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Reverence Equine

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Reverence Equine

Quality-focused horsemanship training, thoughts and teachings for both horse and rider from Abbie Senesac Lopez. Please reach out for more info.
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Lessons - in person in VT, northern NY and southern NH - and virtual, are available.

08/15/2024

You know that feeling, the one you get when you can sense someone you know and love starting to wander into territory - maybe it's politics, religion, strong moral opinions - that you don't get fuzzy feelings about entering? It's that little piece of our conscious in the back of our brains going "Don't go there! Don't engage! Abort! Abort!"

That feeling is about you knowing - before the conversation has even begun - that you won't be heard. You don't need to agree with someone to remain cordial. You don't have to like what they have to say. You can even disagree vehemently with them and still have a good relationship.

You just need to know that they'll handle your thoughts with care. You need to know that you can feel safe displaying stubbornness, ignorance, heck maybe even a little bit of closeted bigotry because hey, you're still learning how to undo what society/your upbringing taught you. You need to know that the other person not only recognizes your worth as a human being but values you enough to offer you your dignity back when you show ignorance and display humility when it is they who have been led astray.

You need to know you can be authentic.

But in these scenarios you recognize immediately that you can't, and that's when you dig in deep for a bitter fight or entirely sidestep and frantically distract and divert and redirect.

THIS is where that feeling comes from. It's the one that is telling you that no matter how much this person cares about you, they can't truly see or accept you.

This lack of ability to connect seems more common than uncommon. It is part of why I believe so many of us struggle with navigating our responses to horse behavior. What do we do when our horses present us with something real, something intense, something that makes our insides churn or our heart pound?

We tend to either dig in deep or entirely sidestep.

We either feel the stab of anger flowing through us and start to fight the with the horse or we go into passive survival mode and avoid any level of confrontation.

The problem is neither option ends well. If we fight we erode trust. If we retreat we become unable to show them that perhaps there's another way, maybe even a better way. We don't want to punish them for their ideas, we just want them to give us the courtesy of considering ours.

So you can either cultivate a relationship with your horse where you allow him to speak authentically and offer him the dignity of truly listening when he does, or you can require him to simply absorb the fact that you aren't willing to accept a truth different from the one you hold so dear.

The reward for the former is one of the most authentic relationships you will ever have in your life - "the bond" that so many of us are seeking with our horses. The punishment for the latter is him knowing that even if he wants so badly to trust in you, he can't.

I don't think the vast majority of us try to instill this in our horses and yet so many of us do because we just don't know better. We don't know better because we can probably count on less than one hand the number of relationships we have where we can be authentic on that level. We haven't practiced enough because we don't have enough people to practice with.

Vulnerability is a tough sell in this day and age, but the consequences for an unwillingness to be vulnerable are too great. Don't sell yourself short: you have all the tools you need already. You just might need to summon up the courage to go out on a limb and try.

Pictured: one of my favorite human/horse student pairs. I don't need to know what was happening in this moment to know the feeling displayed in their interaction.

08/13/2024

You won't lose ground by letting your horse come undone so you can deal with yourself when circumstances are beyond your control...but all the work you do after that should be in preparation for the next time things get a little wild.

The first year I took my late gelding Soni to see Harry Whitney, I took some time on an evening when there was no group dinner to try some saddles out. The host farm had a resident saddle maker and I had been having issues for some time getting a saddle that fit Soni well enough that it didn't slide back throughout the ride.

That particular evening, someone was target shooting on one of the neighboring properties. Individual shots was something Soni could handle as we have hunters in our area, but these were rapid-fire, semi-automatic rounds. Almost as soon as I got Soni saddled in an outfit to trial and had swung my leg over him, shots starting ringing out. His head immediately went sky high and I felt the tension rise in his body.

Soni pretty quickly became beside himself with worry and a few attempts to use one rein to help him find his way back to me mentally and minimize his ability to leave hard did nothing. The shots would start back up a few seconds after the last round ended and each subsequent round caused him to get more and more bent out of shape until he was literally spinning in circles and growing more frantic by the second.

When he threatened to go up, I immediately dismounted. There was no need for either of us to get hurt, but I was left feeling utterly useless holding the mecate as my horse ran frenzied laps around me, completely inconsolable and hysterical.

I couldn't blame him, but the chaos had rattled me as well and I found myself stifling frustration and anger. Why did this have to happen tonight? Why me? Why couldn't I do anything to help my horse? As any semblance of control slipped entirely from my grasp, I felt myself teetering on responses I knew I didn't want to have.

Harry had been nearby and witnessed the whole debacle. Leaning against one of the corral panels, he said "don't worry, you aren't any worse for wear right now if you let him flail around out there."

I don't know for how long the gunfire continued, but Soni have did indeed have a mighty fit at the end of the line. Eventually he found his way back to earth, but he was so riled up there was no way I was getting back on. I led him back to his stall and untacked him feeling completely defeated.

I've thought a lot about what Harry said in that moment. Initially my takeaway was that it was okay at times to take a moment to deal with your own emotional regulation when your horse wasn't doing so well with theirs. Your ability to help your horse is only as good as your ability to control your response to what he might do. Sometimes doing nothing while you get a grip is the best thing you can do. I still think this is applicable and good advice.

That said, it took me a little while to realize that the moral of the story didn't end there. No horseperson who has lived, lives now or will live in the future will ever be able to control everything that happens around them. What we do have the ability to influence, though, is whether we have enough "in the bank" with our horses to where when things get kind of wild, they think about us as they respond and look to us for support.

Yes, sometimes all you can do is give the horse a safe place to come undone. Yes, sometimes dealing with you before you address the horse is the best option.

You just have to be careful you don't stop there. Everything you do with your horse after the dust settles is either building what you've got in the bank with that animal, or taking from it. And THAT is entirely within your control.

08/12/2024

I try to encourage people to think of physical "soundness" not as a static state, where a horse is either sound or unsound, but as a spectrum wherein any given animal's soundness can literally change moment to moment.

I worked in a PT office for several years, and one of the things I learned in my time there is that there is basically no such thing as "100% sound" in any creature. Our physical soundness is ever-changing based on a multitude of factors including but not limited to age, diet, environment stressors, physical conformation, previous injury history and what I call "intensity of use", meaning how hard we're pushing our bodies.

There is another component to soundness that doesn't get recognized nearly enough in the horse world, but it's one I talk about all the time: the ability for the horse to yield mentally. A horse that has been shown how to do this and feel safe about it will soften the parts of his body that you want to soften because his thoughts are aligned with his movement. A horse that is "thinking elsewhere" will by default activate the very parts of his body you're trying to get to relax. Imagine how much effort goes into creating physical tension in a child when they are being dragged somewhere they don't want to go by a parent, versus how easy and effortless it is to walk hand in hand when the child is thinking about going where the parent is leading them. Imagine a time where you've been really nervous and somebody told you to "just relax". How easy is it to relax your body when your mind isn't?

We often talk about riding being like a dance, but this assumes two willing partners. As it's been explained to me, a more accurate analogy would be that you're sitting at the edge of the ballroom avoiding partnering up and someone walks over, grabs your hand, forces you out of your chair and attempts to lead while you resist because you were never on board with dancing to begin with. This is so often the experience of the horse. One can imagine that doing this every day, day after day, would create tremendous tension that would develop into patterns, and those patterns are often what lead to decreased soundness over time...and yet it didn't start with anything physical.

What does all mean, in the context of working with horses, if soundness should be considered in degrees and not definites?

It means we need to move away from a paradigm that uses a "pass/fail" system and move toward one that considers many overlapping influences to get a larger clinical picture of the animal in question.

It means we need to train our eyes to see what "unsound" looks like BEFORE it becomes hobbling, crippled, three-legged-lame and requires a call to the vet.

It means we need to stop thinking about what our horse can and can't do under saddle by using what he does out in the pasture as a gauge for what we should be able to ask of him. A horse trotting in a biomechanical posture he chooses, when he chooses, is not the same as you sitting on him and asking him to trot in the biomechanical posture YOU want.

Finally, it means we need to start thinking about our horse's mental soundness as a crucial factor in his physical soundness, not something separate. The body does nothing without it first forming in the mind.

Pictured: a photo of a hunter horse's front feet, taken at a local show, demonstrating severe high/low syndrome. The compensation for these feet was apparent in the horse's muscling and way of going. This horse would be considered conventionally "sound" by most, but there is a lot here that is clearly not working in the horse's favor.

08/08/2024

Harry has been one my horsemanship mentors for several years now. I have yet to find anyone else who talks about the importance of getting to the horse's mind in the way that he does. The changes that occur in the horses brought to his clinics every year is astounding - I've witnessed it firsthand with my own.

