Fable Farm

08/20/2026

I remember Harry saying how leaving a horse in a state of confusion is a form of abuse.
And something else he said, which I have tattooed on my brain is, “we are always training for something we may not even be aware of (with our horses)”.

What The Horse Can Teach Us About "Abuse"

I was raised up in the "traditional" ways of working with horses, i.e., the horse isn't allowed to say "no", because they get twenty-three hours a day to themselves and therefore they can do what I want for one hour a day.

I still hear that sentiment echoed more often than I'd like.

I then met some pretty amazing people and learned a few things and came to understand that not only can horses say "no" but when they do it's my job to figure out why that "no" might be there and then see if I can do something to help the horse feel comfortable and confident re-shaping their response.

Shortly after that, I came across some additional (and also amazing) people whose life work is to bring to light all the things that might be happening outside of our ability to see them that might lead a horse to say "no". When you work mostly with what the public calls "problem horses", figuring out the why behind a horse's "no" is literally the job, so the more resources you can tap into and the more professionals and good folk you can add to your hive mind, the better.

For some time I didn't ask for too many details or backstory from owners. Talking about the history on a horse is something most people are very forthcoming about and I've learned that a lot of times we filter information through our world lens to such a degree that we almost create an alternative set of facts in our own minds. This happens a lot with horses people get through slaughter or rescue pipelines: if the horse is flinch-y or watch-y on the ground, he must have been beat. If a horse is fussy with the bit, he must have been ridden in harsh headgear or by someone with heavy hands. And so on, and so forth.

In the last couple years I've started to ask for quite a bit more information: I've gotten better at being able to filter out What Feels Important, but I've also learned that sometimes folks "accidentally" provide insight: not that they were withholding anything, they just didn't think of certain things as particularly relevant to the problem at hand.

Harry Whitney has a story he tells about the term "abuse". I know I won't do it justice so I won't endeavor to re-tell it, but suffice to say it involves an interview with an equine publication in which Harry was asked to acknowledge whether some practice or another was abusive. Harry's response was that it depended on whose definition of "abuse" they were using. The overarching point was that things we feel completely normal about and even do every day - both intentionally and unintentionally - can leave a horse feeling pretty darn abused, and so when we talk about what it means to abuse a horse, we might want to think about from whose perspective we're considering the term.

This understanding of whose perspective matters is important in the grand scheme of working with horses - the "problem" ones especially - because the first place I end up starting with the vast majority of horses when there is some issue is "do they understand what I'm asking for?" And more often than not, the answer is no. This isn't always where the journey ends in the search for the root cause of the issue, but experience has taught me that if the horse doesn't understand, I need to get that resolved as a matter of top priority. To perpetually be left to live in a place where the lines shift and you're left feeling uncertain, confused and frustrated, as well as increasingly anxious because you know you don't know but you're going to be asked to respond like you do...well, I could make a strong argument that that qualifies as abuse, even if it's unintentional.

Which brings me back around to Harry's response to that journalist, and to that word.

Because if I take seriously the idea that the horse gets a vote in what "understanding" looks like, I have to take just as seriously the idea that the horse gets a vote in what "abuse" looks like. Not the textbook definition, not the version that lives in a rulebook or some group's by-laws, not even the version I've built up over years of trying to do right by horses. The horse's version. And the horse's version doesn't care how normal something feels to me, or how many other trainers do it the same way, or how long it's been done that way before I ever showed up. A horse can't read the label on a piece of equipment or a training method and decide to feel fine about it because the label says "gentle."

This is uncomfortable, I know. It's a lot easier to have a fixed definition of abuse - something with hard edges, something we can hold up next to our own practices and say "see, I don't do that, so I'm fine." But the horses I end up working with, the ones who've said "no" loud enough that somebody finally listened, keep teaching me that the line isn't fixed at all. It moves. It moves horse to horse, day to day, sometimes minute to minute. What one horse shrugs off, another horse carries around with them, feeling poorly about it, for years. What we thought was small, unremarkable pressure turns out to be the exact thing that taught a particular horse the world isn't safe. And the thing is, it doesn't HAVE to be intentional: sometimes the worst offenses from the horse's point of view are the ones where we committed an oversight or just plain didn't know.

So when I ask an owner for backstory now, I'm not just collecting facts, I'm trying to find the moments nobody thought to flag - the ones that felt too ordinary to mention - because ordinary is exactly where a horse's private definition of abuse tends to hide. Plenty of good, honest work asks a horse to sit with discomfort for a while, but it's the kind that resolves into clarity, into confidence, into a horse who understands and therefore feels safer than he did before. That's not abuse, even if it didn't feel good going in.

