Horses Don’t Lie

In his book Horses Don’t Lie Chris Irwin has this to say about how we affect our horses behaviors.

“In other sports, if you’re not having your best day, it doesn’t bother your equipment. Your golf clubs don’t care if you slice and your surfboard doesn’t care if you fall off.

Horses, however, care intensely. Remember, they’re counting on us to provide clearly consistent leadership-we are the ones who are supposed to know what we’re doing. So when they sense a wobbly, unbalanced, on-the-edge-of-control rider it troubles them. It shakes their trust and leads them to rebel against what they are being asked to do. And as typically seen, here’s where all sorts of horse behavior problems begin.”

Often when our horse is acting up we just assume it’s him who is having a bad day when in reality most of the time we need to take a look at ourselves first before we lay the responsibility on our horse. While this isn’t always easy to remember when we ask our horse for a nice slow lope and he goes into an out of control canter we’d do well to check in with ourselves first before we discipline our horse.