Mills Consilient Horsemanship

08/24/2024

‘Pushing’ a horse who’s behind the vertical into your hand to get collection feels like trying to ‘push’ a wheelbarrow downhill. 😅

08/24/2024

PRIORITIZE POLL HEALTH

I could’ve chosen a more ‘ideal’ picture, but the truth is, this is where me and this mare are at right now, so it can be a teachable moment.

When we reach the threshold of her strength and coordination, or the duration with which she can elevate the base of her neck, she’ll start to drop her nose and curl up and go on the forehand a little, which you can see from the non-verticality of that foreleg.

For a lot of people, this might look ideal, because her nose is ‘tucked’ and she appears ‘round’, but she’s actually starting to roll over into my hand and roll her weight forward.

This also has to do with my brain space and attention span. Sometimes when I’m trying to keep track of legs, I forget to keep the poll up and open, and then things will get a little heavy.

Progress not perfection.

08/23/2024

Best horse brush!

I’ve been using this exact curry comb since I was a kid.

https://equineexchangestore.com/products/grooma-original-horse-pet-general-purpose-comb-671401?srsltid=AfmBOoogGEmZ2Dp3R39QAIqQ3DEqwtgL2nvfU0j0NCq8hyMGGmdqVRpg

08/22/2024

08/21/2024

Has anyone had any experience with sarcocystis fayeri/bertrami?
Different than the protozoa that causes EPM…

Pathogenes mission is to develop patent protected technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of parasitic diseases

08/21/2024

Respect is earned, and so is trust; we aren’t entitled to either.

08/20/2024

It’s not the leg that steps under in disengagement that’s the problem. The joints are made to do that.

It’s the leg that steps out to catch the horse if you’re going Mach 1 one or not letting them travel forward…

As a farrier, I saw an obvious correlation between horses who were getting regular, aggressive, disengagement for 5+ years, and blown out stifles and hocks.

08/19/2024

Reviewing old video makes me sad.

It’s not because I was a terrible rider. I still had good balance, good feel, good timing.
I was trying to be a really kind rider; but looking back, I can see how much I was blocking these horses… mentally, emotionally, physically, because I didn’t understand what they needed on a biomechanical level.

Horses are such physical beings.
And the way we relate to them is so physical.
We affect every aspect of their physical being.

If we don’t understand what they need, physically, if we think intention or kindness is enough, we fail them.

Now, I don’t want to discourage anyone, that if we don’t get it perfect, it’s the end of the world.

If we’re out there seeking balance and listening to feedback from the horse, and continually educating ourselves, we’re on the right path.

Keep going, don’t give up.

What I want to discourage us from doing is being careless, by thinking that intention and kindness are enough, or that if we just stay out of their way, they’ll figure out their own balance.

We’re always in their way. It’s just whether or not we’re in denial about it.

As well, staying out of their way isn’t really what they need, either. They need the mental, emotional, and physical balance of the herd. A healthy herd. We are the surrogate to that.

Looking back at these old videos I pulled up on my cloud, after seeing them pop up on Facebook memories, now that I have a lens where I’ve felt a better mental, emotional, and physical balance, I get a melancholy that can only be salved by getting out there and doing better with the horses I’m responsible for, now.

I know a few professionals who have felt such an overwhelm from this work, that they’ve had to take sabbaticals, or been tempted to quit altogether.

I get it. But please don’t do that. The horses need you.

In closing, I want to address something that we often hear in this work…

“IT GETS WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER.”

No.

I am seeing where, with horses in dysfunction who plateau, or even get worse in rehab, professionals are giving up on them, or professionals are giving up altogether, instead of challenging the approach they’re using.

True mental, emotional, and physical balance will ALWAYS improve the horse, even if, ultimately, they’re not completely rehabbable. So if things are getting worse, not better, just like with hoof trimming methods, or anything else, it may be time to step back from a methodology and get your bearings.

I’ve seen professionals pick up a method of hoof trimming, for example, where suddenly all their horses start getting worse, but they somehow are able to be convinced that they were doing it wrong before, and this is just a necessary transition to true balance.

Don’t fall for that BS.

08/19/2024

This is an interesting re-post.

I still agree with a lot of it… for instance, a stretched horse isn’t any more forehand than an inverted horse, but I see things I would do differently, now.

I touch on shoulder mobilizations in this piece, which have always been a huge part of my riding for western horses, but I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be doing them as much for the more English horses; I was riding them more forward-down-out.
But reading and re-reading some of the classical texts validated me, and I stopped second-guessing myself.

And now, since I’ve developed a better feel for verticality and collection, I’m no longer fooled by the false lift of the back when you overstretch the supraspinous ligament.

Prioritizing spinal integrity and stabilization, you still have to take a lot of stretch breaks, but the horses initiate them organically.

A lot of us are taught that you start a horse out in a longer frame, on the forehand, and it takes years to gradually rock that back into collection.

But I’ve learned most horses are capable of accessing quality collection, even if just for short bursts, from the very beginning.

As well, they need and want to access this part of themselves. This ‘higher self’ is their true self, often knocked down by the fear or ignorance of humans.

So rather than staying in a longer, on-the-forehand frame for years, we can actually take them up and down the scale of collection in a singular session, like a musician.

The only difference being, the duration with which they can hold collection.

Looking back, this horse was definitely capable of short bursts of collection, and they would’ve done her a lot of good mentally, emotionally, and physically…

08/19/2024

‘Hunting the slack’ in lunging is an acquired skill.
Honestly, supporting with a corner and spiraling in and out is about the best fix.
This horse had kissing spine, though, and taught me a lot about backing off of ‘tough cases.’

(2024 addendum:
As my knowledge evolves, I am able to see that the answer for this is NOT teaching the horse to simply abduct the near forelimb, which takes their limbs out of verticality and throws them onto their shoulder, which we can actually see in one of the pictures, but to focus on adduction of the FAR forelimb towards the handler, so it can, from verticality, support a healthy abduction as needed.
The cure for that can be timing, or simply adding an outside line to keep the outer fore and hind limbs from abducting, which is actually what I ended up doing with this horse at the time.

Unfortunately, dysfunctional abduction of the outside limbs is a common symptom of overuse of the inside lateral aids, which we see in leading, lunging, and most riding.
Knowing when and how to use our outside lateral aids, and our inside diagonal aids, and our outside diagonal aids is key to avoiding creating dysfunctional movement patterns, which we often blame on the horse.)

08/18/2024

I don’t know what to call the classical in-hand position where you walk backwards facing the horse, so I call it ‘Aircraft Marshaller’ position, because that’s kind of what it reminds me of. 😅

08/18/2024

Oh boy, I’ve gotten a lot of questions here recently, and I can barely keep up with answering everyone individually.

As much as I’d love to write an essay, I don’t have time for it at the moment, because I’m supposed to be videoing for clients. 😅

So I’m just going to take a few minutes to try to compartmentalize a few things and answer them rapid-fire.

Good practice for me getting feel into words and being more succinct. Makes me a better teacher.

So, first…

“When you say diagonal half halt, what aids do you mean?”

Whatever aids create a diagonal rebalancing effect, forelimb to opposite hindlimb.

This could be verbal, visual, or tactile; non-escalating or escalating.

If escalating, ideally, it’s coming from a fixed point, where the horse can control the escalation and de-escalation themselves.

Riding well means being able to simulate that ‘fixed point’ for the horse.

If referring to a particular rein effect, ‘diagonal half-halt,’ or ‘diagonal shoulder rebalancing,’ my own terminology, not his, I mean what Kerbrech called ‘la rêne d'appui,’ which he compared to the ‘indirect rein of opposition in front of the withers.’

Though he didn’t touch on specific limb effects, I’ve observed that this rein effect adducts the diagonal pair of inside fore/outside hind, without necessarily abducting and de-collecting the opposite diagonal pair.

The rebalancing needed for this paired adduction gives us a language with the horse to communicate towards what we might think of as ‘unilateral engagement/elevation,’ which develops into ‘bilateral engagement/elevation,’ i.e., collection.

A half-halt is simply a mental, emotional, and physical rebound and rebalancing off a boundary we set.

A half-halt isn’t something we have to teach the horse to do, it’s something any synchronous herd-mate does naturally.

The trick is mastering a common language to communicate it.

Unfortunately, most leading is essentially anti-half-halting… continually pulling the horse down across a diagonal into us, and most steering under saddle is no better.

Here we have a horse who no longer needs a diagonal half-halt, just a reference point for where I need him in relation to me in haunches-in, because he half-halts himself accordingly.

08/16/2024

Riding by ‘Feel’ only works if you know what balance is supposed to feel like.

A great example… connecting the reins to the feet.

You can have the best timing in the world, but if you only know how to swing a limb out, but not when and how to swing it back into center, you’ll spend a lifetime unintentionally de-collecting your horse.