It is rare to find video or audio of Harry working: I believe there's a reason for this, as I have learned personally that these lessons take time to soak in for most people. The concepts are simple, but to put them into practice requires the human to commit to change on a very deep level, and that kind of internal work can be hard for folks. You have to be ready to "see the light", but once you do you can't ever go back, no matter how hard you try.

If you do nothing else over the next few days, watch this series of clips from Anna Bonnage Horsemanship's interview w/ Harry Whitney - Horsemanship. It's the best use of a few minutes you'll get.

08/06/2024

My absolutely favorite movie of all time is the original 1967 Doctor Doolittle starring Rex Harrison. There is a musical number sung by Harrison playing the character of John Doolittle well into the plot, the opening lines for which go:

"I do not understand the human race.
It has so little love for creatures with a different face.
Treating animals like people is no madness or disgrace.
I do not understand the human race."

Whenever I see sale ads for three, four, and five year old horses with descriptors like "been used to push cows", "well started over fences", and "been there done that"...
...I wonder why in an age of so much access to knowledge we are still justifying putting young horses into serious work well before they are skeletally mature.

Whenever I see horses forced into postures their bodies aren't developed enough to hold...
..I wonder about the future for these horses and whether or not they'll hold up in the long term or break down well before their time.

Whenever I see horses with this gadget and that gizmo, all designed to give the illusion of "control", I wonder why we haven't figured out that the best way we have to get any real control is to go through the mind, not the body.

I wonder if anyone has really considered what it means to "treat animals like people", as John Doolittle laments. I hesitate to ascribe to the idea in a public forum because I know the ways in which it will be taken too far and become harmful practice or egocentric for the human...but I do think Doolittle was onto something.

If good treatment of other people is rooted in offering courtesy, compassion, empathy, and understanding while drawing healthy, reasonable boundaries, why does good treatment of animals need to look any different?

07/31/2024

I had what ended up being a candid but beautifully authentic conversation with someone recently that I think needs sharing. I wish someone had had this conversation with me a long, long time ago. I'm honored I got to be the initiator of it for someone else.

For years - decades, actually - I struggled with intense depression and anxiety. I understand in my bones what it's like to walk through the world putting on a face that does not match how I feel inside. I know what it feels like to constantly have that inner voice telling me that I'm not worthy. I know what it feels like to be unable to see success in anything that I do or comprehend any benefit in anything I have to offer because no one who feels as poorly as I did could possibly have anything of value to contribute...or so was the internal monologue I fed myself.

I also know what it's like to contemplate the idea of taking my own life because I couldn't possibly live like this anymore.

Insert horses into the mix. I know a whole 'lotta people for whom the barn is their sanctuary, and for whom horses are an escape from lives they are barely able to tolerate. I know way more folks than I wish I did that seek to find solace in these wonderful animals...and by virtue of that I know many people who place insane amounts of pressure on themselves and their horses to be productive, be successful, be improving, be whatever it is that person needs in order to feel like they have some kind of lifeboat to carry them through to the next day. I know this because I did this for way too long, and what inevitably ends up happening is that our mental health becomes reliant upon what happens in the little bit of time each day we get to spend in the saddle. If the ride went well, things feel bearable - maybe even good.

If the ride went poorly, we lose our coping mechanism for life. We put more pressure on ourselves and our horses. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Pretty soon going to the barn becomes a triggering event because our ability to deal with life hinges on how well things go in any given lesson, ride or interaction.

It feels awfully unoriginal to say, but I genuinely feel that horses saved my life - not because I had an outlet for solace in which I could hide from my problems, but because at some point I finally woke up and recognized that what I was doing and how I was handling things wasn't working. My horses had been telling me for a long time, but sometimes a message takes repeated delivery before we can absorb it, process it and respond to it. I don't know of a human that could continue to deliver a message like this over as long of a period. I'm grateful that I had horses that did.

We are responsible for ourselves. We cannot make anyone else responsible for us, our emotions or our struggles. It doesn't mean we have to be alone in our journeys to becoming better or healthier humans, but we do have to be the ones to take responsibility for the first steps.

