'll talk about how breathing, chronic stress and fitness affect this metabolic system.

09/16/2024

Vigilance isn't inherently bad.

Sometimes a student will ask "should I let my horse look away?" and it's always a weird feeling question to me. It must be some relic of the dominance based, human centric type of horsemanship that I hope ends up in the past. Like so many other behaviors our horses present to us, vigilance is communication. It makes me realize how many "training philosophies" are comprised of suppressing communication, rather than interpreting it. No wonder we think horses do things "out of nowhere" and unpredictably.

Instead of suppressing or ignoring or deeming inconvenient, what if we took this feedback for what it is, and made space for it? What is the context of the vigilance? It's a window to the nervous system if we're open to the nuances. A horse can look away calmly, and maintain awareness of the handler and the space around them. A horse can also look away and leave their body and have no awareness of the space around them. Arousal level, duration, consistency- this is all information we need! Hyper-vigilance is less a standalone behavioral issue and more of a bellwether of wider nervous system health.

A horse that isn't allowed to shift attention off the handler is not part of a conversation. I play a lot with attention and directing it, but I try always to make suggestions instead of demands. I give the horse time to tell me what I need to know, so that I can ask an appropriate question. Ultimately yes, you should let your horse look away. See what happens next. Observe the manner in which they do so. It could be the subtlest way of telling you they need a break, or that what you're asking is too difficult, or that it hurts to be present in their body.

We have to start listening. This is just one example of how simply trying to "fix" a behavior without being curious about the underlying cause is missing the mark for our horses. We lose nothing by taking in information, but we lose an awful lot if we don't.

09/15/2024

Jec Ballou on The Humble Hoof podcast- “Hill work is the Wild West” 👏👏👏

Hill work considerations!

Working your horse on hills is a great way to build stamina and muscle, and it is often prescribed for strengthening and rehab. However, it comes with some pretty significant caveats! If you start with a hill that is too steep for your horse's ability, it can send them right back into tension and compensation, strengthening dysfunction rather than helping. I've done my best to provide a visual example here to help train your eye.

In the top photos, we can see the effect the grade of this hill has on the horse. She must invert her posture so that she can use the underside of her neck to help propel her uphill. She doesn't have the strength or balance to mobilize her forelimbs, so she is landing toe-first and loading the limb before it's fully extended. Her weight bearing forelimb has also come quite far under her trunk in an attempt to keep her balance. In the hind end we see the effects of this as less engagement of the hind limbs. If the whole point of hill work is to encourage engagement of the hind end, we're not reaching the goal by working like this. This kind of hill work will do more harm than good.

On the gentler slope, we can see that she is able to keep her top line open and stretch through her neck (because she isn't actively using her neck to pull herself uphill). She is able to create full extension in the front limb before loading it, and her weight bearing limb is much more centered under her mass. We also see far more hind end engagement. Because the psoas muscles are able to access more relaxation, there is more freedom of movement behind, also facilitated by the fact that she does not need to brace her neck for balance on this gentler slope. This is a far more balanced posture, allowing her to access more self carriage and postural muscles!

The gentler slope might look deceptively flat (it's not, I promise!), but it's important to listen to what your horse is showing you they can handle, and what level of incline is appropriate to their current fitness level. If we ask them to reach beyond their abilities, they will likely do so by sacrificing the thing we are trying to build in the first place.

09/11/2024

The next level of understanding.

I've been making a real effort this year to immerse myself in continuing education and expanding my understanding of topics that keep proving themselves worthy of diving into. I'm ready to start sharing some of it! I've been hibernating on social media for a while, but I'm back to feeling like I have something to say.

This space is changing and growing and I've got more offerings in the works. If you support me, or have found value in my work, or are curious about what I'm teaching, stay tuned 👀

08/22/2024

is the real deal y'all! Whether you're new to positive reinforcement, troubleshooting, or want to add to what you already know, this course is a must. It's concise and beautifully simple but also gives you what you need to safely and confidently introduce food rewards to horses. Loved it!

https://www.megeades.com/