Does your horse trust you?

You love your horse but you have this nagging feeling something isn’t quite right.

A lack of eye contact, reduced willingness, increased signs of stubbornness or resistance is all you are greeted with - despite how hard you try!

Why doesn’t my horse trust me?

Here is the thing - the “standard” response to these issues in the equestrian world is to “Just push them through it”.

But just pushing your horse through resistance is the worst thing you can do to build confidence and trust in each other. If you are a horse rider struggling with your horses stubbornness, resistance or difficult behaviours it is likely you have been told to just push them through it, show them who’s boss and make them do it.

Without knowing what your horse is trying to communicate when it is showing this resistance, you will have the same problem as most conflicted horse owners and riders, where the resistance and arguments get bigger. The horse starts giving bigger behaviours that result in you being scared to work with your horse. You lose trust and confidence in yourself and your horse and your horse loses trust and confidence in you. Your horse becomes a glorified paddock ornament and you become riddled with guilt.

• ”Maybe I haven’t done enough” even though in your heart you feel like you have no more to give.

• “Maybe I’m not good enough and my horse needs a better rider” even though in your heart you really want to make it work you just wish it could be easier.

• Maybe you’ve tried sending away to different trainers, working with different instructors and still you feel like you aren’t enough. The problem is consuming your thoughts, keeping you up at night. You fear what will happen to them if you “give up on them”. What future do they have? Will they be safe? Will they be cared for? Will they be loved?

It doesn’t have to look like this.

You can be enough.

What a lot of trainers, coaches and breakers fail to communicate (or sometimes even understand) is that being a good rider and a good human for your horse isn’t about how well you can sit a buck and man handle you horse. The purpose of pressure is not to try and control our horses but to communicate.

The operant condition skills of pressure/release (aka negative reinforcement) often used in natural horsemanship is just one tool of so many in the tool kit of the holistic horse handler. It is a tool for communication, not control, and one piece of the puzzle in how we lay out our shaping plan for our horse.

And if it doesn’t work, the holistic horse handler knows how to reflect on what worked and what didn’t and adapt, use the plethora of other tools we have to communicate with our horse.

What we want to break it down to is:

• How are we going to guide the horse in to the behaviour we desire?

• How are we going to mark that that is the desired behaviour?

• How are we going to motivate them to do it again?

Not all horses like pressure to guide their behaviours (especially young, green or confident/self assured horses) Not all horses find the relief from pressure a strong motivator to do the behaviour again. And if you are trying to use the pressure to control the behaviour, rather than guide or shape it, you will miss the timing that communicates to the horse they got the answer correct.

And these is what our holistic horse handling students are learning how to do. Our program provides an expansive tool kit of different ways to work with different horses to adapt the how to best suit and achieve a willing horse with an array of options to trouble shoot problems that is constantly updated as we have new problems pop up.

So if you’re ready to feel like a confident and connected equestrian, no longer overcome with confusion, guilt and feeling conflicted about “how” you will get your horse to behave, check out the Holistic Horse Handling Program by clicking the button below: