I believe that time is essential for any rider to make a connection with the horse, to assess the horse’s mental and physical well-being. And it’s a responsibility, just part of the lifestyle of horsemanship.

There are many ways to interact with your horse that will improve your partnership. But there are practical reasons for getting to know your own horse, too. Years ago, a barn where I worked had several wealthy clients who were novice horse owners. The policy for those clients was that they could call ahead and the staff would have their horses ready, groomed, tacked and standing in crossties when they arrived. They would come into the barn and a staff member would greet them and help them get organized, adjusted and out the door to the arena. Once, though, the wife opted to ride on her own on a day when the barn was closed. That meant she had to get her lovely bay mare out of its stall, groom it and tack it on her own – maybe for the first time ever in her riding career.

Luckily one of the training staff stopped in just as client wife had completed grooming and tacking. There was, indeed, a horse in the crossties, groomed to a shine and wearing the client’s tack. And it was a bay horse. A bay stallion. (!!) That belonged to another boarder.

Yes, all the experienced horsemen and -women reading this are cringing at the little movie in their heads, the one in which novice rider thinks she’s getting on her quiet, well-mannered mare and instead mounts someone else’s not-so-docile stallion and havoc ensues. Yikes! Happily for all concerned, that was averted. But, really folks. Spend the time. Do the work. Get to know your own horse.

If you don’t go home from the barn dirty, you didn’t do it right!

“The folks at Insure.com also say that ill-advised Facebook postings increasingly can get your insurance cancelled or cause you to pay dramatically more for everything from auto to life insurance coverage.

“You take your classic Camaro out for street racing, soar above the hills in a hang glider, or smoke like a chimney? Insurers are increasingly turning to the web to figure out whether their applicants and customers are putting their lives or property at risk, according to Insure.com.”

First, do these insurance company reps really believe that everyone tells nothing but the truth in their tweets and posts? That’s like believing what you read in personals ads, and I’m here to tell you that every single man on the planet isn’t kind, honest and addicted to sunsets and cuddling. Wise up, guys!

Second, I wonder how long it will be before all of us involved with horses, doing things insurers are surely going to classify as a potentially (profitably) dangerous, will be paying higher health and life insurance premiums than the average couch potato. And, of course, some riding disciplines will no doubt be considered even more dangerous. (All you folks who jump better start saving now to pay your extra premiums.)

I don’t know why I found this information shocking. I had a similar experience recently when I was exploring changing carriers for my professional liability insurance. In fact, all my fellow equine professionals who purchase liability insurance to cover their lesson and training activities will probably encounter this sometime soon.

In my case, even after I had filled out a rather detailed application form, the underwriting department at the new company I was considering actually based some of the decision about whether to cover me and how much risk I posed (therefore, how much premium I should pay) on information gleaned from my website.

Yep, all those prying financial questions on the application form, and the inevitable affirmation of truth and accuracy that precedes your signature, don’t give them enough information. So, they comb through your online marketing materials, assuming their interpretation of your promotional copy will give them a more accurate risk assessment. (I’d say “justify charging a larger premium,” but that’s just my interpretation.)

How preposterous is it to think that marketing information, by definition intended to sell your organization and services to potential clients, in any way represents a concrete, objective picture of your company? That makes no sense at all, unless your promotional copy reads like a resume or a statistical analysis. “In 2008, XYZ Riding Centre provided 635 riding lessons to 85 clients with a reported success rate of 93 percent.” I don’t think so!

The point of marketing is to be subjective, to puff up and overstate and exaggerate and generally paint a rosy picture. The degree to which those things are done differs depending on the personality of the person whose services are being sold. Some of the training gurus come on with all the subtlety of used-car salesmen, while others take a less flamboyant approach. (Someone recently referred to my web bio as “humble.”)

In my case, the fact that I include on my site biographical information about a frequent collaborator, who has her own business entity and her own insurance, initially increased the rate I was quoted. Of course I had merely neglected to include her on my application form as an employee who also needed to be covered, right? And I then I mistakenly avowed that the information I provided was correct by signing the form, all the while leaving off this employee that an underwriter discovered listed on my website?

