09/12/2024
Owners can be incredibly intuitive.
Don’t get me wrong, educating ourselves about biomechanics, and stress signals, and all the other minutia, is great, but often, it’s just putting a name to or validating what we already know to be true.
In this case, a new horse being perfectly broke and obedient, but the owner just feeling like something was ‘off,’ not quite right.
Look at that triangle eye!
This is a very worried, skeptical, insecure horse, and she was really good at hiding it, but the owner was subconsciously picking up on tension around the eye, tension around the nose, blink rate, breathing rate, muscular tension, etc.
And the advice of, “Just go ride,” or “More wet saddle blankets,” didn’t feel right.
I love it when owners trust their gut and listen to the horse.
We don’t want a horse to be insecure because they’re afraid they’re going to get the answer wrong.
We want them to be cocky, that they know exactly what the answer is.
That’s empowering.
Taking a simple task like upward and downward walk transitions on the lunge, with the fence supporting, done very slowly and mindfully, repeated until the horse starts to be able to read you, can be incredibly transformative.
That was a huge relief to this horse, that she could take her time to think about what the human was asking before answering, and that she could trust herself to read the human, and trust the human to be consistent and predictable, and that even an escalation for clarity was never going to be scary.
Sometimes horses don’t need you to take the pressure off, they need you to put the pressure on, so that they finally know how to navigate it, and breathe a sigh of relief, literally.
Then just spending time ‘being with,’ while the humans discuss things, that’s huge.
Being able to process without being interacted with, been able to step out of training mode, some horses have never experienced that.
This mare had some huge releases the owner has never seen before… successive yawns, sneezes, inner eyelid blinks, and some spontaneous stretches, where she even got a huge neck pop.
It was really neat to see her do her own ‘bodywork.’
So the next time you feel something is off, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, trust your gut.
No one knows your horse better than you do.
