How do I desensitise my horse?

Do you want to know the secret to training?

A horse that can't control it’s emotions, can’t control it’s behaviours!

If your horse doesn’t know how to emotionally self regulate, you have to model that emotional self regulation for them.

If you become emotionally engaged and spiral with them, you WILL feed of each other.

Cue training is easy. It’s managing and training their emotional self regulation that is hard.

And this is where we make the mistake with desensitisation.

Throwing a tarp over your horse doesn’t teach your horse to not be afraid of the tarp. It teaches the horse that the tarp goes away when they don’t react.

Waving a flag doesn’t teach a horse that it’s not dangerous, only that it goes away when the horse looks at it (or you).

What we DO need to do is to develop our horses confidence in us, themselves, and their surroundings, so they can face any scary situation. This means both you and your horse need to learn how to emotionally regulate.

There are ways you can develop these skills. But they can’t be learnt when you horse is losing the plot. The most successful method when using these skills is to regularly and consistently creating positve scenarios where the horse can build confidence - in you AND themselves.

So what resources are available to you to support you through this?

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The Trainability Coaching Program

takes you through developing mental relaxation, true willingness and consent with your horse, and teaches you some of the emotional regulation skills as well. This program also gives you access to Katie as your coach and personal cheer squad (and as some have mentioned, “horse marriage councillor)

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Curiosity + Communication Bundle Offer

For the owner of the shut down or spooking horse in particular, ways to work to create confidence in you and themselves, and to understand their cues faster.

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Building Connection Course

This free course and workshop recording gives you insight in the steps to build a deeper connection with your horse so you can start creating trust and confidence in each other.

Do you have a spooky reactive horse?

Are you trying to find a way to get them less sensitive but recognise that you don't want them to be flooded by stimuli and shut down in the desensitisation process?

It is very rare for us at Equestrian Movement to use desensitisation with our horses - and when we do it is after we have opened the pathway for communication and established consent.

We will typically do this for a tool we want to use for our horses like a halter. We teach the cue of stand with relaxation first and then stand with relaxation while we touch you with the tool after we have asked for consent. We also then stay well tuned to the horse to allow them to tell us if they need us to back off or take a break.

Aside from tools that we need our horses to accept with relaxation our horses still need to know how to manage their flight response from scary things like bags.... water bottles.... balloons..... bubble machines..... all the scary things that can make our horses drop their lolly. And it is inevitable that we can't desensitise them to every experience. We also will hit that point where they can no longer cope when we're teaching them to just stand still. This is why we teach relaxation and consent first and combine it with the scary object.

Second to that, we teach them confidence through curiousity.

We teach them what to do with that fear. Ie. be confident in themselves and investigate the scary object.

It takes a little bit of time, especially depending on the horses unique character, but once we support them through this process a really magical thing happens. When our horses see something that's scary they literally drag us over to it to investigate it!!! We have had so much feedback from our students who have implemented confidence through curiousity telling us there once highly strung, spooky, kite on a string horse now takes them around new environments or changes in their environment to investigate and boop the scary things.

Far cry from what I got taught when I started out which was to be bigger, badder, stronger and scarier than the thing they are scared of so the are more scared of you than the thing they are scared of! It also is another great way to build relationships and establish yourself as a leader worth following.

Want to see it in action? Check out phoenix getting to know he's new paddock mate, Ella the pig.

Are you interested in working with your horse to create curiosity, confidence, connection and trust?