GROW Horsemanship

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Caledon East, ON
GROW Horsemanship

I'm Brie Simpson, behaviour consultant, R+ trainer, and the founder of GROW Horsemanship, formerly PATH Equestrian. Please feel free to reach out ❤️

Welfare-focused equine education, discussion, and community

Endorsed Trainer with the WBA

• Behaviour & training support
• In-person R+ lessons
• Clinics

Track-system boarding at Balancing Whispers (Caledon, Ontario) 🇨🇦 PATH was where this work began, but GROW reflects how my understanding and approach have evolved over the years. GROW stands for Guided by Research, Observation & Welfare, the three pillars that shape everything I do:

Research: keeps the work grounded in evidence and curiosity. Observation: helps us truly see the horse in front of us and respond to them as an individual. Welfare: is the foundation, making sure every choice supports the horse’s physical, emotional, and social needs. I manage Balancing Whispers, one of Canada’s largest track-system facilities, which is home to a healthy mixed herd where horses live in a manner that supports their physical, social, and emotional needs. Designed in collaboration with owner Martine Sudan, who has created a haven for welfare-focused owners and a model for progressive horse management. I’ve hosted clinics and mentorships focused on the equine pain ethogram, consent-based procedures, and welfare-based care, supporting owners, professionals, and students in applying science to real-world horse management. I’ve also mentored students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds, including veterinary and graduate students, as well as co-op placements and horse owners seeking hands-on experience in welfare-based training and management. I’m an Endorsed Trainer with the World Bitless Association, a recognition that holds deep meaning for me because it reflects years of learning, reflection, and dedication to welfare-led, evidence-based horsemanship. Very few trainers hold this recognition, and I feel deeply honoured to be part of that community. GROW Horsemanship is about creating a welfare-focused community, a place where questions are welcome, science meets empathy, and education is meant to empower, not judge.

10/15/2026

I saw a post today of someone showing off their dream equestrian facility.

And I think it’s a good reminder that what might be a human’s dream facility isn’t necessarily a horse’s dream facility.

The property had a series of individual paddocks with no shared fence lines. Each paddock looked to be less than a quarter of an acre, possibly even smaller.

Perfect, flat, barren squares.

No shelter, nothing but short, perfectly manicured bright green grass.

And while there were quite a few things about this setup that concerned me, the biggest was that these horses wouldn’t even be able to touch one another.

Think about that for a moment.

Horses are highly social animals. They are literally HERD animals. Social behaviours are fundamental parts of being a horse.

Being able to see another horse across a fence or paddock isn’t the same as being able to physically interact with them. Not even close.

There may still be some benefits to being able to see other horses, including opportunities to coordinate resting and vigilance, but visual contact alone cannot replace physical social interaction. And even that raises some interesting questions about how these behaviours are affected when horses can’t physically interact with one another. Something I’d actually like to spend way more time digging into.

Imagine spending your ENTIRE life being able to see your friends but never being allowed to engage or touch them. And yet we’ve normalized keeping horses this way.

We are still designing and building equestrian facilities around the world that don’t adequately consider the Five Domains of Animal Welfare, or even the basic Three Fs: friends, forage and freedom.

I’m not suggesting that everyone needs hundreds of acres or elaborate track systems. There are plenty of ways to improve the lives of horses without having unlimited land or money.

But surely, when we’re designing a CUSTOM facility specifically for horses, their behavioural, social and physical needs should be among the first things we consider? Right?

Sometimes people hear conversations about turnout, social housing or environmental enrichment and assume we’re just being overly critical of how other people keep their horses.

But this is exactly why these conversations are important.

We’re still at a point where facilities that don’t even allow horses to physically interact with one another are being celebrated as dream properties.

Because if we’re starting from scratch, with the opportunity to design an entire property around horses, and we still aren’t considering their most fundamental needs, let’s just be honest and say their needs come secondary to your wants and they just aren’t being considered at all.

10/14/2026

Project Enzo: Leading

This is training from about a month ago, and looking back, I’m not completely happy with the approach I took.

I tried “cookie on top” for leading, but Enzo’s body language told me pretty quickly that we needed to change direction.

The next Reel explains why.

10/13/2026

Horses don’t have “thick skin” in the way people love to claim.

This is one of the most convenient lies in our industry.

The part of the skin that actually FEELS pain is the same as ours. Same thickness. Same nerve density.

