"Don't let them get away with it!"

"You're too soft with your horse!"
"Gotta show them that you are the boss!"
"Kick!"
"Pull!"

"They are a big animal. You can't hurt them"
"This is how it has always been done!"

"Horses don't have feelings like us"
"Don't spoil them, don't be kind to them"
"Make them move their feet"
"Ask, tell... then demand"
"Use as much pressure as you need to get what you want, immediately"


A long list of common phrases perpetuate the horsemanship and horse training world. Some people subscribe fully to them, some people do what everyone else does.  Some people do what they are told and taught to do, and some of us reject these things entirely. 

If you read those above phrases again, through a lens of "Would you do this to a child" and if you would, ask again "Would that be considered child abuse?", how then would you feel about the treatment of horses who work under such a program?

Look to your left, look to your right, 100% of those people have done the above to a horse. Nobody has utterly clean hands here. It is not about blame.  It's about honesty, radical accountability and change.  Doing better. 

The above quoted approach to a horse, is not training.  It is not quality communication.  It is dominance, coercion and abuse.  All of this is about the human desire to use and exploit the horse for their own benefit.  It has an element of the selfish within it, that fundamentally ignores that the horse has needs, wants, desires and rights of their own.  

30 years ago, some brave horse trainers stepped outside of the box and started something called Natural Horsemanship.  For their time, they were mavericks. Because they didn't blindfold horses, sack them out, tie them up to poles, throw them to the ground, or beat them with 2x4's until they gave up, like some of their contemporaries did.  For that, they were seen as betrayers to tradition, but also guru's of ethical change. For their time, what they offered was essential.  A launchpad for what was about to come next.  

But for many horse people today, even Natural Horsemanship has become outdated.  It is often performed through the lens of Dominance Theory, of the Alpha horse, of establishing advantage over the horse, be is physical,y mentally or emotionally. 

Emotional Horsemanship IS NOT Natural Horsemanship. 

In a response to Dominance Theory and problematic and abusive training, many horse people didn't walk, but ran towards Positive Reinforcement Training.  In this context, the word "Positive" does not mean "Ethically Superior" or "Better than", despite the fact that it is often marketed as such.  The genesis of Positive Reinforcement Training (R+) is in Radical Behaviourism, or Operant Conditioning.  It means "The Addition of a Wanted Stimulus to an Other, To Gain the Behaviour that You Want Out of Them"

R+ training, just like the advent of Natural Horsemanship, has added many very valuable and important tools and changes to the horse training world.  But it is not the end of the development and improvement of horse training.  It is only chapter two.  Because still, this Radical Behaviourism approach does not automatically account for the inner life of the horse.  It can.  But the tools it recruits need to be augmented and applied with great focus and intention toward the horses internal world, it is not fundamentally or intrinsically part of that tool kit. Its inception was not about the animals internal world, but its external motivators. Some of us want something that from its inception accounted for the horses inner world. 

After R+, many folks continued their learning journey and discovered a multitude of other horse training modalities.  One of them which is popular is "Intrinzen".  Founder and figurehead, and famously "Anti-Guru" Kathy Sierra, a personal friend and colleague, explored ways in which the internal world of the horse can be improved by externally motivating factors.  Her work on Pain Science, modern biomechanics and hormonal responses of motivation is 20 years ahead of its time.  This works very well for many, but while this works on often highly aroused and explosive manoeuvres that require an adrenalised horse, many of us dream of a quieter, more relaxed relationship to our horse that give give us safe and simple riding and groundwork activities. So what to do next?

Next enter the world of Modern Horsemanship and Liberty training.  We look to change the horses mentality and focus.  The word "Energy" is used frequently.  As is wanting the thought of the horse to follow us.  Liberty is instilled as the removal of tools and tack and focusing on the pure communication trade with the horse.  Valuable and important contributions here too.  Yet if all we do is change the focus, the horse learns to shift focus onto us, but not necessarily onto themselves.  "Energy" is sometimes used as a euphemism for escalating pressure and aversions, or something esoteric and intangible that overwhelms the average horse owner.  Shifting focus is great, but if the horse cannot hold that focus, you've basically trained them an equivalent of an ADHD response.  Liberty is great too, so long as the horse can and does say "No" within that framework, otherwise it is just tackless obedience training and behaviour conditioning. The horse doesn't internally choose that which has been conditioned to be their only available choice. 

Everything that is old, is becoming new again.  The Biomechanics training movement is well established and again, is offering extremely important and valuable lessons to the horse training world.  Important to understand anatomy, the consequences of pathological posture, the consequences of overuse, inappropriate training and disease of the musculoskeletal system, and sympathetic training which seeks to avoid and prevent those issues.  Yet for some of us, the narrowing down of a small percentage of correct postures, and large percentage of incorrect postures is confining and suffocating.  And at its best, is contextual.  What is correct for a show horse is not necessarily correct for a family horse.  Correctness for a jumper is not necessarily correct or desirable in a trail horse.  So what is correctness?  Modern Human Kinesiology and Biomechanics has discovered that the Correct v Incorrect paradigm was a well intentioned but medically ineffective protocol for human athletes and now focuses on adaptability, mobility, versatility and cross training as a foundational approach to injury prevention and physical performance.  But as usual, the equine world is at least 30 years away from accepting this, and integrating the change from the human athlete world into the equine athlete world. So on this subject, modern equine biomechanics, the cheese stands alone. 

So, which method of training to use?  None of these are perfect. None of these really address a Holistic Approach that seeks to touch on all the things. 

Scale back and look at classical training.  Both Western and European.  Fact; we do not know what that actually looked like. We have no videos of the ancient medieval systems that some of us romanticise.  It may have been glorious.  Or it may have been problematic.  We might interpret the writings and treatise about them and transform them now into something which considers the horse as a thinking, feeling creature who has a right to say what they need and want.  But how often is this actually the case?

Most of us are aware that forceful and manipulative training that is fundamentally selfish or abusive towards the horse and not the way to be.  We know this.  But we don't have any valid other alternatives.  

Just like we have regular soda, and diet soda, we basically eschew Forceful Training for Diet Forceful Training.  Light Force.  We mostly listen to the horse, but in the end, we are going to make our agenda be priority.  We want the horse to explore postural variability, but in the end, we want them round and collected the way we want them to be.  We like that the horse has the right to say no, but in the end, we use best practices behaviourism to get what we want from them, with a 100% success rate.  

So how does Emotional Horsemanship differ from all of the above? Stay with me dear reader...