07/12/2022
I never do this, but I am going to do this.
I am going to talk about safety.
And I am not going to mention hats once.
I’ve seen one too many sad stories about people tumbling off their horses, one too many melancholy pictures from A&E, one too many shy, shamed admissions that the nerve has gone.
People feel ashamed that they are afraid to get back on their horses after a nasty fall. But there are two kinds of fear: the useful, sensible fear that keeps us humans alive, and the paranoid amygdala fear that says everything is going to hell and we will never amount to anything. The first one is the one I listen to. I don’t, eccentric as it may seem, want to die.
That fear tells me a lot of good stuff. It tells me that if the red mare and I are out of practice, we will need to go and do a bit of preparatory work before we ride out into the hills again. It tells me that preparation and practice and patience are everything. It tells me not to rely on luck or what the hell; it tells me to do the work, day after day.
So, in our field, we do the work. We do it on the ground, for days and weeks and months, until the fear nods its head sagely and tells us we are ready. We do stuff which looks boring or nuts to a lot of people. And that’s because I don’t want to be the person who has to sit up all night in a chair because of seven broken ribs, or who can hardly speak and is the colour of putty because of a smashed up pelvis, or who is hobbling about on a broken ankle. I live alone. I have to do my work and look after dogs and horses. I can’t break my ankle.
I have a whole boatload of rules that many people will scoff at. I don’t care. For instance, I won’t get on a horse who can’t stand still at the mounting block. Won’t do it. It’s not only dangerous in and of itself, but that inability to stand is what my friend Warwick Schiller calls ‘bolting at the standstill’. That horse cannot control itself, and so we’re in trouble, right off the bat.
I spend years teaching my horses to control themselves. I learnt an entire new horsemanship from scratch to do this. It is never complete, because horses are prey animals and flight animals, but it goes a hell of a long way.
You literally can teach horses to think their way through problems, rather than react.
You can teach them to move easily between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, so they can bring themselves down after a fright.
I’ll give you a specific example: when Clova first came to us, it took her as long as forty-seven minutes to bring herself down. I once timed it on my telephone. And that was not after a fright, that was after the tiniest bit of pressure - just me asking her to trot round me on the rope. Forty-seven minutes. I stood and breathed and waited and broke my heart, a little, thinking of the things she must have been through in her life.
Now, it takes between three to seven seconds.
I watched her do it the other day, out on the trail. An unexpected duck flew up off the burn. It gave her a tiny fright. Four seconds later, she dropped her head, relaxed into her loose rein, and licked and chewed. We taught her that, because it’s a lifesaver, for her rider. It also makes her own life so much easier and happier.
We do a ton of other stuff that helps safety. We teach all our horses to stand still, we teach them all personal space, we teach them focus and connection. This means they won’t trample over us in fear. When horses get scared, they go blind. They’ll knock you over because they don’t know you are there. They are in full survival mode. I won’t work with horses like that. It’s not their fault, but they scare the jeepers out of me.
Actually, that’s not true. Our Freya was like that, and I did work with her, because I wanted her to relax and be happy and find herself, and so I had to work through a lot of very sensible fear. It was a balance between keeping myself safe and giving that horse what she needed, all the time. Thank goodness those days are behind us. Kayleigh was sometimes scared and I was sometimes scared and we were absolutely right to be afraid. There was danger, and we reacted to it rationally.
The focus work is not just so the horses won’t send us flying when they are in survival mode, it’s also for things like feeding time and putting them back into the field.
I have a ridiculously strict rule in the field. All our children obey it to the letter. I owe it to their mothers to keep them safe. It is: we lead the horses in, find a good space, turn them to face the gate, check whether they are relaxed, check whether they are focused on us (rather than on the bears in the woods), check whether they are connected to us, and only then let them go.
I do all this because I love being with horses and I don’t want to be scared of them. A horse who can regulate her own nervous system is so much easier to be around. She’s easy with herself and that makes the humans happy and confident. A horse who knows about personal space is a pleasure, in every interaction. A horse who has control over himself is a joy, not a terror.
Horses will always be intrinsically risky. We’ve all tumbled off, at one time or another, the posse and I. But I like to reduce the risk to the lowest possible point. Every time one of us tumbles, we learn a boatload of lessons from that. It’s almost always that I’ve let something slide, got a bit cocky, ignored a warning sign.
I’m not very brave, and I’m glad I’m not. I used to be deadly ashamed of this. Everything in my childhood was geared to kicking on and riding through it. That was what my dad did, with his steeplechasers; that’s what he famously did when the docs told him he could never ride again and he was back the next year in the Grand National. That was how it was done, in our house.
But I don’t have that kind of physical courage; not any more. I am afraid of breaking things and hurting things. So I train my horses in the ways of slowness and peace. I train them to know me and know themselves, so that fear does not swamp them when it comes. I train them to trust their humans, so they don’t have to go into that hard, terrified survival mode. They always have someone, in their corner, on their side, who will stand on the ramparts and not let the mountain lions pass.
I think a lot about what horses want. Sometimes, I think they want someone who will stand between them and a hungry lion. I am not physically brave, but I would do that for my red mare. I can’t tell you that she knows that, not for sure (I will never entirely know what she knows), but my guess is she has a sense of it. And that is why we are a team. We will protect each other until the last lion is down.
