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I can’t thank Another Turn Tack & Apparel enough for this new pair of Cavallo dress boots! The last pair I got from them served me well for years, and these will now take their place for clinics and shows.

Another Turn is always our go-to for everything horse and rider. We’re so grateful for their support!

~Justin

Psych Saturday: The Quiet That Isn’t Peace

Walk down a barn aisle and you start to craft a story filled with seemingly benign judgments. That one is misbehaving. He is kicking the door. That one is trouble. She is pawing in the crossties. That one is fine… he is standing still.

I told myself those stories a thousand times, casually and automatically, because it is the story almost all of us were taught. Trouble is what you can see. So, when you cannot see any, there is none.

Underneath that is a single assumption. We assume a troubled animal will show us, that distress announces itself, that if something were really wrong we would see it. And nowhere do we trust that assumption more than with fear. Fear spooks, it braces, it bolts. So when the spooking stops, we believe the fear stopped with it.

Here is the thing. The absence of visible fear does not tell you that a frightened animal is at peace. It may tell you only that the fear is no longer being expressed in the way you expect.

Take a frightened horse and make him stop reacting. He may become watchful. He may stand still while every part of him remains organized around what might happen next. He is not grazing. He is not dozing with a hind leg cocked and his lower lip loose. He is not nosing the strange bucket somebody left in the corner just to find out what it is.

He looks, if anything, tense. Nobody walks past that horse and calls him fine.

But there is another possibility, and this one can fool many people, including me. Instead of staying up, the nervous system can shut down. It can quit.

There is a kind of horse who stands very still for long stretches. Neck flat and level with his back. Eyes open, staring, not much blinking. Ears fixed and pointed back. He does not react much to a person appearing at his stall, or to a sudden noise, or to being touched. He looks, honestly, like a horse who has finally settled.

He has not settled. He has given up.

Researchers have studied horses who display this kind of withdrawn behavior, and they found something that should stop all of us cold. Those withdrawn horses had lower plasma cortisol levels than their non-withdrawn neighbors. Lower. So if you had walked up and administered a lab test, the number might have looked reassuring even though there was something seriously wrong.

The number does not tell you the whole story. Neither does the behavior by itself. Neither tells you what kind of life is happening inside the animal.

On the surface those two horses could not look less alike. One is tight. The other is still. Yet neither is grazing quietly. Neither plays. Neither goes looking for anybody. The same things are missing from both.

That is why quiet tells you so little. Quiet is not the same as safe. Quiet is just quiet.

I have watched this play out with clients more times than I can count. Someone finds a horse who is dead quiet. Bombproof. Stands like a rock at the mounting block, does not care about the tarp or the traffic or the dog. They try him, they love him, they buy him. And three or four weeks after he gets home, he starts to act up. Suddenly he has opinions. And the question the new owner always asks, and it is a fair question, is whether he was drugged the day they rode him. Sometimes he was. That happens, and I am not naive about it.

But I have come to wonder about a different explanation. What if he was not drugged and not calm either? What if he was shut down? And then he went home with a kind person who turned him out with friends, and fed him well, and did not ask much of him for a few weeks… and he woke up.

That is not a horse getting worse. That is a horse coming back to life.

It just came back in a way the new owner did not order. Because what returns first, when a shut-down animal starts to revive, is not the pleasant stuff. It is the opinions. The reactions. The ability to say no. A creature waking up is not necessarily a tidy process. Yet I would rather have a horse with opinions and a plan for helping him than a horse who has quit.

I want to be careful here, because a horse who suddenly has opinions can be genuinely dangerous, and this is the moment to get good help. But it changes what you think you are looking at. The behavior did not come out of nowhere. It came out of him.

So it helps to better understand the flavors of quiet. A horse can stop reacting because reacting never helped, or because he is still watching, or because he has stopped expecting anything to change. None of that is safety.

Safety is not what remains when fear disappears. It is not an empty space where the trouble used to be. Safety has something in it. A horse who feels safe has room for the rest of his life.

