11/02/2025
These are so important and well worth the read for anyone who has or is transitioning from the teachings of "Big Horsemanship" (omg my new favorite phrase) and a more ethical, gentle, approach to training π
The Inexperienced Expert.
A horse person whom permits themselves to use heavy, insistent, stinging, intimidating or escalating forms of pressure is absolutely unqualified to advise about the efficacy of NOT using those forms of pressure.
They are also the first people to pontificate on all the ways that gentleness, patience and capping your pressure use at a certain level and not going past it is allegedly:
1. Ineffective
2. Forceful in its own right (With convoluted twists of the story)
3. Causes dangerous/unhealthy/spoiled horses
Yet they are advising on a manner of training they have never actually seen through from beginning to end with a horse.
If you want to know about gentle, patient, pressure reducing training and how to navigate that with a horse over time you need to speak to trainers that train that way exclusively and have tracked the patterns, predictions, pitfalls and stages this way of training offers. Because the trajectory it sets a horse and human on is totally different to training that annihilates that by stinging, intimidating, pushing, escalating upon the horse at some point. It is a fork in the road and the journeys for the horse are not the same. You cannot compare apples and oranges.
So here is my short and obviously over-simplified list of things I have noticed when we train horses with a focus on absolute radical gentleness, pressure reduction and patience.
1. If you want to train with feel, the horse needs to feel you.
If you are a person who has chosen this way of training, stop telling yourself to use less. That is not you. We are almost always approaching the horse from UNDER the amount of pressure your horse can feel and hear you with. You've been gaslit by Big Horsemanship telling you to use more and then OVERUSE more for years and now you're afraid to use anything at all. Let that go. Trust that you have installed in yourself this incredible self-auditing responsibility and realise your tendency is not to use too much, but to use too little, and that your job is to squeeze yourself up to a LITTLE bit more. You won't often use too much. And if you do, your autonomous horse will tell you immediately, you won't have to guess.
2. Stop training your horse like you're apologising for the past. Your horse already forgave you, or if they haven't the way to apologise to them is to take action that is different, now. Take action. Atonement Horsemanship never produced anything except a sour horse confused why all your questions to them felt deeply conflicted. They will eventually check-out somehow with you.
3. Hold space for the rehab. I have watched dozens and dozens of horses that came from mainstream training programs absolutely understand their person when their person communicated with quiet aids, and then stand passive, and wait for the monkeys to get loud and use more. These horses have given up responding to pressure that isn't forceful at some level because what was the point? They will wait you out. You will know this the moment your body now feels an overwhelming urge to use a whip, hustle them along, pull harder, toss a rope at them etc. Resist that urge, focus on your technique not your force, ensure the horse considers your question, keep working the process. I have also watched those same horses have penny drop moments when they realised the monkeys aren't going to do that anymore. They are ALWAYS more generous, with less pressure, on the other side of that process. Most trainers don't have the patience to get to the other side of that, so they have no idea how generous those horses could be if they totally dropped their hustle.
3. Asking your horse the same question, repeatedly, is not escalating pressure, nor is it force, nor is it domination. Commanding your horse to obey repeatedly might be. Asking questions that build in the horses chance to interpret, is not. That's communication. Asking your horse one question one time, then standing there till kingdom come waiting for a response is not gentleness. You have misunderstood the ethical shift Horse-First training is asking of you. We are looking for communication between species. You will often have to repeat questions many times, especially if the questions are new.
4. Training with gentleness, patience and "pressure-capping" is an entirely new, stand-alone language. Your horse will be learning a new language (you too). This can be very time consuming, and you will need to bridge them regularly to old techniques. This is normal and acceptable during the transition phase, and shame spiralling around dusting off old techniques you hate, is not helpful or kind to you or your horse. You know what you're doing, where you are going and where you came from. Move forward.
5. The majority of dangerous horses that hurt people via behavioural problems, have been trained with mainstream techniques, or missed quality training due being too long in the transitional phase between mainstream and the "Other" way of going. Horses trained gently, by prevalence, are categorically safer to handle. Every bit of unsolicited advise you are about to get will try to convince you that your kindness is dangerous. You need to be almost anti-social about calling bu****it on that rhetoric, because it is ubiquitous, it is incessant, and almost always unsolicited. Stay strong.
6. Forced exercise is inflammatory, not beneficial. That's not my opinion, that is academic fact. No matter how much Facebook Horsemanship might wax lyrical about Haute Γcole movements, if the horse feels forced into it at any level, the body produces life shortening, metabolism dissolving, endocrinological inflammation. For exercise to be beneficial to the body, the brain in charge of that body must volunteer to be doing it. And you cannot stick your way into voluntary exercise. The temptations to make them move more now, are so pervasively conditioned into horse people, most horse people have no idea they are exercise addicts and project that onto horses in damaging ways. You need enormous self awareness and pause to navigate these cultural obsessions that have been drilled into you by every Horsemanship LLC known to man. You're going to need new friends.
7. Rope can be leverage. So can a halter. But they are physiologically much gentler than many tools available to us, yet you need to dedicate lots of time to ensuring your horse is properly established in their halter training. Because most horses halter training consisted of pulling and that's it. Do not assume they feel good about rope or halter and yet this is the equipment you're likely to use more than any other. Focusing on it is not a demotion of your skill, but a devotion to your horses well-being.
8. It gets worse before it gets better, especially with horses exiting a mainstream program. But it does get better.
9. A horse cannot consent to activities they have not learned. There is a difference between a horse saying: "I am rejecting that because I do not know what that is and prefer the thing I know (Meere Exposure Effect)" and a horse saying "Yes I know what that is, and I would rather not." A Catch-22 so many have gotten stuck on, is introducing new things to horses, so that you can expand their preference library, and work consensually, yet these horses have no idea how to learn new things gently, they only know obedience. Which brings us back to a bigger issue; What is your horses relationship to learning? If Learning was fraught with force, fear and meaningless discomfort/pain, they will reject learning new things in your gentle hands, because they know they can. People who created this problem with learning in the first place, will point the finger of blame at YOU, but the fact is, you are the maid cleaning up THEIR MESS. You didn't create the problem, but you are responsible for cleaning it up now. You can recover a horses relationship to learning without resorting to old practices that are somewhere on the violence spectrum. Then, once your horse likes learning, you can demonstrate new skills to them, and allow them to tell you their preferences. Do not be so quick to attribute a horses lack of consent to your requests, especially if they had training prior to you.