Luckily, the agent I was working with realized all this and was able to clarify for the underwriters. No, I did not forget to include an employee on my application. No, I do not need coverage for someone who is not part of my organization. And no, I was not making a fraudulent statement when I signed the form. If the person was an employee and I was responsible for insuring her, I would have indicated such on the form in the space provided.

On my website, I never, ever state in any way that this person is my employee; in fact her own business name appears prominently and there is a link to her very own website. So, clearly whomever was doing the gleaning in this case didn’t do a very good job of accurately determining actual risk. And that person’s mistake could have cost me money.

This type of practice seems inherently inefficient and practically guarantees mistakes, making it seem to me to be a bad idea notwithstanding the privacy issues. If the insurers don’t believe an applicant has provided truthful information on my application form, either turn the person down or ask for clarification. If the underwriters need to know something that wasn’t covered on the form, don’t pretend they can read between the lines of advertising copy or a social networking page and come up with concrete information.

In short, do not just pick a number out the air (or cyberspace) and expect me to pay a premium that in no way reflects the risk exposure I represent.

A big thanks to Tami George – dressage rider extraordinaire and honest, sensible insurance professional – for educating me about some of the nuances, such as the actuarial difference between an “instructor” and a “trainer.” (Be sure to ask your insurer for that company’s interpretation; you might be surprised which is considered to present a higher risk.) Her company’s quote didn’t make any sense whatsoever (they expected me to pay a higher premium for “activities” they didn’t cover)?! Even though she didn’t earn my business, I do very much appreciate the time she took to educate me a bit about her industry.

So, folks, if you’re in the market for personal insurance of any kind, you might just want to consider taking all those lovely pictures of you with your horse off any publicly available site. (And be sure to get your friends to stop “tagging” you in their photos.) Maybe you should replace your horse photos with nice shots of you doing some safe activity, like sitting quietly in a sturdy chair writing checks to insurance companies.

As for us equine professionals … I’m not sure how we’re going to promote our businesses without fueling the flames of rising premiums. But get ready, your words and images and even things you don’t say or do will be used to attempt to extract your hard-earned income and enrich the insurance companies.

Read more here: “Look who’s lurking around your Facebook page: Your insurance company!“

Started the morning in sauna-like humidity (for Arizona) with the hardworking pair Diane and her beloved Roy. He is just under 11 months out from colic surgery and coming back splendidly thanks to her diligence at keeping him moving and happy right from the start. She says he feels stronger and more supple than ever! And she’s riding better than ever, too, thanks in part to the horses she worked with during Roy’s convalescence. Today we did a challenging bending exercise using a simple labyrinth, plus used cavaletti and a small crossrail to help stabilize her jump position. Much sweat, big smiles and much licking and chewing!

Later, I was assistant at yet another successful young-horse backing, this time the first ride for my old friend Amy’s three-year-old Friesian-cross gelding. And, like the last time, the structure of the session was built around the simple groundwork exercises I have been teaching to this gangly-but-sweet youngster for about six weeks now. Amy had been slowly introducing saddle and bridle over the past few weeks and he was pretty much unconcerned about all of that. (He had been trained to drive by his previous owner, so no real surprise that a saddle and bridle weren’t all that strange to him.)

She had also been leading him up to a mounting block and standing on it without incident; though, today he did have a little issue with her standing up there while I led him in serpentines near it and then asked him sometimes to stop with the freakishly tall human on one side of him and me on the other side. Mild baby horse sensory overload. We solved that by making the space within easy reach of the mounting block “the scritch zone.” When he stood there, he got scratched on all his itchy spots, which were plentiful as his late summer shed is in full molt. Of course, sometimes you have to lean on the saddle to reach the scratchy spot way down on the opposite hip. At one point, while his eyes were all soft and snoozy, I just put a hand on his shoulder in case I needed to steady him and Amy climbed on.

Minor weight shifting and worried eye-crinkling, but I think his passenger’s adrenaline spiked more than the horse’s did. After he’d had a good chance to feel his rider – and gotten quite a few more scratches to his itchy withers – we went for a little groundwork walk, turning in big soft S-turns and even introducing the concept of stopping from the seat. Much petting, a little sweat and even a few nice, deep breaths with the rider astride!

A video clip showed up on my facebook wall recently and brought up, once again, the technique known as Laying a Horse Down. I wrote about this topic in an earlier post, but this encounter with the issue sent me on a different mental path.

