31/10/2025
I wish I’d said it this well. 🙂
What if the practice we don’t think we want, the slow, sometimes frustrating stuff, is exactly the change we’re searching for?
People love horses. But more and more, they don’t want to train them. Somewhere along the way, we fell in love with the idea of the horse but not the work of understanding them.
They want to ‘have’ horses, to enjoy them, to photograph them, to feel close to an animal like no other.
They want to experience partnership, but not the process that the partnership requires. Hard, slow, often repetitive work of shaping behaviour and understanding another complex being.
This isn’t new, but it’s become more obvious in recent years. After the pandemic and lockdowns, many people of a certain age moved to a more rural life, and horses became part of that dream. They arrived with good intentions and a genuine desire to do right by their horses but without much experience or a clear framework for what horse care actually entails.
They imagine horses come pre-loaded, like a laptop. They look for naturalness but not in the sense of ethology, in the sense of not needing effort. One of my pet sayings is, ‘Horses don’t learn through osmosis’. It’s not, of course, strictly true. Sometimes they do seem to absorb things by magic, noticing patterns or spotting tiny details we think we never taught them. But that kind of learning is a mystery to the new horse owner, and it only makes the rest of the work more necessary.
Horses learn through interaction, consequences, environmental stimuli causing changes that they can respond to.
The irony is that people who avoid training because it feels unnatural end up missing the most natural thing of all: genuine communication with another species. The joy of discovering how your body language, timing, and movement can shape the world for your horse. The realisation that you’re both learning, all the time.
There’s the other side of the industry, the competitive equestrians. These are the people who do train. They work hard. They sacrifice; keeping horses costs big in money and time. They study technique and commit to training. But the systems they train within are often so deep in tradition that they don’t find time to question how horses actually learn.
Making a horse do ‘the thing’ is still the overriding logic. It seems efficient and they get results. But many quietly struggle with tension and resistance. There is no joy in their training. They know something isn’t quite right but don’t have the tools to approach things differently.
Positive reinforcement, learning theory, and a more science-literate approach to behaviour could help bridge that gap. But those ideas are often dismissed as soft, sentimental, or ‘woo’. They don’t like the sound of using food to ‘bribe’ a horse to do ‘the things’ they’d rather use the dig of a spur or a good old kick with the leg.
And so the horse world has fractured and we have:
A growing population of horse owners who never meant to become trainers.
A competitive core that trains but hasn’t evolved in their methods.
And a small, persistent group of people trying to show that it can be different. That horses can learn joyfully, that connection and results aren’t opposites, that the slow road is worth taking.
Being in that last group can feel lonely. I offer something that asks for more reflection and curiosity than people are used to giving. It’s not a product you can market easily.
But maybe there’s a quiet revolution. This week I heard a well known behavioural term attributed to a hat-wearing cowboy who has done a great job of repurposing it.
I won’t name them but you’d know them. I’ve heard other giants (yes, no shock, they’re men) in the horse world mentioning they use clicker training. They still wave a whip or flag in the other hand but the language is becoming more common to hear.
Perhaps we can come round to the idea that that training isn’t the thing you have to do to get the horse to work for you. It is ‘the thing’ you came for. The fun. The art. The communication. The whole nine yards. Everything.
When you stop trying to skip training, when you lean into the most humbling, beautiful process of learning together, everything flows from there.
That’s the paradox. The grunt everyone wants to avoid turns out to be the most meaningful part of animal guardianship.