It has been incredibly empowering to take control of my own life. It has also been fantastically difficult at times and required some seriously heavy lifting on my part, but the net result is I am happier and better for it, and the changes in my horses and my relationships with them have been a stunning byproduct of getting right within myself. It doesn't mean every day is sunshine and rainbows, and it doesn't mean I don't experience the natural highs and lows of life: I'm just better equipped to deal with them now and no longer placing that burden on my animals.

You cannot hide from yourself on the back of a horse.

07/29/2024

The most glorious work you'll do will be the things no one ever sees. It will be in quiet conversations devoid of applauding audiences or admiring onlookers. It will be in the everyday, the usual, the typical. This is, in my experience, the difference between a true horseman and everyone else who do things with horses: the horseman doesn't change because they have spectators.

As the equine community continues to grapple with what it means to love a horse in light of what seems like report after report of abusive practices in professional levels of the industry, I continue to come back to the idea of consideration: for what the horse feels, for what is important to him and for what is meaningful to him. It is an essential part in my mind of truly loving something for what it is, not what it can do for us.

You can do all the right things to provide for the body: thoughtful diet, maximizing turnout, attention to veterinary care and therapeutic modalities, proper hoof care...but you don't build a relationship with the body. What you have with a horse when you get right down to it is with the mind.

When you're alone, the only one you're accountable to is the horse. What you do then says everything about who you are, what you value, and whether you really love the animal you're working with.

07/26/2024

I sometimes find myself saying to people - when they ask me if I think they should do something about a particular thing their horse does (or doesn't do) - that it doesn't really matter to me because I don't have to handle their horse every day. If it doesn't bother them, at the end of the day it doesn't bother me.

I've thought about that a lot, because my intention has always been to try and help people help their horses, and yet I recognize I am not them. I'm a support and a guide, but I can't do the work on their behalf. As a teacher, I need to be realistic about knowing I can only help where someone is open to receiving help. If they don't think of something as a problem then they won't be seeking a solution and so I try and influence where I can, not where I can't.

With all of that said, I realized I needed to stop saying it doesn't matter to me, because it does.

The harsh reality for the horse is that he will more than likely know several homes in his lifetime. It's pretty rare that a horse stays with the same person from first breath 'till last. It's even rarer that any two people will have the same way of doing things, the same expectations, the same feel, the same timing, and the same awareness. The horse, for better or for worse, has to learn each new person he comes across and figure out how to adapt to them. The more people he cycles through, the more confusing his world can become. Imagine having 10 different expectations around how you handle the same request. Imagine having learned something was okay, then being told it wasn't, and then learning it is again.

Imagine being expected to navigate and attempt to learn every imaginable difference between dozens of different people in your lifetime while realizing that only maybe one or two are taking the time to see and then learn what YOU need of them. There's not a single other animal in our world we ask this much of, but we ask it of horses all the time.

So yes, it does matter to me whether it matters to you. It matters because you, the person in that horse's life right now, have the ability to help him with a heck of a lot. You have the ability to set up him for the best life possible - with or without you - by attending to the things that are probably going to be important down the road. You have the ability to influence how he relates to our world should you exit his life and someone else enters.

And how he relates to our world is most likely to be the single biggest determining factor in regards to the kind of people that enter his.

07/24/2024

As the horse community reels after the dated video of Charlotte Dujardin surfaced, I can't help but feel like collectively we continue to walk head on into the point, fall down, get up, look around and then carry on to our next outrage.

Her actions in that snippet of film are a symptom and byproduct of a much larger problem.

It's another one of those situations where two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time. Do I find what she did reprehensible? Yes. Do I feel the vitriol directed at her is helpful, beneficial or in any way productive? No.

If you add fire to fire, you get more fire. It's the reason our political system in the United States is in the state that it's in right now, and the world of competitive dressage is just a mini political sphere. We should no longer be surprised at the fact that when a system rewards certain behavior, we get more of that behavior. And yet, time after time these sorts of things come to the surface and the public is shocked and outraged and there are calls to denounce and remove the problem child...and then eventually we move on to our next crusade, failing to take any time to reflect inwardly on how we got here to begin with.

These issues don't exist in a vacuum. You can fervently hack at cancer after cancer and eventually you'll be left with nothing to cut away. The more we as a society believe that the things that ail any given system are those outside of us, the more divisive and focused on the "other" our viewpoints become. It is incredibly, demonstrably difficult to exist in a healthy way within a system that rewards dis-ease, and Charlotte is just another example of this. If you want to stop seeing this type of thing on your news feed, begin with your own response. You don't create healthy systems by demanding everyone else around you change; you create healthy systems by refusing to become part the thing that requires membership to exist in the first place.

