How to create a safe horse that wants to look after you (video/audio)

In this video, Katie shares her tips on creating a safe horse that wants to look after you.

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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?

Does your horse rear when it is napping?

“My horse rears when it’s napping - what can I do?”

It was a question I was asked recently and thought it would be a good idea to discuss it.

First though, let’s clarify what napping is for those of you unfamiliar with the term.

Editor’s note: I assumed napping meant snoozing, and said to Katie “big surprise - they are probably startling their horse…” —- SARAH

Napping is when your horse is reluctant or refusing to move forward in the direction your want it to go. It is different to spooking, which is when a horse is genuinely scared, startled and trying to bolt reactively.

Napping, and then rearing during these periods, is often put down to bad behaviour. But let’s look a little deeper at the cause, and why they may rear as a response to your actions.

FIRST DO NO HARM

At Equestrian Movement, our first rule of thumb in working with our horse is first do no harm.

So before you go down the path of training and correcting ANY behaviour, rule out all possible reasons for your horse doing this.

• Pain, muscle and gastrointestinal,

• Saddle doesn’t fit/pinches,

• Rubs or galls from the girth or saddle,

• Old injuries etc.

If you know for certain your horse is rearing to get out of work then we can consider how to work with them. 

REARING TO GET OUT OF WORK

Rearing without a good reason usually starts because they used to have a good reason and it went away, or they are lacking confidence. Once they establish that this behaviour gets what they want (i.e. no more work), they will continue it.

So they may rear because you are walking them away from the stable. If you were to get off take them back to the stable and feed them, they will learn that if they rear you get off, turn them out and feed them.

It is ok if you get off but make sure that if you get off the work continues. So if you are leading them away from the barn and they rear to get you to take them back to the barn, you can dismount but continue leading them away from the barn on the ground and work them through the argument on the ground until you get a yes and then remount. Not until they are walking sweetly away from the barn without argument (whether on the ground or in the saddle) do you turn them back toward the barn and feed and turn out. 

JAMMED SHOULDERS

Another reason why horses can just stop and rear is because they are jammed through the shoulders. Basically their neck, chest, shoulders or back get tight and pull resulting in them feeling like the only option they have is to go up.

This horse needs a lot of topline conditioning to maintain forward thought and forward while being ridden. Canter transitions and canter poles can really help. It most often comes up as the horse is learning to develop throughness in a working frame. So the hindquarters are coming under and engaging but they don’t know how to extend through the shoulder to move their forehand out of the road and they rear. 

Using shoulder mobilising exercises like turn on the hind quarters, leg yield and shoulder fore in combination with teaching them how to transfer their weight onto the haunches and maintain forwardness all help with teaching them how to use their body so they don’t feel jammed. 

If at any stage you feel uncomfortable or unsafe with your horse we recommend you work with a professional trainer to help.

How To Stop Your Horse Spooking

Our horses mostly are prey animals, creatures of flight. Their instinct is to run first think later. To understand how the different breeds react to scary stimuli read our article … This is a survival mechanism bred into them over years of evolution and now we are trying to redirect that behaviour to make them safe for mounts for anyone to ride.

The old school method and train of thought is to shut them down, something akin to learned helplessness. Essentially we try to be bigger and scarier than anything else so they are more scared to react to their environment than they are of the scary thing in their environment. This can work for the more experienced riders but not for less experienced riders.

Just hold on and clock up the ks. Another way to desensitise and settle a spooky horse is to just expose them to a bunch of different environments and stimuli until the stop being scared. Again this requires an experienced professional rider. Done by a novice the horse can end up more scared because the rider is scared and so now it thinks it has a legitimate reason to be scared!!

What we teach at equestrian movement is getting the horse to be curious about what its scared of. This is helpful for a few different reasons.

• We can’t desensitise a horse to everything. This means that each time our horse encounters something new we have to go through the whole desensitisation process with that object. However, if we teach them to be curious about things they are scared of, so that it doesn’t matter what they are scared of -they know how to approach it and deal with it.

• Even the most beginner riders can work on teaching curiosity and create a calm, relaxed horse.

• It creates a good relationship with the rider and establishes trust and confidence in their rider over the long term.

• It can be a fun exercise to break up their training regime to keep them going sour on their work

• Your horse becomes safe for trails and if you are unsure you know what to do to best handle your horse when it becomes nervy and spooky.

Would you like to learn how to make your horse curious? We have an excellent mini-course dedicated to just that - click here to learn more!

How The Herd Changes Your Relationship With Your Horse

Have you ever experienced a change with your horse simply because something has changed in the paddock social circle?

And did it affect your horses behaviour?

Some may say that what happens in the paddock should have no impact on your working relationship with your horse. Some may say that when a horse is in tack, his mind should be in the game.

And to some extent, it’s true.

However, when we don’t take the time to ensure our relationship has ourselves set up as your horses alpha, any changes that happen to the herd will impact your working relationship and your horses confidence levels - sometimes with seriously damaging results.

Understanding how your horse works within your herd structure, the importance of the herd structure, and how you can fit in, will go a long way to improving your relationship with your horse, and result in a stronger, unflappable bond where your horse can look to you for guidance.

The Herd

Have you ever taken time to watch what is happening in a herd? You may have noticed there is a bit of a pecking order, with the lead being taken by the Alpha. Generally, the Alpha is a dominant mare, although in our paddocks filled with geldings, some more of the ‘stallion-minded’ geldings may take the head spot.

It is the role of the Alpha to determine where they will graze, where they will water, and when they need to bolt. The Alpha will be on guard and watchful as the rest of the herd graze or relax.

It is no wonder then, when there are changes to this structure, that the confidence of our horses can change. Some may be thrust into a role that they are not ready for (either because of age, genetics or lack of social skills), and others may come into a herd with limited understanding of how one works (again, due to isolation or lack of teaching from other horses).

The end result could be a horse, previously exceptionally well-behaved (or at least mostly), becoming ‘grumpy’, ‘spooky’, ‘testing boundaries’, or even outright ‘rebelling’. It is the simple attempt of your horse to understand the new behaviours now expected.

This is why it is important for us to step up and become the Human Alpha within the herd.

Start showing up as a leader by taking steps to strengthen your bond with your horse - click to access the free guide

The Human Alpha

I promise you, I don’t mean for you to spend months camped outside, pretending to eat grass and boss around your horse.

Again, when we look at the herd, it is the Alpha that sets the pace. The Alpha is confident, relaxed, and rarely triggered by their environment. When the Alpha is calm, the rest of the horses are safe. When the Alpha runs, the herd knows it’s time to put some speed on (sure, some horses lower in the pecking order may mess around or bolt when the Alpha is relaxed, but you will notice that the herd itself does not react).

The Human Alpha is simply a process of setting yourself up to be the calm, confident and relaxed leader that your horse knows to look to when he is with you.

By setting yourself up as the leader, you can begin to establish (or re-establish) your horses confidence, and regain the working brain.