That said, so much of we do - sometimes without even realizing it - is leaving the horse stranded in confusion and calling it training. What we owe the horse is honesty to keep checking our work against something other than our own comfort with the method. If we're paying attention, the signs in the horse aren't subtle. It's just easy to miss when we've decided ahead of time that what we're doing couldn't possibly be the problem.

08/10/2026

Well said Abbie

I am not a classically trained rider. I come from a world of varying disciplines over the years - hunter/jumper, dressage, working western - each one asking something different of me and of the horse beneath me. For a long time I was searching without quite knowing what for, chasing something that felt better than what I had at any given point in my riding. What I eventually came to understand was that the discipline is the icing, not the cake, and the cake is really what matters. No amount of frosting will save what was never built right underneath.

I spent years chasing a feeling I couldn't name, trying on one icing after another, looking for something that might finally feel like home in the saddle. What I've come to understand, mostly through the horses who asked the most of me, is that the feeling was never about the discipline at all. It was about whether the horse underneath me had access to his own balance, his own power, his own willingness to offer it up freely. A horse can look correct doing almost anything and still be braced, hollow, absent from himself. And a horse can be doing next to nothing - walking a slow circle, standing quietly in the middle of an arena - and be utterly, unmistakably present. This is what it means to me to allow a horse his birthright balance.

It isn't something you install. It's something every horse is born owning, and most are simply never shown how to find it, or are talked out of it somewhere along the way by hands that meant well but asked for shape instead of substance. Watching a horse begin to find it on his own never stops feeling like witnessing something sacred. Uphill balance isn't only a nicer way of moving through space - it's the quiet, unmistakable difference between a horse who is enduring you and a horse who is meeting you. After years spent with horses who carried real trouble in them, I've come to believe a horse cannot step into this kind of balance until he feels safe enough to risk it. Balance, in the end, is an act of trust before it is ever an act of movement.

I don't think I would know how to see any of this so clearly if it weren't for the horses who carried more, who took longer, who taught me not because I chose the lesson but because I had no choice but to learn it. And still, some days, I hardly know how to hold what I'm watching - that what a horse can offer, when you simply lead him back to what was always already his, is nothing short of brilliant.

07/29/2026

I’m feeling the need to climb on my soap box again.
I was listening to a podcast by a well known trainer, whom I respect, interviewing an up and coming young trainer. She was explaining her background which was wonderfully diverse and how she drew from the different disciplines methods that could help various horses. Love hearing that especially in the dressage world which seems to think the “traditional” I.e. German methods are the only way.
And then…..she talked about how valuable it is to utilize desensitization in training.
Oh. Hmmm.
So as I sat ruminating on that I felt the need to empty those thoughts here.
We can come at the problem with desensitizing from several angles.
First is, we want our horses to be sensitive to our aids , why would we teach them to be insensitive to anything in their world?
Or, how about the thought of how can you possibly desensitize your horse to everything in their world that may bother them?
Another way to look at it is, that in the practice of desensitization you are flooding your horses nervous system until the only pathway available to them is to shut down. Become so internalized that they are no longer participating in the world. Just wait til that horse wakes up! There is your “western moment”!
I want my horses to be aware of their environment and learn to process what is there and determine if that something is going to hurt them or not.
And if their fear or anxiety becomes too much, my horse seeks me for support and direction without it adding to their worry.
I want my horses to process rather than react in that moment. And if they do need to react, which is understandable (they are horses after all) I hope that I’ve done enough homework that I can do something positive to help them live through that moment.
So, that is why I hope to God the fad of desensitization disappears over time.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

07/28/2026

Finally wrapping up 2026 breeding season. Both Pebbles and Bellewood Forever are confirmed in foal to Sunday NRW (Sandro Hit/Donnerhall lines) due in 2027, fingers crossed!

And a very successful show for the George Clooney x Pebbles brothers at Otter Creek Dressage Fest.
Pandamonium FF starting to master 2nd level and The Rock FF (aka Dwayne) 3 years old, handling his very first show and winning all 4 tests. Julie Christie has been such a great partner in developing my young horses and I am so grateful.

07/05/2026

Our trailer-in saddle fitting day at Fable Farm in Rochester, MN is coming up soon!

Here are the details:
📍 July 22 | 9:00am–6:00pm

💲 $180 per saddle
💲 $20 trailer-in fee

If you’ve been thinking about getting on the schedule, now is the time. This dedicated days are a great way to get your horse seen without waiting for a full regular appointment slot.

Spots are limited and filling quickly, reach out today if you want in.

07/05/2026

Whatever you practice is what you're going to develop.

