I remember years ago having a riding peer try to tell me horses don't feel sad because they can't cry.....

Say What!?! No way was I believing that.

Just because we can't understand or measure what our horses are feeling doesn't mean they can't feel!

Horses have all the things they need to be emotional, they have the areas of the brain and the chemicals that communicate feelings just as we do.

The one area of the brain that is smaller than ours is the frontal lobe which is responsible for rational thinking and problem solving, so if anything horses rely on their emotional interaction with their environment far more than their intellectual.

This makes for an important consideration in training and the one thing we discuss a lot with our facebook group, the stronger bond community, is that how we make our horse feel when we are training them is key to how well or how poorly they respond to our training. A horse that feel safe, secure in its environment and relationship with us, is confident in itself, trusts in us, enjoys learning and movement feels good is going to work far more reliably.

"This sounds well and good", I hear you say,"but easier said than done!"

And I so hear you, there are so many times we watch back on the videos we use for our membership trainings and go “oops, missed that’!

But the important thing is to start with this as our goal post, because when we start here and we are aware and listening our horses communication of its needs become so quiet and subtle because guess what? It actually causes them stress as well to get into those big "dangerous" behaviours and argue with us. They would much prefer to work together in unison as well!

And it's not about them walking over the top of you, pushing you around. We still expect you to set clear, consistent boundaries that you follow through on (FYI your horse likes this as well) but we do it in a way that we can check in on our horses and they can tell us if they are ready or if they need some help processing their emotions.

Want our favourite tool (actually a couple of our favourite tools) that we use to deescalate our horses big scary behaviours? We share them in our training video in our stronger bond workshop which is coming up again in February! Want to join us?