Equine & Facilities Team

• Creating Better Horse Pastures - Webinar

• Using Freedom and Choice in Horsemanship

• Article on Learned Helplessness

• How To Train Low Energy Horses

• Karen Rolf Podcast - Covers many topics! Here are 3 I've listened to recently

  • • • 109 - Warwick Schiller

      • 113 - 5 and 3 Challenge

      • 116 - Making Progress with Limited Time

A horse’s foremost priority is safety and horses view all interactions with humans through this lens. When horses’ are interacting with humans they interact with them in one of two ways. The first is seeing a human as a predator and a danger. In this circumstance, horses will choose fight or flight. When interacting in a therapeutic setting, horses need to be given these options to protect themselves when they are approached by a client who may be interacting in a predatory type manner. Flight may be as subtle as looking away or moving away or as extreme as kicking up and running away, pushing through fences or jumping out of spaces.

The second way a horse may view a human is as a fellow herd member. In this context the horse will determine who has the leadership role in the herd of two. The leader is charged with keeping the horse or herd safe. Thus, establishing this pecking order is critical for a horse’s sense of self-preservation. Horses will test the human’s leadership to determine the roles in the herd of two for self-preservation.

Horses establish leadership by moving each other. Horses may move another horse or human just simply by moving their body into their space or by pinning their ears, by stretching their heads forward and into a human’s space, by showing their teeth, nipping or in more extreme cases by biting or kicking.

Horses often use more violent (as defined by humans) means like biting and kicking when other means are ineffective and the horse feels he or she must attain the leadership role in order to be safe. Horses do not use these methods to “be mean or rude” or because they “have poor manners” but instead for their own safety.

To this end, horses are keenly aware of emotional changes that would indicate aggression, lack of confidence, fear and make decisions regarding their responses according to these emotional states. Any professional working with the horses in a therapeutic way should be aware that horses of any training level may offer feedback in any way at any time. It is the responsibility of the equine professional to keep sessions physically safe regardless of the horses’ feedback. A therapeutic goal is not worth pursuing at the expense of physical safety. However, accurate feedback from the equine is the lynchpin of the therapeutic environment. At-risk youth are far more likely to accept feedback from their equine partners that rebuke from adults and thus are more likely to strive for change and find Jesus’s grace.