05/02/2025
Ask ourselves where we are here...
The horse industry is confused. Two camps have begun to appear; Horsepeople who employ horses in jobs, and Horsepeople who have horses for the love of having horses. The confusion is often pitching these two camps against each other.
Folks who rely on horses for ranches, or in sport, for their livelihood, often look at leisure owners and their horses as spoiled, indulgent perhaps.
“Good for them!”, they say.
“But my horse needs to respond when I need them to respond.”
Sometimes, there is a sneer, often the condescension is hidden or couched better. Most often however, there is just plain detached bewilderment, that there exists millions of horses and horse people for whom the purpose of the horse is undefined to the folk who rely on horses for a job.
Camp 2 is often no better. Folks who have horses in their life as an elective pleasure, or artistic hobby, can often look over at horses employed in specific tasks and see pressure, pressure, pressure. Problems, problems, problems. Clutch pearls and grabbing pitchforks. Lighting flaming torches and embarking on witch hunts in which the “witch” is some obscure ethical yard stick folks decided they had the right to measure other folks with. Lambasting the rider of the ranch horse and the producer of the sport horse with curses against their character and with noses in the air, making sworn statements to never subject their equines to the same treatment.
I know this because at varying times in my career- I have been both people.
I have not been a working dancer for a long time. I have spent more time working with horses than I did in the dance industry. I consider myself a horseman since childhood, who had an interesting brief sojourn in dance, so that I could learn what it felt like to be;
- a creature of movement
- without a voice
- working often with violent leaders, yet forced to perform.
- Or, working with incompetent people who wasted my motivation on their endless, self absorbed anxiety or allowed my talent and training to die due to not knowing how to employ it.
It was the best possible empathic preparation for horses.
I have been both “horses”. I have been both horse people.
To the horse-folk who employ horses, I know safety is your number 1. Often, safety is the reason we hold onto practices which can wobble between violence and being effective. Like, we retain the right to force compliance in the same of safety, by any means necessary. A friend of mine who recently attended an Olympic level equestrian clinic was shocked to discover that relentless whipping for refusal of a task was “The only way to do this”. Because refusal of a task, in some circumstances, can mean death to the horse and the person.
But I want you to know, safety is EVERYONE'S first priority. And there are options that don't involve violence to the vulnerable animal in our employ.
What you don’t know is that I spent more than a decade of my short life on again-off again, working trail horses for the public in the last untouched wilderness of Europe, the Sierra Nevada National Park of Andalucia. I found my heart horse there, he is below my window now.
I have seen horses fall off cliffs, with clients on board- because they did not have sufficient training. I have had to “Rock Climb” to go and rescue those horses, on my own. I have seen horses flip over backwards on people who then needed helicopter evacuation, because the lead horse wouldn’t go forward in a crucial moment. I have known people lost legs, because they got stuck in equipment on a bucking stallion, spurs cutting the leg free from their body. I have had clients lose their lives, months after I tried to intervene and begged them to prepare their horses better.
Today, I work mostly for the private owner. Not ranchers, not sportsman. I work for private owners, many of them are horse pro’s. As a horse pro, my horses are also my livelihood. If I cannot demonstrate my work to a high level in tutorials on my own horses, I get no international clinic bookings, produce no courses, book no lessons. And this is my sole income, that employs now six people together with me. My horses have jobs too. But I have developed a job structure that centres my horses always before the results of the job... because I chose to make that career change, and chose to do it this way. I walked away from traditional equestrian work for this reason.
One of the biggest misnomers is that “folks like me” abandon the Doing-ness of horses, because our horses no longer have to perform a day job according to what day jobs have looked like for generations. Yet our horses need all the same skills all horses need. A rider is still dead, regardless how they die. Anybody who elects to swing a leg over requires a safe horse to work with, regardless where they are in the world or what they do.
If we have any luxury that perhaps was not a part of society until now, it is that of time. We do not have to force compliance in any sort of time frame. That gift of time allows us to spend a little longer asking the horse some questions. Often the answers to those questions are
1. This horse shouldn’t be ridden, ever. No matter the training.
2. This horse is not ready for riding.
3. This owner is not a good match for this horse.
4. This owner is not acting in a responsible manner.
5. This horse is over-faced by the owners expectations.
6. This horse is genetically, or medically, not healthy enough for what the owner wants out of the horse.
And in those circumstances “people like me” are often able to keep and safe-guard those horses that others would deem “useless” and sell down the river to God knows what fate.
Yet, anyone who elects to ride horses, needs horses who are trained and communicative. But not only riding. People die on the ground plenty around horses. Unless we release horses to sanctuaries where they are without human contact, all domestic horses need the same skills, all horses need.
Electing to teach them without devices that induce pain or discomfort if the horse is in conflict with the aids or request, is not bypassing safety. It is guaranteeing it. I understand that good handlers can use potentially volatile equipment without harm. But folks who are not equestrian professionals shouldn’t use tools that are volatile, and the most time poor owner in the world- the Working Equestrian Professional, often doesn’t have the time or energy to get those tools right for their clients, or their own horses.
A rancher might be able to tinker with a tool all day, and the next. A recreational owner might get 20 minutes after work. A working equine pro might not touch their own horses for months or years, if they still have their own private horses.
So turns out, ALL horses everywhere are often under the same pressures in different guises. When all is said and done, all of us have work to do for our horses. All of us.
Professionally, I won’t put tools in the hands of folks that don’t have the time to get them right or that should be handled by pro’s. I won't let people play with fire on my watch. Techniques that induce excessive pressure, yet remove the time required to finesse those techniques, can ruin a horse real quickly. A recreational owner who pi**es off their horse, or hurts them regularly, or uses them inappropriately, is headed for disaster too. Titanic.
In fact, I met people working trail heads and Guiding in the mountains who were in grave danger with horses and had no idea. I have met with clients in stables all over the world who were struggling, regardless of their background, or desired outcome. I have also seen exceptionally happy and well trained horses in every category.
I saw a gaping hole in the industry, that the "newer" people were without leadership, teachers, or methods that understood them. “Harriet the Hacker” and “Rachel Recreation” cannot thrive with tools and techniques designed for “Rob the Rancher” or “Sam the Sportsman”. They are oil and water. Some systems of training before us have tried. And largely failed to honour the horse. They tried to augment ranching/sporting traditions for the now growing base of the industry. And crashed and burned. Yet private aspirational ownership is on the rise. And they are paired with horses who are often struggling.
This is big work in the industry. Are we tired of binaries and partisanship that patronise the way “people who are not like me” work with horses?
Until the recreational owner and the trainers that focus on them are seen legitimate by traditional horseman, the industry is headed for an iceberg. Hubris. Look at the FEI, lemmings in jodhpurs running for a cliff.
Until the recreational owner respects the 5,500 years of tradition that came before Henry Ford invented the internal combustion engine, and learns to understand honoured practices AND redact the violence out of them, we are all headed for a dead end.
So what is the answer? How are you doing better by your horse, and yourself today? You tell me below.
