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.
