EquiThorne (2024)

12/11/2024

What if?

Right now the world may feel like it’s coming undone at the seams. Over the last week I think a great deal of us are experiencing a wide range of emotions.

I know most of my community will have felt fear, helplessness, rage, disappointment, and anxiety over the world seemingly teetering farther and farther towards racism, sexism, homophobia, and fascism.

But what if? What if this is just the death throes of our failing capitalist society? To be kind in the face of adversity, bigotry, hate, and ignorance is a very difficult thing to do.

While I don’t have a horse in the race being a Canadian citizen - I do have a very personal history with fascism.

My grandfather was a N**i. He was (or so I’m told) an awful person who took pleasure in causing harm to others. Though he was murdered long before I was born. The abuses he inflicted on my grandmother, my mother and her side of the family have led me to lose my own parents through having to go no contact as an adult.

I have empathy for my grandmother. She never had a chance to become everything she wanted in life. Instead she was forced to marry at just 19 years old, to a man she did not love and to be repeatedly victimized by. Due to the policies and POLITICS of east Germany.

Her story is long, sad, horrific and ultimately tragic. But to anyone who says

“Oh I don’t really pay attention to politics.”

Remember that the governing powers decide who you can and cannot love. Who you can marry, who can hurt you without consequence, and what you can do with your life.

“Your body my choice.” Works both ways.

Oppressing others because of your personal beliefs is a moral failing. Needing a safe space because (god forbid) someone wears a different outfit from you, has a different skin color, loves someone of the same gender, is literally a woman, followed a different religion, has an alternate gender identity is the very definition of SNOWFLAKE.

So. What if? What if this is the death throes of a society that can no longer support itself on a lack of oppression, hatred and violence?

My moral, ethical, and business philosophy is what influences my political stance. It influences who I am as a human being and horse trainer who chooses to train with ethical means.

What happens in the USA influences Canada. And I do not wish to see my friends and family being hunted and persecuted for simply being who they are.

Who will you be?

07/08/2024

“I want my horse to want to be with me”

Years ago, long before I came across Positive Reinforcement, ethical horsemanship, or science based training this is what drove me to be with horses.

If you want your horse to be your friend you have to be a friend worth having. For my entire life I was taught to bully horses into being with me, I was taught that I had to be the ‘leader’ through making my horse do what I wanted and punishing them when they didn’t.

But what is the quality of getting your horse to say ‘yes’ if that’s the only acceptable answer? Recently during a conversation on riding horses someone told me that ‘horses don’t like work.’

WHY?

Why is that? Why can’t horses like work? What is it about work that we are making so unpleasant that there’s such a universal feeling that horses don’t like to work.

But I think it goes so much deeper than that. We are taught that work sucks, school sucks, each and every one of us has probably had a job we hated, or class we didn’t enjoy. We are socially conditioned to believe and normalize the idea that work isn’t fun. And that enjoying your work is a ‘dream job’ as if it should be somehow unattainable.

We continue to internalize these ideas and then apply them to horses. Statements like ‘my horse loves his job’ often fall apart with the realities of giving your horse a choice to participate. It’s a hard realization to face, that given the choice a lot of horses don’t really want to do the things we want them to do.

Part of getting your horse to want to be with you and choose to be with you is giving them a choice. Giving horses the choice to be with us reveals the truth of how we treat them and how we treat ourselves.

02/05/2024

I used to view horse training as something that required horses to be stressed out, anxious, fearful, and reactive. I saw it all around me. On Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube, on various training pages, I saw it in person at the barns I worked at, I saw it at clinics and events I attended.

But horse training isn’t supposed to be exceedingly stressful for the horse. And while many people are attracted to watching stressed out horses react, bronc, and cause havoc, I don’t want to build my following off of that. I used to think success was in becoming like everyone else I saw who was doing well for themselves. I thought that maybe if I could ride better, if I could make better horse friends, if I could get in with the ‘right’ crowd I’d find myself with what I thought I wanted in life.

The truth is that I was pretending. Stressing myself out for every perceived failure or mistake and that somehow if I could just figure out what everyone else was doing I could find what I thought success with horses looked like. And it took me a long time to realize that would never make me happy in life.

For years I spent my days agonizing over how to blend in with other equestrians and my social media reflected that inauthentic version of myself. My horses reflected that version back at me in our relationships. It was uncomfortable to realize the face I was wearing wasn’t actually mine and the people I attracted to me were not actually interested in anything I was doing or saying because I was trying to hide in plain sight.

Being seen is the scariest part of becoming your authentic self. People leave because they don’t like those parts of you. And they leave because they feel uncomfortable with the space you begin to give yourself to grow. Unmasking is the process of unraveling the layers and layers of thread attached to the parts that were never really part of you and more like a piece of glass. It may look pretty close to the what everyone else has but it’s cracked and sharp.

Learning about neurodiversity and beginning the long process of rebuilding myself from within has absolutely changed the way I view horses. It allowed me to strip away the views I held about horse training for my entire life and begin to actually enjoy learning with horses.

Creating relationships from a place of authenticity is a part of positive reinforcement. While I think it’s possible to learn how to do XYZ and get ABC out of horses; I strongly believe that the depth of connection we are able to achieve is a direct result of how connected we are to ourselves and understanding without judgment, fear or anger.

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