I just finished 6 weeks of clinics in the US and I’m heading home to Australia in a few hours. At my clinics, I talk a lot and try to demonstrate the communication between a horse and a rider. I describe working with a horse as a constant conversation.

Every once in a while somebody will ask me how can we know what a horse is thinking and feeling since they don’t talk. My answer is always that they do talk. They never shut up. They just don’t verbalize a lot. But they are definitely chatterboxes and I for one am glad they can’t verbalise their thoughts. Problem is that we confuse our inability to hear them with their inability to talk.

Some horses are quieter in their chatter than others. The quietest horses are the shut-down horses. These are the ones that build a metaphorical wall between them and their human. They usually seem very quiet and unresponsive. People often mistakenly identify this quietness as calmness and relaxation. Yet, most times the opposite is true. Inside these horses is a bubbling mess of tumultuous emotions and thoughts. They are often no less troubled than a horse that is jumping out of its skin, the difference is that the shut-down horse stuffs all the trouble nside and the jumpy horse wears it on its sleeve.

In my experience, horses become shut-down as a learned behaviour, a survival strategy. I think it happens mostly because when they talk, we are not listening. If a horse feels nobody is listening, it will stop talking. The futility of expressing themselves overwhelms them and they power down their expressiveness. They stop trying and we can’t tell if they are happy or miserable. We can’t tell if they are searching for an answer or sleeping. We caused that by telling them we were not listening. We told them we didn’t care what they had to say. When they asked us a question we did not reply in a way they could understand. When we saw them trying to solve a problem we did not provide clarity to guide them to a solution.

Shut down horses appear quiet and safe. They are not. Shut-down horses appear calm and relaxed. They are not. Shut down horses appear happy. They are not. And we do that to them. So when your horse has something to say, they need to know you are listening - even if your plan and their plan differ. They need to know somebody is listening and not be discouraged from talking by our deafness.