Probably because I have been working with a horse whose way of being in the world resembles descriptions of humans with post-traumatic stress disorder, I started thinking about how to describe what I believe to be some of the psychological costs of this extreme and wrong-minded technique.

For those of you who haven’t encountered this type of horse “taming,” the basic program is this:

• First, you restrain an animal who is programmed to survive by running away,
• Then you force him to the ground, into a position where even his ability to draw breath is compromised,
• Finally, you lay on top of him to simulate a fatal attack by a predator.

You make this operation sound beneficial by saying it will help the horse get over his fear of you. You say that afterward he will be so thankful that you didn’t actually kill him, he will then trust and respect you.

Maybe a screwed-up Stockholm syndrome version of trust and respect. Isn’t it much more logical to expect this animal to fear you? Loathe you. Dread being in your presence ever again and find some way to prevent it. But trust you? That’s got to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

Ever see a baby bunny (or any other small animal) that has been caught by a well-fed cat? Bunny goes limp and plays dead, because if it moves it becomes way more fun for kitty – who isn’t really hungry – to play with. It’s called tonic immobility and it’s hardwired in to prey animals and, incidentally, humans.

If the cat loses interest or some interfering person comes along and convinces it to let the bunny go pretty quickly, the baby might scamper off to safety. But if the cat has been toying with the bunny for some time before the reprieve or rescue, the bunny might stay immobile, as if it can no longer move. As if it has given up and decided it’s already dead. Sometimes, if you find a quiet, safe place to leave these babies alone, they eventually come back to life and when you go back to check on them, they are gone. Other times, you simply find them dead, even if they didn’t have a mark on them. I have always felt that there was some mechanism – some kind of psychic tipping point – in these animals that makes them give up and die even when they are physically unharmed.  And, there is more than one way to die – the physical body can die, but so can the emotional/spiritual body.

There’s a lot of interesting research on the web linking this type of instinctive immobility during a traumatic experience to human psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative behaviors, anxiety disorders and even catatonia. One very interesting blog even linked the chemistry involved in this reflex to chronic pain in humans.

So, what exactly is a person doing to a horse by intentionally forcing the animal into this state? The justifications for perpetrating this kind of primal attack on a horse makes no sense to me, on any level – intellectual or emotional. Everything I know about what happens when a living being’s very survival is threatened tells me this horse, deprived of his first line of defense – flight – will either fight until he is horribly injured or dead or he will just check out mentally and emotionally, dissociating to the point that it’s as if he barely lives in his body anymore. Those vacant-eyed, shutdown horses may seem safe to people are either afraid of horses but won’t admit it or “easy to handle” for those are too lazy to do the work to create a respectful relationship with their horses, but doing that to another living being is a travesty. What, Stepford wives weren’t enough? Now we want Stepford horses?

Make no mistake. Horses who have been induced to check out are neither tamed nor trained. Both of those are processes that take time. Training is a mutual process of teaching and learning. How well would you learn if you were trussed up, forced to the ground and had somebody lay on top of you? (I believe when humans do that kind of thing to each other, it’s called assault!?)  If it’s such a great teaching tool for the early education of a living creature, why aren’t elementary schools the world over simply employing thugs to tie up the students and sit on them while the teacher expounds on the subject of the day? Wouldn’t that produce quiet, respectful students?

What makes me the maddest about the people who promote and defend this type of “training” method is that we know better, each and every one of us human beings. We can’t say that because we are predators, we just don’t directly relate to the instinctual responses of a prey animal. Although our intelligence and ability to design all manner of tools and techniques to maim and kill places us atop the food chain as master predators, don’t forget that we also have in our collective memory the experience of being prey. There are all manner of predators who can take down a human being, so we have that primal knowledge programmed in, as well.

Don’t think so? Just imagine dumping a couple of suburban families off in the Australian outback, the remote Canadian Rockies, the Amazon rain forest or a mid-east desert with no satellite phone, no weapons and no survival training. Are they predators or prey? Or ask anyone who has been physically abused or assaulted by a by another human. Freeze, flight, fight, fright – we’ve got it all in our circuits, too.

