On the first day of every clinic, I will ask every new student to tell me a little background history about their horse. It’s a normal procedure. Sometimes the horses are very new and owners and horses are just getting to know each other. Other times the horse has been with the owner since birth. Every horse comes to a clinic with a story.
Often I’ll be told that a horse has a shopping list of problems and poor behaviours and this is explained away by earlier training and handling by the previous owner(s). This is usually true. Our horses are the result of a combination of temperament and history. Their nature and how they were brought up and trained is the root cause of why they are like they are today.
However, sometimes we take blaming a horse’s past too far. Many years ago I was watching a clinic by Buck Brannaman and he said something that has stuck with me. To paraphrase, “If you have owned a horse for more than 2 weeks and have not started to make some changes you have to stop blaming the previous owner or the earlier handling.”
This sentiment was recently reinforced by a conversation with a student at a recent clinic. When I asked them about their horse I received a lengthy diatribe of how his previous owner had caused a litany of bad behaviour which my student was still dealing with despite having owned the horse for 5 years.
I don’t know about the “2 weeks” part, but I agree with the sentiment that we cannot continue to direct blame forever on a horse’s history for the issues it carries. At some point, we have to look inward for the cause of the problems or at the very least why things are not improving.
Of course, I am talking about emotional and training problems. I am not talking about horses that have issues because of previous injury or conformation. Those can continue to be life-long impediments to a horse’s progress in some cases.
I have always felt that when a horse knocks on my door and asks if they can work with me, I am going to expect them to do their best to fit into my program. But that has never happened. Every horse I have owned has had no say about coming to live with me. They didn’t get consulted about what they wanted. Since I dragged them into my life I feel it is my absolute responsibility to step up and do everything I know to the best of my ability to make their life as easy and comfortable as possible. My horses owe me nothing, but I owe them all I have to give.
I believe looking in the rearview mirror for the cause of a horse’s problems is not helpful. It may be nice to know that the reason a horse fidgets when being saddled is because on its first saddling the saddle slipped under its belly. But it does not change a single thing how you might approach helping the horse become more comfortable about being saddled. Knowing why a horse fidgets does not explain or justify why the problem is still there after a month or 6 months or 6 years.
I’m not trying to make people feel bad because they are dealing with horse issues that persist seemingly forever. But I want to make clear the solution to those problems don’t exist in a horse’s past. The solutions exist in their future and we are the ones in control of that.
I just like this photo. Ben Moxon from England is riding my horse, Riley in our 10 hectare arena while I coach on him. Ben and Sari visited us at our home in NSW for a few weeks back in 2017.