The blog is back!!
To say I’ve had a few things change would be an understatement.
Finished my Masters of Research with a thesis in Rider Biomechanics
Moved from NSW to QLD
Enrolled in Veterinary Science at University of QLD
Became an acknowledged retrainer for the Queensland Off The Track Programme (QOTT)
So yep, life is and has been a little busy. But I’m back now and open to hearing what topics you’d like me to dive into.
For the moment though, I’ve been having a thought recently and it keeps coming up. Here’s my thought:
I think we forget sometimes that horses never signed up for riding or work. It’s easy to say (I joke about it too!) that they have an easy life. They only work a few hours a week, unlike those humans who work hard to pay for them. They have everything they need (or that we think they need… but that’s another story). That they really do have a good life so there’s no excuse for a bad attitude towards work
The thing is though, horses don’t know any of that. They don’t know they’re doing less work than other horses, or than the humans around them. They don’t know that we only plan to ride for 20 minutes and we have an easy ride planned. They don’t know that if they just do ____ we’ll be done and the rider will get off.
They don’t know.
All they are faced with is the prospect of doing something potentially hard. They don’t know how often, for how long, what that hard thing is, and whether or not it may even hurt.
It’s like us going to the gym twice a week to do something that’s really damn hard. At best we end up a bit muscle sore, but sometimes we actually injure ourselves. Only horses didn’t join the gym. They can’t even justify that the exercise is good for them. Someone else signed them up for it, dragged them there, made them exercise and is most likely not able to understand or acknowledge when the horse says the workout is too intense, too long, or actually painful.
So I get it, I think my horses have an easy life too. I joke about it often. But there’s a difference between joking about it and forgetting how they truly view the world and their life within it.
So try this, every time you think of something from your horse’s perspective, check in: do they actually know what I know?