Are you being taught to read your horse wrong?

What if that online guru or that instructor you work with weekly is teaching you to read your horse wrong?

What if all the heart ache, disappointment, frustration and plateau is from entrusting your horses mental, emotional and physical health in a reputable coach that is teaching you the signals your horse is trying to communicate with us just them being naughty

I've had this happen many times. The one time I did advocate for my horses welfare I was told I was unteachable and fired as a student.

So I turned to online trainers. In particularly natural horsemanship and join up.

And while natural horsemanship was progress in an industry that forced the horse to relinquish their will to live, it was anything but natural.

It's not natural to chase a horse around an environment it can't escape. That is not what horses do to each other.

There has always been a horse in these turning points in my career that I was advocating for. The particular horse when I learnt how unnatural natural horsemanship was was a little stallion. We were at that sweet spot just where he was about to soften (submit) and instead of submitting he lunged at me picked me up by the throat and threw me to the ground.

I was shocked. I honestly thought we were about to connect. But he didn't feel safe to submit. He didn't feel safe to be vulnerable. He didn't feel safe to forfeit control to me. I very easily couldn't have been seriously injured. Thankfully I really feel the cold and had 3 jumpers on which is all he tore through.

I walked away without a scratch but I was seriously shook.

What about join up made him feel threatened?

This sounds like such an outrageous question now, but still a lot of people use join up without realising what it's doing to horses. The ones that don't need it, it "works" for, but there are far better exercises that build trust and connection and teach horses to seek the release of pressure for Cuing.

The horses that do need help with feeling safe and connected, it really doesn’t work for and makes them feel threatened.

That's why our ground work doesn't include join up. Our foundation of safe, secure and connected creates softness through relaxation - not submission. And this is where the true magic of softness lies. The mistake most riders are making. The special sauce that is the art of horsemanship.

The "give", the "softness" comes from relaxing in to you and feel safe, not feeling threatened and submitting to you.

Want to here more? Join the Stronger Bond Workshop this week!