What I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Riding
My journey to a stronger partnership with my horse
‘Looking for the impossible…’
This is something I see every day on social media sites like Kent Equestrian Grapevine and in online marketplaces like Horsemart. These ads are generated by people looking for a horse that is ‘100%’. Aka, a horse that doesn’t nap, kick, buck, bolt, rear, barge, weave, bite, spin… the list is endless. Additionally, of course, said horse also has to be completely sound, the right height and the right age (commonly, that’s between 7 and 12).
‘Looking for the impossible,’ I hear you say?
That’s because it is impossible.
Humans have got this ‘100%’ idea all wrong; there is no horse out there that is 100% and that’s because so called ‘behavioural issues’ or ‘bad habits’ are labelled as such when their surfacing is unexplained. Or, to look at it differently, all horses are 100%, but we just don’t understand them.
Since all behaviours are ways for our horses to communicate with us, it’s important that we understand one thing: Horses only know how to be horses.
This is something I wish I had learnt before I got into riding. I have spent a lot of time over the years wondering why my horse was being ‘naughty’ (bucking me off) and what I could do to teach him it was wrong. I talked to previous owners, then to farriers, dentists, vets, saddlers, nutritionists, and even equine Shiatsu specialists to get to the core of the problem — but, of course, I didn’t find an answer.
Then I realised that like love, ‘naughtiness’ is a human construct; that horses don’t understand what it is to be naughty, and therefore, they simply can’t misbehave.
This prompted me to think about all the times I had been victim to my horse’s violent, ‘unexplained’ outbursts, and slowly, I begun to understand what he might have been trying to say (‘this task is too much/too soon’).
Had I accepted this earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time trying to find an answer in all the wrong places, and it would have stopped me listening to the person who told me that persevering with my ‘naughty’ horse was just not worth it.
Listening to Mr. Not-worth-it led to me making the worst decision of my life — that selling my horse in the summer of 2016 was the best thing for both of us. I thought someone with a better seat might be able to sit the bucks; that someone with more experience might recognise where the problem began. I thought it wasn’t fair I couldn’t jump my horse seriously — that I was holding him back.
Obviously, I was wrong.
He went to someone ‘more experienced’ (hand-picked by people who had known him before I had ever set eyes on him) who would take him to shows and do all of the things that I couldn’t do with him. But the new girl had him four days before he bucked her off. Then, he came back to me.
I’ve learnt that ultimately it is miscommunication and human constructs that keep people from finding their ‘100%’ horse. This has helped me find peace in the saddle again, and most importantly, it’s helped me build a stronger partnership with my horse (even if it is second-time lucky).