I have owned two horses in my life whom I suspected had been thrown as part of their early experiences with humans. Both were hyper-vigilant, dissociative, over-reactive and “hard to handle,” not because that was the underlying personality of either, but because of what had been done to them in the guise of “training.” With years of patience and consistency, they both found their places in the world and learned to exist fairly successfully with people. But the fear and discomfort they had to endure and overcome was entirely unnecessary. So much time and potential gone to waste. Their lives were made much harder and less happy because of a few misguided moments with the wrong people. That’s just wrong.

“Hi, this is Stan from Equine Somethingorother and I see you indicated you were having some problems with horseflies.”

“I did what?” (Mind you, I am most emphatically not a morning person and my brain cells were not primed for a telemarketing call.)

“You submitted an interest card, probably at a horse expo or show …”

“Nope. Didn’t happen. First, don’t you think it’s a little early for a business call? And second, I have not been to a horse event in years, so I am quite sure I did not submit any kind of card. Good-bye.”

Does someone at this company (regrettably, I failed to rouse the brain cells enough to ask him to repeat the name) really think that I don’t know whether or not I requested information from them? That I won’t realize they just prospected my contact info. off the web and cold-called me (despite my number being on the national no-call list)?

And even if I were interested in what they’re selling, would I buy from an organization that started off our professional relationship with a blatent – and completely unnecessary – lie? If he had said “we saw your website and thought you might be interested in our products,” I still would have suggested he was calling a bit early, but I wouldn’t have been angry.

If any of my fellow horse biz professionals get a call from this guy, please email me the name of the company so I can check them out!

Just this morning I worked with a new student who made truly unprecedented progress at finding a more balanced and free-moving seat on horseback. She was referred by my talented yoga colleague Jenny Kendall, who had already pre-programmed in some of the crucial awareness of body and breath. Made my job – and that of my faithful school horse – so much easier. And the student, an adult coming back to riding after a decade away from horses, is going to recapture (and, I suspect, exceed) her previous riding competence with much less of the pain and stiffness she expected. Everybody wins!

Then, this afternoon I sent out a new edition of my business newsletter featuring an article on practical and emotional preparations for the death of an equine companion. I had commissioned it written by client, friend and celebrant extraordinaire Kristine Bentz. That project grew out of a shared experience this spring when a barnmate spent an agonizingly frustrating day juggling all the logistics to put down her cherished horse. Instead of spending a sad-but-calm day enjoying his company and easing both their transitions before the scheduled euthanasia, she was on the phone for hours finding a suitable burial place and negotiating last-minute for the necessary equipment.

In addition to creating a lovely (but short) ceremony on the fly that day to acknowledge and celebrate the horse/human bond, Kristine provided a wealth of practical information about backhoes and cremation facilities and state laws regarding burials. As the owner of a 27-year-old horse, I realized I really can’t escape thinking about plans for his final day (though, happily, he’s not showing any signs of going anywhere any time soon.) And really, all of us who share our lives with horses know on some level that injury or colic could strike any day. Better to be prepared than to add worry and frustration to an already fraught situation. So I’m very happy to have a resource who knows how to help folks channel their emotions and find a heavy-equipment operator after hours.

Thanks ladies!

Of course free longing isn't fun for a horse who is allowed to be heavy on the forehand, slamming into the ground at every gait.

Why in the world would a horse dislike any exercise he was carefully and respectfully taught to do? If the human thoughtfully plans and competently executes a progression of training exercises designed so each skill builds from what has been mastered before, most horses are pretty happy to play along.

Of course some skills will come more easily for each horse, depending on breed, conformation, temperament and experience. The build that makes rollbacks and spins a breeze might render extensions more of a challenge. The horse who loves to gallop cross country might find quiet, collected work more mentally difficult. But there’s no reason for any horse to take special exception to being asked to trot a correct 20-meter circle, to walk quietly when being led from the off side or to canter in civilized fashion over a pole.

In my own experience, my horses have only balked at doing what I ask in a few situations:

•    Instances when I got in a hurry and didn’t teach the mechanics of the movement well enough in an orderly sequence. I hit the ground a few times from horses who had natural talent but who hadn’t mastered the mechanics of jumping well enough to help them problem solve in less-than-perfect conditions.

•    Times when I didn’t adequately prepare my horse physically to accomplish the task without discomfort. It took several years before I could school lateral work with my long-backed race-bred Quarter Horse without his loin are getting really sore, but eventually I figured out the combination of conditioning and bodywork that let him learn lateral work happily.