In some areas, it’s actually THINNER.

So no, it DOES hurt them when we hit them, despite what anyone has told you.

This idea falls apart the second you actually watch a horse.

They feel a fly land.
They twitch to a light touch.
They respond to subtle pressure.

But somehow we’re supposed to believe they can’t feel impact?

That’s not misunderstanding.
That’s willful ignorance.

That’s not a lack of knowledge. It’s choosing to believe a lie because it’s more comfortable than questioning what we’ve been taught.

10/12/2026

Asher hit a HUGE milestone today. We actually went for a hand walk out on the trail through the forest!

For anyone who knows Asher, this is not something I was sure he’d ever feel comfortable doing. For years I’ve said Asher is an indoor-only horse, and I’m very, very happy to say I was wrong.

As many of you know, Asher is a PHENOMENAL teacher and lesson horse. Over the years, I’m pretty sure he’s taught hundreds of humans about R+!

But because of his nervousness and reactivity, we’ve done a lot of our training in safe, controlled environments.

Today, all our progress took us somewhere I genuinely wasn’t sure we’d ever go and it was such a truly special moment. Oddly, he felt like he was in his element and has been doing this for years.

We started the day saying we’d start in the outdoor by Enzo unsure if we’d go past here.

Then behind the arena, a milestone I was expecting for potentially another day.

And suddenly we got further and further away and he just kept going, staying curious and engaged.

At some point he even ended up leading vs following Boo, who was his usual chaos gremlin self.

I’m just so in love with how much this horse is willing to give, despite all the fear he once had. He’s always been just an incredible lesson horse but this was just beyond anything I had hoped for him.

Big thank you to my student Amy who has been taking weekly lessons Asher (as well as loving on him whenever she can) for a few months and I am in awe of how fast their relationship has grown ❤️

10/11/2026

Quiet Communication: Part 3, Varying Eye Baselines

(I’ve added a title so we can figure out where we are in the series and you guys can know how many we have done)

I’ve talked quite a bit about recognizing subtle changes in our horses eyes but there’s something really important we need to consider when interpreting those changes.

What’s normal for each horse?

Let’s go back to looking at their eyes.

Some horses naturally show a lot of white around their eyes, while others show very little. Some horses even have brown pigmentation where we would typically expect to see white.

Pale is a perfect example of this. He has one eye with white sclera and another with brown pigmentation, which corresponds with the different colouring around his eyes.

Boo is another interesting example. Since his accident, he’s had a noticeable difference in how much white is visible around the right eye, particularly depending on where he’s looking. Some horses naturally show more sclera when they look in certain directions, and that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s been ANY change in their emotional state.

I’ve included two photos of Boo’s right eye to demonstrate this. In one photo, he’s looking forward and there’s very little white visible. In the other, he’s looking to the side and considerably more white is showing. Both photos represent his normal baseline, just with his eye looking in different directions. There was no corresponding change in his arousal.

So even within the same eye, the amount of visible sclera can vary without indicating a change in HOW the horse is feeling.

And then there’s Baron, who naturally has a slight tenting to his upper eyelids and almost always has some white visible in the bottom corners of his eyes.

If you didn’t know these horses, you could easily look at their eyes and interpret something about each one.

This is why knowing each horse’s baseline is SO important. And keeping in mind that what’s normal can vary depending on which side of their face you’re looking at, or even the direction they’re looking!

Visible eye sclera can be associated with fear or heightened arousal. Tension around the eyes and changes in eyelid shape can also tell us a lot about how a horse is feeling.

I will link part 1 and 2 in the comments. Part 1 looked at Boo’s eyes specifically in varying states.

But we can’t look at one feature and automatically assume we know what it means.

I spend a lot of time just observing my horses. Not necessarily during training or when something is happening, but when they’re going about their day.

What do their eyes look like when they’re resting? Eating? Interacting with other horses? And Training?

Because when you become familiar with what their faces normally look like, those small changes become much easier to recognize.

And of course, we still need to consider the rest of the horse’s body language and what’s happening around them.

The presence of a facial feature isn’t always what matters. We need to recognize a change from what’s normal for THAT individual horse.

10/10/2026

I am SO far behind on the Project Enzo series. I promise I will get it all edited and voiced over 😅

This was just to cute not to share.

He is just SO dedicated and willing. 🤣

“Oh, you want me to reverse all the way to the cone? Okay human, whatever you say.”

