09/08/2026
Adaptability, individuality, the horse you have today, the you you have today, what do they need โฆnot what we think they need, growth.
Getting to know them to be able to adapt tasks to bring out the best. Humans have the capacity to be critical thinkers, to be able to adapt concepts, change, move, slow, rebalance, strengthen, be curious, too much curiosity. Everyday it depends โฆ
Rigid Thinking Divorces Us From Horses
We love certainty. We love an idea that appears to finally answer our questions, and keep them answered. I have become increasingly suspicious of certainty in horsemanship, horse keeping and equestrian culture.
Including my own.
We learn something that works, or something that explains an experience we have had with horses, and understandably we grab onto it. Maybe it is learning theory, nervous system regulation, biomechanics, the classical masters, positive reinforcement, pressure and release, consent, more freedom, more movement, more choice, more rest, more challenge. The list goes on. All the things that can answer the questions and confusions we hold about horses. The answers that cause us to feel competent and clear.
Sometimes these ideas completely change our lives with horses. They become our whole personality. The pitfall is when the idea that worked once stops being something we use to understand the horse, and starts becoming something we use to feel like we are right. Righteous. Justified. Ethical.
I think this is where good ideas can become rigid thinking. And rigid thinking divorces us from horses.
A colleague shared with me yesterday:
"The minute I see evidence that someone has become totally certain about ANYTHING in regard to horses, I know immediately that they have not been around horses long enough."
Because eventually, a horse arrives who proves one of your ideas wrong. Particularly if it was an idea you held sacred, certain and true for all horses. Horses will blow that apart.
Horses are a terrible pastime for anybody who really enjoys putting everything into tidy boxes.
At best, good ideas become general rules. A starting point, not an end point. A framework, not a law. And not only is it NOT illegal to break these rules, if we are putting horses before ideology, we must be willing to break our own rules, depart from our frameworks, experiment for ourselves and establish new outcomes.
If our horsemanship is driven by ideology, eventually we are no longer responding to the horse in front of us. We are responding to what our framework says *must* be happening to the horse in front of us.
That slippery slope leads to dogma. It can give us licence to attack people who challenge our framework. Or it can make our world so small and restricted that horses only thrive in our care if a thousand things go exactly right.
This is control, not craft.
I have had to confront this in my own work recently.
I have spent years talking about slowing down. Slow down. Observe more. Notice more. Don't rush the horse. Create safety. Develop your observational skills. Give the horse time to think.
I still believe ALL of those things.
I just stepped out of a lesson where a client and I were building true forward movement with their mare. She needed between 8 and 15 seconds of thinking time after each aid. They had a 100% success rate at going forward, and she simply needed that 8 to 15 seconds.
I timed it.
When we refined the aid, her thinking time increased to around 20 to 30 seconds for the first four or five attempts, then returned to 8 to 15 seconds.
Yesterday, I had a lesson where the horses responded in under 2 seconds.
Both approaches were correct. Both riders needed pretty different forward aids with their horses, because their physiology was wildly different.
These were individual horses with individual needs, individual people with individual needs. Rigid frameworks are anathema to that adjustability, that grace-space needed to figure out what actually works, rather than choosing what works right (on paper) and fighting on that talking point forever.
Yet I will consistently receive questions like:
"What is the correct amount of time to wait for a horse's response?"
"What is the best aid for forward."
Which is a bit like asking:
"What is the correct thing to eat for dinner?"
Hopefully a healthy and diverse diet. And if you're like me, preferably one that creates a minimum or absence of suffering for animals.
But I have worked with this slower approach long enough now to also see what can happen when we keep prescribing one idea to a horse who has already benefitted from everything that idea offers. And that horse now needs the next thing.
Some horses I am seeing now are safe. They are calm. They feel understood. They have been listened to. They have been ... turned out.
In fact, I represent a community where the last horse has finally been turned out, gone bit-less, knows food reward, is not subjected to escalating pressure, does not have to work, can opt in, eats a forage-based diet and is barefoot or booted.
I represent a body of people who have already done many of the things we fought hard for and advocated for.
It is done.
Like Frodo at the end of the journey, the ring has been cast into the volcano.
"It is done. It is over."
But it is not finished. So what is the next conversation?
My work will not look exactly like the work of people still advocating for the bare minimum, because much of my community has already established that minimum. We now have to ask what comes next.
If we treat any solution as a monolithic truth, as if One Framework Cures All, we create blind spots. And eventually the horses suffer for those blind spots.
At some point I have to be willing to look at an individual horse and say:
Maybe more slow isn't what you need today. Maybe you need to MOVE. Maybe you need to become stronger.
What happens when yesterday's medicine becomes today's limitation?
If your philosophy says one thing and the horse standing in front of you says another, you cannot simply prescribe more of the same thing.
You have to adapt. You have to offer something else.
I want to remain capable of hearing the horse before I hear Horse Culture.
That requires something harder than only learning a method. It requires being willing to change our minds. To adapt. Sometimes quickly. Sometimes embarrassingly. Sometimes publicly.
Good horsemanship cannot be built entirely from certainty because horses are living, changing beings.
The frightened horse may become confident. The shut-down horse may become expressive. The weak horse may become strong. The horse who once needed enormous amounts of time may eventually say:
"I'm ready. Let's go."
And if we keep orienting ourselves to last century's problems and yesterday's horses, we can accidentally block forward momentum. We stunt not only our horses' growth and development, but our own, and sometimes each other's too.
We begin holding a metaphorical threat to the temple of our peers and saying:
"You had better promote the same talking points as me."
That misses the point.
The table of the equestrian world is wide and long, and there is room for everyone. We are going to need different perspectives, different experiences and different areas of expertise if we genuinely want to create better lives for the horses we love.
Our job is not to remain loyal to the concepts we love.
Our job is to remain loyal to the horse.
