Horse Heart Shelley

27/01/2025

How to be the best horse owner you can be…

14/09/2024

Some satire gold from Amy Skinner Horsemanship 👌

How to look really cool without ever getting any better:

FOMO: a major driving force, and a large contributing factor to the equine industry, maintaining a healthy economy. If all your friends are going, you can’t afford to miss out!

If you want to stay in the cool circles, it’s important in this day and age that you follow the social rules of horsemanship, which I will lay out for you. Following these steps ensures you stay visible to all as a VIP in the horsemanship world, without risking perilous improvement to skill.

1- lay out your clinic schedule well ahead of time. Shop around, attend as many as you can. Bonus points if each clinician has contradictory basics! This helps ensure your horse is as confused as you are, but you are seen in as many outfits as possible. The better the hat and costume the clinician has, the more cool points you get!

2- when in your next clinic, be sure to spend as much time telling the clinician who you’ve ridden with. This ensures you don’t waste any time actually learning, and helps everyone know who you’ve rubbed elbows with- which is the whole point of going to these things.

3- be very sure not to follow up with any of your teachers after they’ve left town. Avoid practicing or understanding the theory behind the exercises you practiced- this deliberate tactic prevents any painful growth or insights.

4- continue looking for the next bit of gear that will solve all your problems. There is so much to be gained here: lots of Facebook post materials about your new gear, garnering admiration and jealousy from your peers, without having to prove you know how to use it. Dopamine hits for days! When your horse still goes poorly, you can begin searching for the next bit of gear. It’s lots of fun, gets plenty of validation, and is low effort. A very sustainable activity with loads of rewards, except to your wallet and horse.

Looking cool is extremely important! We all know it’s the most important thing to teachers and horses : someone who can have all the gear and talk the lingo without any actionable skill set to prove it. So be sure to make every step count: get seen as much as possible, talk about it as often as possible to anyone who will listen, and practice and self reflect as little as possible. And the most important piece : stick with nothing, and leave as soon as it gets hard or uncomfortable. And you too can look awesome without actually working hard!

10/09/2024

13/08/2024

“Is that your baby?”
“Somebody rescue that poor baby!”
“He loves his mommy!”

This is something that I’ve found curious for a long time - and let me preface this by saying I am the mother of 2 children, and so I like to believe I understand the maternal drive; but also believe this should be separate from animals. Good husbandry and being a steward of them is not the same as mothering -

A very interesting hole is being filled by our animals. I’m sure we’re all aware they aren’t human babies, they aren’t our boyfriends or surrogate husbands, they are horses.

But if you zone out on the broader, cultural norm of how we treat our pets, at least in the US - this was not the way I saw horses treated abroad as a child at all - we have a very interesting displacement of needs being filled, or attempted to be filled, by our horses.

It comes with a heavy amount of anthropomorphism, a heavy amount of emotional burden placed on the horse to make us happy, entertain us, to fill our emotional needs. A horse is a strong being physically, but this is too large a load for anyone to carry -

So what’s the solution? I’d love to say personal development, and I do believe that to be true -

But I believe people, like animals, are driven by needs and will find unhealthy ways to meet them like anything else. We are social beings - we crave connection.
And so I believe this problem is a symptom of a larger problem -
Societally we are not well. Culturally we can’t get our emotional needs, our need for security in connection with others filled, and so it spills out into unproductive or unhealthy ways with animals - who also are not getting their emotional needs met.

This is the point where, yet again, I can come to no easy solution or point blame at any one thing. We’re driven, just like animals, for security, and yet are not finding it amongst each other.

Photo by Jasmine Cope

02/07/2024

Pushing with the leg into a closed hand is a cheap cop out for good back to front riding - it doesn’t take much education or self discipline to push and hold, and the results are heavy, tense, and not conducive to suppleness. It creates a brick without the ability to breathe deeply or feel the seat of the rider, let alone enjoy the aids of the rider.

Good back to front riding, in essence, is about educating the hind leg. It’s about teaching the horse to flex the joints downward, so the front legs can flex upward. It’s about creating swinging, suppleness, stability, and a swinging, moving back.

To get this, the rider commits to becoming stable and supple themsleves. They commit to the discipline of learning to use aids subtly with good timing, and to never use an aid outside of their own center: the emphasis is on the seat, and so the hand is never a solution to a stability problem. The rider gains over time the discipline to check themsleves first: to not make knee jerk corrections to the horse when it’s likely the rider has lost center, feel, rhythm, or swing. It is a commitment to responsibility to be what you want the horse to be- to provide a balanced opening forward, not to chase, prod, beg, or threaten the horse into balance (which is an oxymoron and an impossibility)

This way of riding creates a very confident horse who is calm but energetic. One who can breathe deeply, feel unafraid of the aids but understands they are actually their friend , one who has very comfortable gaits to ride because of their suppleness. It creates long term soundness and best of all, it creates a deep and lasting friendship between horse and person.

The reason so much poor quality back to front riding can be seen is because it’s easy and requires no real
Self discipline from the rider - the focus is all about making the horse take a shape and go forward. It’s cheap and easy enough to learn quickly.

The reason so little high quality back to front riding can be seen is because of the arduous commitment to better positioning and mind frame development - to be flexible mentally while maintaining commitment.

It could take me two lifetimes to get it. I’m not great at it now, but I am committed to learning and grateful for the guidance toward the most beautiful way of being with a horse I’ve discovered. Some days it feels incredible, other days too difficult to manage. Some days I miss feeling like I know what I’m doing. But overall I adore the art, and the self development required.

If it were easy everyone would be doing it -

13/06/2024

Shut down horse?
There is currently a lot of interest and programs catering to “waking up” the shut down horse

But there are some things to consider -
What’s creating, or has created the shut down?
Why did they shut down, and what are they protecting?
Are we reading their behavior accurately?
What do we have to offer on the other side?

If a horse has in fact gone in to shut down, it’s typically to protect themselves from overwhelming input they can’t get away from. Often, well meaning interest in bringing them out easily turns into endless fussing, poking, badgering, and driving the horse absolutely crazy.

It reminds me of an introverted kid at a family gathering who has found a room to get away in.

A well meaning relative goes in to talk to him, breaking his peace
Another relative offers food, trying to bribe him out
Another gets upset, wondering why he is being rude by hiding
Then an argument breaks out in the bedroom with all the adults bringing up ideas on how to get the kid to participate in the social gathering

Pretty soon the peaceful place he’s found is overwhelming again, and there is no choice but to shut down

But if everybody would just calm down and be quiet, and provide a safe environment of structure and peace, maybe he’d come out, and if they didn’t make a huge fuss when he did come out, maybe he could enjoy himself in his own way, in his own time.

Maybe our tendency to fuss and probe and fix is the exact opposite of what a shut down horse needs.