Trying for better horse welfare can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing when you feel trapped by circumstance. When you’re limited by the types of available boarding options in your area. When you lease or take lessons and have limited say. When you are working with horses who aren’t yours, be it as a trainer, groom, stablehand etc. When you want things to change for your horse but aren’t sure where to start and are doing this best that you can. There is no shortage of roadblocks that may halt and slow down people on the path to bettering the lives of the horses around them.  The ..read more

“It’s never the horse’s fault” and “You need to get after him, you can’t let him get away with that!” are antithetical mindsets. By default, positive punishment is directing blame. You are adding a punishing stimulus to discourage a behaviour that you believe the horse is wrong for doing. The mindset of it never being the horse’s fault should, in theory, involve people not assessing blame and physically punishing horses. But, often it doesn’t. It’s important for us to look within and see what are words actually mean, if they contradict each other and if we are excusing certain behaviours that ..read more

All over equestrian media you can find photos showing the faces of elated riders, joyous from their competition wins or the sheer joy of riding their horses. Their faces are alight with big authentic smiles, their joy is palpable. But, then you look at the horse. The horse’s mouth is tensed into a grimace. Their lips may even be parted, teeth visible, or perhaps their jaw is open and their mouth is gaping. Their eyes are tense and wide, sometimes showing the whites of the eye in a look of sheer distress, their eyelid pulled into a triangulated peak. Perhaps their tail is also ringing in the p ..read more

The New Year is a time of year where people post their highlight reels and talk about big personal wins, areas of growth and discuss their future resolutions. While it can be a good practice for self improvement, I think it is also important for everyone to remember that the mistakes we make — our failures — are the very catalysts leading to the creation of our biggest wins. Personal growth doesn’t generally happen without some sort of pressure, epiphany or newfound information resulting in our need for change. Our mistakes lead us to such knowledge or create the necessary pressure for us to ..read more

The expertise of riders and the weight their words hold is so often valued based on competition wins and training prowess; in that the extent of useful output they’re able to convince horses to do, no matter how, is what defines a good rider. In the same breath, people will exclaim that horsemanship is all about the horse and loving the horse first and foremost… Yet, we’ve created a value system that weights usefulness of the horse, their ability to perform, how well they perform and the levels they can achieve above all else… even if all of the aforementioned are achieved at the horses’ welf ..read more

It seems that any time a concern regarding horse welfare is voiced, perhaps one that calls to change certain norms in training or management of horses, there is a resounding public outcry. “This is the start of PETA cancelling the horse sport, because of tree huggers like you!” “But I don’t do that to my horse, stop talking about this!” “Most people love their horses, stop focusing on the negatives!” “This is a slippery slope to riding horses being outlawed completely!” Or any number of common deflection tactics that serve the purpose of trying to quiet any mention of concern for horse welfar ..read more

The idea of keeping horses stalled for much of their daily time budget is a common one amongst the horse world. It is arguably more common for people to stall their horses than not, oftentimes even being depicted in the media as the ideal living situation for the horse when we're viewing equestrian movies and TV shows. The beliefs pertaining to stalling in the horse world are largely outdated with many horse people seeing absolutely no concern with horses spending the majority of their daily time budget (12+ hours) isolated in a stall that averages in size at about 12x12ft. The lack of aware ..read more

“Human athletes often look angry and in pain when under physical strain for sport!” The age old excuse that is so often brought up when people discuss the prevalence of pain and stress faces in competition horses. So let’s dive into this and point out some of the flaws with this argument as a deflection away from needed discussion about sport horse stress and why we need to be looking at how to mitigate it. First and foremost — human athletes consent to sport. Even if they ARE in pain, they’ve made the express decision of their own accord TO compete and can opt in or out at any time. Horses d ..read more

Something that I don’t think is discussed often enough in the horse community is the idea of harm reduction. So much of the horse world seems to view all opinions in a very black and white light, assuming that someone either has to be completely for something or completely against it. And, unfortunately, a lot of horse people DO contribute to this belief by publicizing their very black and white views. A lack of nuance can contribute to more harm than some flexibility, or at minimum, understanding of where other equestrians may at in their journey of knowledge acquisition and horsemanship imp ..read more

Let me compare horse training to a rubber band. When you rush horse training and try to obtain a certain result on your timeline and not the horses, you stretch the elastic band. You can stretch and stretch that elastic band and for a time, it’ll seem like you’re getting further ahead. And for a time, it’ll actually be true. But, as you push on, the tension will build and eventually, it will become too much and that elastic band may snap, rebounding back with much more of a sting than what would’ve otherwise have existed if tension was relived earlier. If you had just relaxed and slowed down ..read more