06/14/2026
One of the common things I see when a horse is having a problem is people immediately trying to guess what happened to that horse in the past.
Maybe he was abused. Maybe someone kicked on him too much. Maybe he was never turned out. Maybe he was ridden too hard. Maybe he was never handled correctly. Maybe somebody scared him. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Most of the time, those thoughts come from a good place. People are trying to understand the horse. They are trying to explain what they are seeing. They are trying to be fair to the horse. I understand that part of it.
The problem is that those guesses usually do not help you evaluate the horse standing in front of you.
The first reason is simple. You will probably never know if your guess is right or wrong. If you decide a horse acts a certain way because he was abused in the past, how are you going to prove that? How are you going to know if that is actually what happened? How are you going to get accurate feedback on whether your interpretation was correct?
Most of the time, you cannot.
That means you are building your decisions on something you cannot confirm.
The second problem is even bigger. When you start working from what you think happened in the past, you stop working from what the horse is actually telling you right now. You start explaining behavior instead of evaluating behavior. You start making excuses instead of making decisions. You start treating your suspicion like it is a fact.
That is dangerous.
The horse in front of you is giving you hard truths. His feet, his body, his expression, his response to pressure, his willingness, his resistance, his timing, his softness, his brace, his focus, his lack of focus — those are things you can see. Those are things you can test. Those are things you can work with. Those are things that give you feedback.
What you think happened five years ago is a guess.
Guesses have no place in decisionmaking.
The horse may have had a rough past. He may not have. He may have been mishandled. He may have simply never been trained. He may have learned to avoid work. He may be scared. He may be spoiled. He may be confused. He may be disrespectful. He may be physically limited. He may be several of those things at once.
My job is not to write a story about his past.
My job is to correctly read what he is showing me today.
That does not mean I am unsympathetic. It does not mean I do not care what a horse has been through. It means I care enough about the horse to deal with the truth in front of me instead of getting lost in a story I may never be able to prove.
A horse does not need me to feel sorry for the version of his past I invented. He needs me to be accurate. He needs me to be fair. He needs me to make good decisions based on what he is actually doing.
If the horse is scared, I need to recognize fear and help him through it. If the horse is confused, I need to make the answer clearer. If the horse is evading, I need to recognize that too. If the horse is ignoring me, crowding me, bracing against me, or taking over the situation, I need to deal with that horse honestly.
The past may explain how a horse got here, but it does not change what is standing in front of me.
Training has to be based on what the horse is telling me now.
Not what I suspect.
Not what I imagine.
Not what would make the story more emotional.
The proof is in the pattern. If I watch the horse closely enough, the horse will tell me what I need to know. My job is to believe the horse in front of me more than I believe the story in my head.