He tries so hard and gives me 100%. It’s ridiculously cute. ❤️

10/10/2026

We have more information available at our fingertips than at any other point in human history.

I grew up in the 90’s and if we needed to look something up, I was being taught to look up things in the library in an encyclopedia and eventually we started to move to computers.

Now I can look up whatever I want within seconds on Google and read for hours.

And yet, we’re seeing documented declines in reading literacy and concerning changes in how we sustain our attention.

I think we’re starting to see the effects of this in how people engage with information, particularly online.

People seem increasingly interested in REACTING to information rather than understanding it. They’ll read a sentence, form an opinion, and write an entire response (which let’s be honest takes MORE time then actually reading the post) without realizing that the position they’re so upset about isn’t even one the person they’re responding to holds.

Information that challenges someone’s existing beliefs is often taken as a personal attack, or an attempt to tell them what they can and cannot do.

I’ve also noticed something else that I find particularly concerning.

I’ve had people cite scientific research they’ve asked AI to find without actually UNDERSTANDING, or even KNOWING, what the research concluded.

In one instance, someone presented a study to defend their position when the study itself actually supported the opposite conclusion. AI had pulled a section that appeared to support their argument, and they shared it without bothering to read the rest, honestly I don’t even think they skimmed it over. Just copied and pasted.

I want to pause on that for a moment, because to me this is just so wild.

We are in the middle of an disagreement, and instead of defending your own arguement and you own position (because keep in mind this position is based on how you handle a living and breathing being), you can’t even bother to understand why you are making the decisions you are making but must defend them?

Someone can now ask AI to defend their position, copy an ENTIRE argument complete with “scientific backing”, and present it as their own understanding of a subject.

Without reading the research. Without understanding the conclusions. Sometimes without even fully understanding the argument they’ve just shared.

And all of this to win an argument with someone on the internet?

It’s no longer about defending what you KNOW is right, it’s about defending your argument with evidence you haven’t even engaged with.

I find it concerning that we’re becoming so comfortable presenting information we haven’t actually taken the time to understand and presenting these arguments as our own?

We have access to an incredible amount of knowledge, but I wonder how much of it we’re actually absorbing when our priority is defending what we already believe rather than considering the information in front of us.

This is obviously a much bigger issue than the horse world. We’re seeing it literally evrywhere, and I find that concerning enough on its own.

But what makes it particularly upsetting to me in the horse world is that there’s a living being at the heart of these discussions.

We’re talking about decisions that directly affect the welfare of these horses.

And someone can feel SO strongly about defending their training choices that they will ask AI to find research that supports them, but won’t take the time to actually read or understand that research?

At what point does defending what we already do become more important than understanding how those decisions affect the horse? Why are we so focused on being RIGHT, at all costs?

Because ultimately, the horse is the one living with the consequences of those decisions, whether we’ve taken the time to actually understand those decisions or not.

Anyways if you made it to the end of this rant, thank you 😅

10/09/2026

Horses are not dogs.

I think we’re seeing an influx of people coming into the equestrian industry with backgrounds in dog training, and I’ve encountered this quite a few times myself.

And before anyone takes this as an argument against using food in horse training, it absolutely isn’t. I’m a Positive Reinforcement trainer myself. This isn’t a criticism of using food in training, but rather the assumption that understanding learning theory automatically means understanding how to apply it and understand the body language of other animals.

Interestingly, some of my absolute favourite clients have been dog trainers.

These are people who already have a strong understanding of learning theory, reinforcement, shaping, and behaviour modification. But they also recognize that understanding how animals learn doesn’t mean they automatically understand horses.

They seek out professional instruction, take lessons, ask questions, and build on the knowledge they already have.

And they’re often wonderful to work with because they have SUCH a strong foundation to build from.

But I’ve also encountered the opposite.

People with extensive dog training experience who enter the horse industry assuming that their existing knowledge is sufficient to train horses, without seeking out any meaningful equine education.

And I’ve seen the consequences of that. Including horses who have developed genuinely dangerous behaviours.

Learning theory applies across species. But the application of that knowledge requires an understanding of the animal standing in front of you.

Horses have their own behavioural needs, social dynamics, communication, physical characteristics, and welfare considerations. Understanding canine behaviour doesn’t automatically equip someone to recognize and understand equine behaviour.

And when you’re working with an animal that weighs 1,000+ lbs, those gaps in knowledge can have very serious consequences for both the horse and the people around them.