The world won't change because of your opinion, but it could change because of your example.

07/22/2024

Don't forget that in order to offer something to you, your horse has to give up something else.

There is a reason, I think, that we ride with reins attached to gear on the horse's head or a bit in the horse's mouth, versus reins attached to the the horse's feet. After all, the feet are what moves the body and takes us somewhere. But the mind has to talk to the feet first, and I think somewhere in history someone recognized that. Without the mind, the feet and every other part of the horse is no different than the stuff that makes up the grass that he eats or the tree he rests under or the clouds that shade his pasture. The mind is what causes the body to come alive: it is what governs what he does and how he does it.

So at the core of every request we make of the horse - EVERY. single. one. - is actually a request for him to let go of whatever is on his mind, so that he can be open to offer what's on ours.

That's a pretty massive request if you ask me, and yet if you make it with an understanding of just how big of a deal that is to the animal you're working with, it's nothing short of astounding how much the horse can get willing to offer. The exchange, big as it is, feels good to him because he knows exactly what he's getting in return for letting go of his thoughts, and that is peace and security from you.

If I'm being honest, I have a feeling so many people struggle with this concept because we've learned to equate giving something freely with being taken advantage of: "if you're not winning, you're losing" and all that, and so we go on to practice that same internal philosophy with our horses. It never occurs to us that the horse COULD offer something and feel good about it. It never occurs to us that both of us could win, together, in the same moment.

Don't underestimate how much you're really asking of a horse when you request something from him. And yet, don't underestimate how easy that ask can feel to him if you've taken the time to really get something good going between the two of you.

07/19/2024

My Peggy the Polo Pony post appears to have resurfaced somewhere as there have been thousands of new visitors to this page in the last few days. There continues to be a lot of shock and anger and sadness that a horse could ever get to that point physically, let alone still be used in some kind of work.

There also have been quite a few people expressing a sentiment I understand entirely too well.

When your radius of awareness is wider than your sphere of influence, you are going to feel powerless and like affecting change is impossible.

There is also a growing population of horse people who feel more than a bit despondent about the fact that there is SO MUCH we don't know about how horses work, what drives disease and physical deterioration, and how to pick through hundreds of data points for any given horse to try and determine the root cause of their struggles. We have an ever-increasing radius of awareness, and a lot of that awareness is around the fact that there is so much we AREN'T aware of.

That tends to leave many asking themselves why we do what we do with horses. Should we even ride? Is it ethical to sit on an animal that was never designed to be sat on?

I'm not interested in that debate. The reality is that the paths of horses and human merged thousands of years ago, and no one is going to be able to undue all that history. We are not going to debate, legislate or otherwise change the fact that the horse's role in the human world is here to stay.

What I am greatly interested in is discussing how we can make that role a better deal for the horse. And sometimes, that means being willing to acknowledge and accept that seemingly opposing ideas can both be true at the same time.

I do not think one should ride obviously lame horses, AND YET there are times where doing so is necessary and in the best interests of the horse in order to try and diagnose and treat the problem.

I do not think one should ride horses that are physically uncomfortable, AND YET I recognize that discomfort exists on a spectrum and there are times where asking the horse to use his body in a certain way is actually the best long-term solution to issue causing the discomfort.

I sometimes question whether riding is ethical, AND YET I know that my sphere of influence does not include changing nearly 6,000 years of history between hominids and horses. But, it certainly includes talking-the-talk and walking-the-walk in regards to the one tool that, above all else, is most likely to succeed in attaining long term physical and mental soundness in our equine partners, and that's good riding.
. . .

Pictured is Whiskey, my stock gelding. At fourteen, his diagnoses include a fused right hock, active degenerative joint disease in the left hock, insufficient (also sometimes called "negative") palmar angles in the right and left hind hooves, and significant bilateral navicular changes in both front hooves, with the right being worse than the left. He has a host of compensatory physical patterns in his muscling and movement that don't share one particular "diagnosis". I am fairly certain he has brachial plexus nerve impingement in his thoracic sling, especially in the right shoulder, but this cannot be diagnosed definitively. He also is very defensive and tends toward intense worrying, and is one of the toughest horses I've come across in terms of his willingness to hold onto his ideas.