•    Situations when imbalance, imprecision or incomplete understanding of my own biomechanics meant my body was moving (or not moving) in a way that either confused the horse or actually prevented him from doing what I thought I was asking him to do. Not long ago I had to apologize profusely to a very frustrated horse after a session in which I was trying to work out the “geometry” of the seat aids to transition from leg yield to half pass.

Teach the horse to balance and move with ease and comfort, and the same exercise becomes fun and beneficial for horse and handler.

I’m working with a couple of horses now whose posture choices and balance habits mean one “hates the round pen” and the other “kicks out a lot, so be careful of him on the longe line.” Both of them exhibit some combination of classic bad carriage on a circle – head high, hollow back, hindquarters disengaged and nose tipped out, shoulder dropped in, hindquarters disengaged. And both display the discomfort of their lack of balance on a circle quite similarly – they careen around at top speed, slam on the brakes unsolicited and try to cut across the circle or turn without being asked. Hyperness, histrionics and generally much ado about nothing. Walk/trot/canter/halt/turn on a circle is not difficult, advanced work. But those skills do form the basis for advanced work, so it’s important for both horse and human to find a way to practice and perfect them happily, completely and with confidence in their abilities.

I’m betting that after I invest some patience and time, a little bodywork and a lot of miles of groundwork, both of these horses will be converts and will enjoy learning new, fun exercises in the roundpen and on the longe line. I like it! And I’m betting so will they.

It all started off well. The place was beautiful and full of high-quality horses. The accommodations for our horses were quite good and the barn staff was friendly and extremely helpful. The boarders in the barn where our horses were housed were welcoming, initiating conversation and generally being super nice. Great. And then came the downside.

Although we were told we would have “half” the arena to ride in, we kept being warned that “the reiners have the right of way.” Clearly that was the party line on the property; I asked one of the boarders who was also riding in the clinic why that point was made so many times. “Surely they wouldn’t ride right through a clinic or deliberately get in someone’s way, right?” The answer was a wry smile and a repeat of the mantra: “the reiners have the right of way.”  Hmmm.

Well, our “half’ of the arena turned out to be a very tiny corner, which had the benefit of an open, raised area where chairs could be placed for the auditors. For some reason, that remote corner, farthest from the gate, seemed to be a magnet for one “reiner” (not multiple reiners) who was a complete and utter jackass. Apparently his idea of necessary and appropriate training and arena etiquette included the following activities:

• Riding along the rail into our little corner, getting between the auditors and the clinician so that everyone photographing or videotaping ended up with his head bobbing through the shots. One day he spent the best part of two hours galloping one horse through that area over and over and over with no regard for the clinician or the riders. Rude, annoying, unsafe.
• Running at speed from the far end of the arena into a space just outside our little circle (except when it encroached into the space) and sliding his horse over and over and over. He could just as easily have moved over and slid into an area closer to the other corner, or chosen to go width-ways and stay out of our space completely. At one point, he slid his horse to a stop about 20 feet from our clinician. Rude, inappropriate, unsafe.
• Doing obviously deliberate “fly-bys” of the clinic riders as they were trying to warm up and cool down their horses outside the clinic area so as not to interfere with their fellow riders. At one point he stopped his horse right off my left flank and then yee-hawed to a gallop so close to me that if I’d had the presence of mind to stick out my elbow I could easily have knocked him off his horse. In any discipline, that’s a deliberate attempt to get someone dumped. I’ve done it myself, but not since I was about 10. Rude, immature, unsafe. I wonder what his liability insurance carrier (or that of the owner of the multi-million-dollar facility) would think of the risk he represents?

To make matters worse, he seems to be teaching his young students to be just as awful as he is. The second day of the clinic, the arena emptied out completely in the afternoon with the exception of the clinic riders, the jerk and two of his students, both young girls. They had the entire rest of the 150 x 300 arena in which to work, but he kept sending them right into our little corner. During my lesson, I was riding a 20- to 30-meter circle around the clinician and these girls kept getting in front of me. My horse had settled in by then and didn’t care, so I just held my line and made them move. One of the girls had the good grace to look a little sheepish, but the other had a nasty little sneer. Trainer’s pet, no doubt. Appalling, horrifying, unsafe. And what are their parents thinking?!

