I was breaking in a Connemara filly, called Connie. She was only about 13.3 hh, but very stout and could easily carry an adult. But Connie was particularly jittery.
The first step is to become brilliant at observing everything about your horse. Not just the bad behaviour, but observe what happened before the bad behaviour. What happened before what happened happened.
Lately, I have been thinking about neurological traits in horses that might go unrecognised. Can a horse suffer chronic depression? Can they experience schizophrenia? What about paranoia or autism?
Now that the Paris Olympics is coming to an end, I expect some of the controversy over the conflict between horse events and animal welfare will subside for another four years. But it shouldn’t.
People are always chasing symptoms because it is the symptom that most bothers us. We view the symptom as the thing that gets in the way of what we want to do.
I think it is widely accepted that when two horses ask, “Am I in charge of you or are you in charge of me?”, the one who moves the feet of the other is the more dominant horse.