He sounds like a pretty awful riding candidate on paper, and certainly doesn't sound like he should be sound...and yet here I am, sitting on him, because it's the best thing I can do for him to improve his soundness in the long term. And he improves every. single. ride.

I'm not asking him to perform to my level of expectation. I'm not demanding he do something he isn't physically or mentally ready to do. I'm not placing unreasonable or unfair asks unto him because of what I think he needs (even if I'm pretty sure he does need it).

I'm acting the way a good physical therapist would: I'm asking questions of his body, listening to the answers and respecting whatever boundaries he sets. I'm helping him find ease, balance and comfort in movement, instead of relying on long-standing compensations that are ultimately continuing to drive his discomfort. I'm helping him develop a body that will support his long term soundness instead of speeding up the process of deterioration.

I'm also acting the way a good counselor does: I'm asking questions of his mind, listening to the answers and respecting whatever boundaries he sets. I'm helping him find ease, balance and comfort in working with me and others, instead of feeling like being worried, defensive and triggered all the time is the way he has to live. I'm helping him develop a mind that will support a lifetime of improved resilience and contentedness instead of one that sets him up for a lifetime of tension, resistance and fear.

Looking at how he improves from day to day, I'm satisfied with 1%, grateful for 2% and ecstatic with 3%.

This is how we make it a better deal for horses, even those who come with baggage. Ask much, expect little and be grateful for what is offered, and then build on that as often as you can. There will inevitably still be those who simply cannot get past a certain level of dis-ease, and decisions sometimes have to be made about quality of life or suitability of use. Euthanasia is never a wrong choice for these horses: quality of life is much more important than quantity, and a horse's best insurance for a good life in the human world is to be able to do some sort of job, and do it comfortably and well. That's just reality.

What's also reality is that, like Whiskey, most horses with even significant levels of wear and tear ARE capable of doing a comfortable job provided they have the right support and the road to getting them there is compassionate, considerate and without a set expectation of how far they'll be able to go.

It is possible to affect great change, even though our spheres of influence may be small. Don't underestimate how much it means to your horses to know that someone is willing to listen, even if you don't have all the answers.

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Videos

Process, no matter how embarrassing it can be to look back on sometimes, is how we get where we're going. It has immense value. This clip is six years old and only 30 seconds or so long, but there's a lot in it...and most of it I don't like. I have a horse that is very light and very obedient but distinctly lacking in softness and somewhat operating on an autopilot feel versus really being with me. At that moment in time, I was still very much new to differentiating between the light and soft and in my fettering about, put more worry into this gelding than I would have liked. Fast forward several years and a lot of practice later and I'm still working at those concepts. I'll never stop working at them, but the feeling I have to offer a horse now versus then is completely different. So is the feeling I get back. I imagine if I keep working at it, those feelings will be different and better still in another few years. You don't have to look back far to see how far you've come.

The canter/lope tends to be the gait that really shows us whether we have a horse who feels good and confident about being in front of the leg or a horse who carries worry, struggles with balance and/or cannot find relaxation when there is an increase in speed. The canter also tends to be the gait where we find out how good the rider feels about these things, too. If you or your horse struggles here, you are far from alone. There are plenty of riders who both dread the canter and at the same time place immense pressure on themselves and their horses to do it because of the idea that they should be able to. If you never, ever wanted to canter on your horse there is nothing wrong with that, BUT...you should always be working towards being in a place with your riding so that should you change your mind one way, you have the tools necessary to make taking the canter the easiest thing in the world for you and your horse. A good place to begin for many is to help your horse find ease and relaxation in a big, open trot. "Long trotting" has the benefit of allowing your horse to settle into a rhythm while asking for a fairly significant energy output. An increase in energy tends to be paired with an increase in anxiety unless we teach our horses and train ourselves to keep the relaxation regardless of how much "forward" we ask for. As your horse gets more and more steady, ask for a little bit more trot. Then a little more. Let them settle, then ask for a little more. Keep asking for just a little more and a little more: at some point, the vast majority of horses are going to start to get a bit lighter in front and you will FEEL them say "I really can't trot any faster than this, but I could canter"...to which you reply "what a wonderful idea!" Enjoy a few strides, so long as your horse can carry himself with relaxation. As you practice this more and more, you will start to build a horse who can get promptly in front of the leg, maintain his own balance better and find s