What is Your Horse Working On?
So what do I mean when I ask, “What is your horse working on?” What I mean by that is mostly “What is your horse thinking about?” while you’re working with him. What the horse is thinking about while...
View ArticleThe Worry Cup
Horses, and people, have a “Worry Cup”. The Worry Cup is a useful image when we’re trying to quantify worry, in a horse or in a human. Imagine a cup, maybe even a measuring cup, being filled up, bit by...
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Learned Helplessness
Quite a few years ago, I was idling away some time reading the then-current issue of The Chronicle of the Horse magazine (a weekly sport-horse publication). While skimming a pretty dry article about...
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An Alternative to Learned Helpessness
As we continue this discussion about the possibility of Learned Helplessness (LH) in horses (please see the first article here), it seems like some folks kind of feel like LH should be eradicated in...
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Are You Blind?
This is another one of those things that needs to be as important to us as it is to the horses (VERY, in other words!). Blind spots. Blind spots are very important to horses and they have a lot of...
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Watch Your Mouth!
“Your words matter” is something we have all heard. And words do matter, they do now and they always have. Google it. They’ve done lots of studies on it, actually. I feel like words are kind of...
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It’s Not About Desensitization
I don’t need my horse to be desensitized. I need him to have understanding. I need him to be able to discern when he IS supposed to respond to a thing, and when he is not. Yes, you read that right....
View ArticleThis Explains a Lot
There’s this thing about working with horses… it’s one of those things that is responsible for making working with horses difficult, soul-shattering hard work. And I don’t want to be Debbie Downer...
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Where Are You Starting?
I’m not entirely sure why this can be a touchy subject, but I’m going to give this a go, because I think this is an important subject — to the horses. You know me, by now, probably, and you know that...
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Why Is It So Hard?
Have you ever gotten unsolicited advice from a fellow horse person? Have you ever sat in the audience at a clinic or at a horse show and all you could hear was “arm chair quarter-backing” from your...
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