He grazes. He rests. He investigates. He plays. He notices another horse and goes over to say hello. He wanders away again. He has opinions. He can startle and recover. He can say no and then come back. His nervous system is not simply quiet. It is available.

We do the same thing with each other, of course. Somebody says they’re fine and we believe them, because nothing is visibly on fire. No crisis, no tears, no call at midnight. But not falling apart is a very low bar to clear, and I have known plenty of people, and have been one myself, who cleared it for years while nothing good was actually happening inside their lives.

The absence of a problem is not the presence of an engaged life.

These days I ask different questions with both horses and people. I used to wonder what was wrong. The true answers to that question are often easy to disguise. Now I ask what is alive.

Is he eating like he means it? Is he curious about something? Does he play? Does he seek anybody out, or does he only tolerate being sought? With people, same question in different clothes. Not, are you managing. But, what lights you up and is there anything you are looking forward to?

It is a harder question. It does not let anybody off the hook, including me. But it is the honest one, because it looks for something rather than settling for the absence of something.

Peace is not what is left when the trouble stops.

Peace is comes from connection and is something a body goes out and does.

Look for that.

~ Paul
PC- Gilmore Photography
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One of the things I enjoy about conversations like the Facebook Live we had last Tuesday with Dr. Pebbles Turbeville is discovering how often the same principles show up in different places.

We started by talking about a question that comes up more and more in the horse world: what should we do when a horse says "no"?

For me, the more interesting question is why the "no" is there in the first place.

I raised two boys, and I can't count the number of essential life skills they said "no" to along the way.

If we'd stopped there and said, "Well, they don't want to brush their teeth today," or "They don't want to get dressed," or "They don't want to go to school," we'd have left them unprepared for the world they're growing into.

Our job isn't simply to avoid every "no."

It's to prepare them for the world in which we live, and for the way we connect and relate to each other within it.

At the same time, when we begin to understand the context behind the "no," it's important to pay attention to it.

The answer isn't to push on regardless.

Nor is it to stop every time we hear resistance.

It's to stay in that middle ground where we can understand what's happening, while still helping children develop the skills they'll need in life.

If you missed last Tuesday's conversation with Dr. Pebbles Turbeville, I'd encourage you to go back and give it a listen. We started by talking about horses, but as often happens, the conversation became less about horses and more about the principles that shape healthy development.

~ Paul

This 100%… it does sadden me that the author felt the need to be anonymous. We need all of us to stand up for the riders and the horses.

One of the greatest challenges facing our industry is not a lack of passion, talent, or dedication. But the tension between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of validation, an anonymous contributor writes.

Most people are first drawn to horses because of the profound effect they have on us. Horses offer confidence to the uncertain, peace to the anxious, purpose to the searching, and belonging to those who have struggled to find it elsewhere. Their therapeutic influence is undeniable. Yet somewhere along the way, many equestrian systems begin rewarding something very different. Instead of nurturing curiosity and lifelong learning, they often reward status, image, and external success. The result is an environment in which appearing knowledgeable can become more valuable than becoming knowledgeable.

Horse people aren’t inherently narcissistic. Many have never felt genuinely supported in their own educational journey. When people feel insecure, unsupported, or afraid of being exposed as inadequate, self-protection becomes their primary objective. Human psychology makes this entirely understandable. We defend what we believe gives us value, and we often resist anything that feels as though it might diminish it.

Viewed through this lens, resistance to education, qualification, licensure, or even modest eligibility standards is not always opposition to learning itself. It may instead reflect a fear that one’s identity, livelihood, or sense of belonging depends upon already being seen as competent. When knowledge is perceived as a threat rather than an invitation, curiosity is replaced by defensiveness.

Empathy cannot flourish where survival dominates. A person who is preoccupied with protecting their own status has far less capacity to consider the needs of others. In this industry, the “other” is the horse.

📎 Continue reading this article at https://www.theplaidhorse.com/2026/08/08/a-horse-first-culture-starts-with-how-we-teach-humans/
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