I don’t know whether this guy thought he was intimidating the clinician in breeches or showing off for the women auditors and riders. But he should have noticed that the very poised and confident young man from Vienna wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed by or even vaguely interested in his antics. And someone really should tell him that even women who don’t do reining (or haven’t done it in years, but used to!) can tell bad riding at a glance and are not impressed by it.

Sitting so far to the left that your poor horse nearly runs into the wall every time you go careening around the corner is not impressive. Dozens of crooked stops during which you are whacking your horse between the ears with a big stick are not impressive. Spins where the hindquarters end up moving faster than the front are not impressive. A young student with a horse cranked down in drawreins and a curb bit is not impressive. Oh, and I believe the conventional wisdom among real reiners is that a horse only has so many spins and so many slides in him, and when they’re used up the horse is no longer competitive. This guy seemed to be doing his best to use up his horses as fast as possible. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is different in his specialty, Arabian reining.

Frankly, all he did was make a complete fool of himself, make the facility that was apparently catering to him seem poorly and unsafely managed and spark a spirited debate among the participants about what specific physical inadequacy he might be compensating for. Hmmm … what do you think?!

For the past few months, this role has been played by a horse, an Appaloosa gelding named Chester. At 24, he was retired from a long and happy career as a trail horse, crippled by founder so bad that one of his front hooves looked like it had been twisted a quarter turn. Every time I interacted with this horse I marveled at his spirit, his calm acceptance of his lot in life and his unwavering good humor. Was he in pain every day? Absolutely. Did that stop him from enjoying his life. No way.

He was always bright eyed and inquisitive, interested in everything going on in the barn and, most of all, he was  very, very sweet. I got into the habit of dropping by for a visit most days I was at the barn, and I always got a happy, eager greeting. If he was lying down, which he did quite often to take the weight off those feet, he would roll to sternal position and reach out his nose to greet me. If he was standing, he wouldn’t usually walk to me, but he always made some gesture – a shift of weight or turn of the head to face me right on – to draw me to him.

For a horse who could barely move, he engaged his world quite fully and he certainly didn’t spend a single moment feeling sorry for himself. He’d stand in the corner of his run and play games through the fence with his neighbor, sometimes nuzzling or just touching noses and then a few minutes later engaging in mock battle, with ears back and snaky neck and all manner of threats. He loved his food and waited just as eagerly as all the others for his lunchtime pellets and supplements. He would stretch out flat on his side in the sun, soaking up the warmth while giving his feet a rest and enjoying the extra-fluffy shavings his owner bought to keep him from rubbing sores on his bony prominences.

And even though he could no longer do the job he had loved, carrying his human on miles and miles of trails, he still had plenty to contribute. The afternoon I met Chester and his owner, she had him outside the barn grazing and as I passed back and forth it became obvious she was upset about something. I made some banal comment about the horse enjoying the luxury of grass in the desert, introduced myself and talked with her long enough to find out that she was grieving the loss of a beloved pet dog and dealing with the stress of a husband deployed overseas. So where did she go for comfort? To her horse, of course.

I was also party to a small miracle, initiated and brilliantly executed by Chester, that drew out a young girl who had been traumatized by some awful, insensitive treatment by a teacher. She had withdrawn from the activities she once loved and refused to engage with any new people. But Chester, while standing innocently getting a massage, pulled her right out of that shell and got her involved in the massage process. She turned out to be a model bodywork student – bright, curious and with a talent for “feel.”

Anyone who knew Chester realized he wasn’t going to get better; in fact, he was steadily failing physically in spite of his bright spirit. His vet had recommended he be put down before the stress of summer heat took its toll, and his owner was slowly resigning herself to that plan. But suddenly last week the tendons in the worst of his forelegs started to shorten, causing him to knuckle over pretty severely in the fetlock. Nothing was going to fix that, and the risk of a traumatic injury was just too great. (Here’s where all us horse people cringe a little, imagining the painful mess that leg could become pretty easily.) So, Chester’s friend and caretaker of 22 years made the decision to end his pain, and he died very peacefully after a day of treats and loving attention and tearful good-byes from his many friends.

Rest well Chester, and thank you for cheering me up on many sad days. I’ll miss your bright eyes and sweet presence.