This isn’t about gatekeeping horse training or suggesting that dog trainers can’t become excellent equine professionals. Many already are, and the skills they bring with them can be incredibly valuable. Some of the most knowledgeable, thoughtful and influential horse trainers I’ve encountered have backgrounds in training other animals.

But that expertise comes from combining their existing skills with an understanding of horses, not treating the two species as interchangeable.

There’s a difference between bringing your existing knowledge into a new field and assuming you have nothing left to learn.

10/09/2026

A welfare concern doesn’t stop being a welfare concern because discussing it makes you uncomfortable.

I talk about restricted turnout, and suddenly people who have never shown much interest in discussing the Big Lick are telling me that’s what I should be focusing on instead.

I talk about rider weight, and suddenly there are apparently much more important welfare issues we need to discuss, like training methods, retirement, or any number of other concerns. Which is particularly interesting considering those topics make up the majority of what I discuss on this page.

I’m not ignoring those issues. We’re just talking about a different one today.

And yes, there ARE welfare issues that are more serious or more urgent than others. I’ve never suggested otherwise. But why does something need to be the most serious welfare concern in the industry before we’re allowed to talk about it?

I’ve also noticed how quickly simply discussing a welfare issue can be interpreted as attacking someone.

Suddenly I’m being told to mind my own business, leave people alone, or that having the conversation at all is somehow encouraging bullying.

Welfare discussions can exist without having an individual as their target. My page has demonstrated that for years.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve publicly named someone (who is a public figure), even when discussing practices I strongly disagree with.

The overwhelming majority of what I discuss here is about practices, research, welfare concerns and the decisions we make on behalf of horses.

We CAN discuss those things without publicly attacking the people participating in them. And I absolutely believe we should.

But there is a difference between being personally attacked and being uncomfortable with a subject.

Sometimes a welfare discussion challenges something we do ourselves. Sometimes it’s something we believe in, something we’ve supported, or something we’ve never really questioned.

And sometimes we just don’t like the topic.

None of those things make the welfare concern disappear.

I think we’re becoming far too quick to centre human feelings in conversations that are supposed to be about the horse.

That doesn’t mean feelings aren’t important. It doesn’t mean people deserve to be bullied, shamed or humiliated. I’ve been very clear about where I stand on that. But we cannot expect every welfare conversation to be comfortable, and we cannot keep redirecting the discussion toward something else simply because we don’t like what’s being discussed.

We should be capable of talking about more than one welfare issue.

And we should be capable of discussing welfare issues that make us uncomfortable without treating the existence of the conversation as an attack.

The horse is still at the centre of these issues, whether we’re personally affected by them or not.

Welfare conversations are still welfare conversations, regardless of how we feel about them.

10/08/2026

I’ve seen this conversation coming up in a few places! So here are my thoughts.

For so long, many of us were taught that patting a horse was praise.

A quick pat on the neck.
A well done.
A human gesture of approval.
We see it CONTINUIOUSLY in the show ring.

But sometimes the smallest details can reveal much bigger disconnects in our industry.

A 2016 study found that wither scratching produced significantly more relaxed behaviours in horses than traditional neck patting (I will include this in my comments).

When we consider that scratching is much more close to mimicking natural social behaviours with horses because these are affiliative behaviours and behaviours horses naturally do when they engage with each other

And honestly, I think this says a lot about the broader disconnect we still see in the horse world.

I want to be clear I’m not saying patting is abusive by ANY MEANS. And that patting is anything I have an issue with, but majority of horses find scratching more reinforcing and a more “natural” behaviour for them and horses are less likely to find patting reinforcing then scratching (I have a weirdo that likes to be pat between the eyes). And I have had horses who will brace against being pat.

So much of traditional horsemanship has historically been shaped around human convenience, human tradition, and human interpretation, rather than species specific understanding.

But the fact that patting is the “default” can make you think about that disconnect.

Because sometimes the smallest details reveal the biggest gaps we have been continuously talking about.

Are we interacting in ways horses truly understand?
Are we prioritizing their experience?
Or are we defaulting to what makes sense to us?

Patting versus scratching may seem minor because neither is aversive, but studies have shown there is usually clear preference.

But it can serve as a powerful example of how often horse care and handling has been filtered through a human lens first.

True horse centred care often requires us to examine even the most normalized behaviours.

Because better welfare is built through reflection, not just routine.

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