“The point I would hope to make is that my choices and your choices are all valid as long as we adhere to the first principle of horsemanship — that whatever we choose is always in the best interest of the horse.”

This is a quote Denny Emerson from the closing paragraph of Begin and Begin Again: The Bright Optimism of Reinventing Life with Horses.

In describing that competitive mindset he says, “everything I had been doing was based on too much — too much force, too much pressure, too much too soon, too much assumption that my horse knew what I wanted but was simply not doing it right, too much, too much. I wasn’t teaching, I was forcing.”

I think that most of us who have been riding horses for some time have been guilty of doing too much. I certainly have and it’s resulted in lots of “make them do it” moments and “don’t let them get away with it” decisions.

As Denny says, the use of force with your horse “always escalates because force creates anxiety in the horse, anxiety creates resistance, resistance elicits more force from the rider to counteract it, and down the rabbit hole we go”.

So I hope you're listening to your horse, and you're experimenting with ways to train your horse with connection and relaxation. Please remember that you are an individual, your horse is an individual and your relationship with your horse is unique. Please choose in the best interest of the horse because that choice is in your best interest too.

Here's a link to the Second Half Horsemanship website.

And a link to Descript, my go-to choice for audio and video editing.