In the pursuit of better horsemanship, I've walked many different paths. Some of them have been dead ends. Some of them have required bushwhacking. Some of them I've gotten a bit lost on - or at least I felt lost in the moment - only to come out on the other side and realize I was never really lost in the first place.

One thing I've never done, though, is quit trying.

Oh, I've paused at times, for sure. I've sat with frustration until it went quiet on its own. There have been days I've questioned why I'm doing this at all. Days where I'm filming the session and I get off, or stop right in the middle of everything, rewind the footage and watch it back like it might confess something I missed the first time. I've gone to bed turning over what didn't work and woken up still turning it over. I've tweaked and adjusted and scrapped it all and started again, and again, and again.

I know folks who call horses their happy place. They go to the barn the way you'd slip out a side door - to get away from life, from the noise of family, the weight of work, the small daily wars we all carry. And I sometimes wonder if I'm doing something wrong, because horses have never been a place where I could hide. If anything, they've been the opposite of an escape. They've been a mirror held up at the worst possible angle - the one that shows you exactly what you don't want to see.

Horses have stripped me bare, over and over, and set me down in front of whatever I was avoiding. My impatience. My inconsistency. My need to be right instead of clear. My tendency to ask for softness while holding on so tight my hands forget how to open. There's no hiding from an animal built to read your body before you've finished the thought. They don't care what story I'm telling myself on the drive to the barn or the walk out to the pasture. They only answer the truth of what shows up in the round pen.

Maybe that's the trade I've made without ever quite deciding to. Other people get a refuge. I got a teacher who doesn't grade on effort, only on honesty. And somewhere along the way I stopped resenting that and started needing it because the version of me that horses ask me to become is a version I actually want to be, in the barn and out of it. Patient. Present. Willing to be wrong long enough to get it right.

So no, horses have never been my happy place. They've been something better and harder: the place I go to practice becoming who I'm trying to be - one paused video, one restarted session, one small honest correction at a time.

06/25/2026

Our August session sold out so fast we decided to run another one in July! Only 6 spots available for this one so sign up quick!

Click the link to reserve your spot!
https://bluevalleyclay.square.site/product/july-kids-clay-camp/BVNRNF7C43EKQXTBW7FBYFRM?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=29

06/20/2026

06/18/2026

For the second year in a row I participated in a demonstration on problem solving using foundational approaches to horsemanship at a local equine expo. At the close of the demo we opened the floor to questions, and someone asked me: if I had one piece of advice for folks trying to create a shift in a horse - regardless of the issue - what would it be?

I said that if there ever was a key to the universe, something applicable to every situation you've ever had and will ever have with a horse, it's the ability to get and then keep your horse's attention on you. Nothing of consequence can unfold if that isn't working in your favor, and if it isn't, you may as well save your breath and your energy until it is.

Naturally, having had some time to sit with it, I have an amendment to that.

Yes, being able to ask for the horse's attention and sustain it is paramount, whatever you're doing. That part of the answer stands, and always will.

The amendment is around how you present that ask - and when.

So often, people only notice their horse isn't truly with them at the moment they go to ask something of him - and find that his mind has quietly slipped out the door and wandered off somewhere else entirely. The natural inclination at that point is to ask louder, more firmly, to demand he come back to you. This is where the fights begin, because we've taken it to him after creating an environment where the rules are built on shifting sands and worse, we've taught him that just how intentional this approach is: that the only time we care about where he is mentally is when we want something from him. The rest of the time, he's left to his own devices.

We fall into the habit of catching, haltering, grooming and tacking up our horses with little awareness of whether they are genuinely engaged in those processes - and then wonder why conflict arises the moment we want to ride or lunge or do something. The trouble is, we don't think of all those things that came before as "doings."

The horse most certainly does.

It is deeply confusing to him when the rules seem to shift without reason or warning. It breeds anxiety, because the horse lives without clarity. When do you want his attention? When does it not matter? How is he supposed to tell the difference? Imagine inhabiting a world where you can never quite read where someone stands...until suddenly you've crossed a line you didn't know existed. This is the world a great many horses live in, quietly and persistently unsettled.

And so, it's not simply about being able to ask for and receive your horse's attention. It's about never taking a single step forward - in anything you might want or need to do together - before you have it. It's about resisting the urge to cut corners, to assume that because a horse is tolerating something he is truly present for it. Tolerance is not engagement. A horse can stand still and be a thousand miles away. What we're after is something more honest than that: a horse who is genuinely with you from the very first moment you approach him, because he's learned that your presence always means something worth paying attention to - not just sometimes, not just when it's convenient, but every single time.

Photo: Harry Whitney with a kind little ex-ranch horse we met in Tennessee
PC: Danielle Gruber