http://www.lshorsemanship.co.uk/

LS Horsemanship, Stokesley (2026)

02/09/2026

Pain memory 🐴

I know I’ve written about this extensively before, but this idea of “pain memory” is still so commonly used to justify training horses who are still in pain.

I have never seen any evidence that pain memory exists in the way people suggest it does, if it did nerve blocks and pain relief wouldn’t work.

I am not denying that if a horse has perhaps had a sore back, that they may anticipate that soreness when they come to deal with things like saddling or being mounted again, but these things tend to resolve fairly quickly if the horse is truly comfortable. Especially if we train gently and counter-condition appropriately.

Unfortunately what usually happens is, a horse is given the “all-clear” by saddler/bodyworker/vet and people take this as permission to ignore all of the horse’s communication and just carry on to “show them” it doesn’t hurt any more. Often even using punishing methods like pushing the horses face away or making them move their feet when they try to communicate. Usually these horses are still in pain, it has just been missed and now they are being told to shut up.

Even if it was “pain memory”, ignoring a horse’s communication and continuing to do things to them they are telling you they are really uncomfortable with is not the way to create a safe, calm partner. Its a way to create a shut down horse who learns their communication is ignored. So how are you going to decide what is “real” communication of pain and what is this alleged “pain memory”? How is the horse supposed to communicate pain to you if you’re picking and choosing when to listen?

So how do we train ethically if we think we have successfully treated a horse’s pain but they are still communicating that they are uncomfortable? I’m going to briefly explain my process with 2 horses who were unhappy at the mounting block, they both had pain issues which were treated. For the sake of this post not being 6 pages long lets just assume these horses were fine with being saddled and only showed discomfort at the mounting block.

My process is counter conditioning each step and seeing where it is they start to become anxious, this is different for every horse. People mistakingly try to counter condition by putting the horse into an uncomfortable situation then feeding treats on top when the horse is already upset. This will not work nor will it give us the information we need about how the horse is really feeling.

We need to break it down really small, horses are excellent at recognising patterns and predicting what might come next, so often their anxiety starts long before we actually get to the mounting block.

So my process might look something like this, using low value food to create new, positive associations with these scenarios. Can the horse have a human move down their body and stay relaxed? Can they do it in different areas? Are they any different with a saddle on/off? Are they different if the human is wearing a riding hat? Can the human face their back and touch them? Can they stand next to the block? Can they stand still while the human moves to the block? Can the human walk up the first step? The second step? Can they walk up and touch the horse’s back as if to mount? Can they lean over? I am not just looking for tolerance here, I am looking for any signs of anxiety such as bracing their neck up or shifting their weight back, we don’t go any further if we see these signs, we wait for them to be comfortable.

If we move through all of these steps successfully, my next questions are what happens if we get on and ride a bit? Does the rest of the behaviour regress? There’s my big pain red flag, all without having to terribly stress the horse out or teach them I will ignore their communication of discomfort.

So back to the 2 horses I wanted to talk about. Both went through the same process, one progressed really well and is back to hacking out with no regression in his behaviour at the mounting block. The other horse started to step back at the block after one single short ride. We repeated this process several times over several weeks to get the same result. He was referred back to the vet and found to have further arthritis that had not been treated.

There is much more to talk about here, if the way the horse is being ridden is horribly stressful or difficult for them, that will also cause a regression in behaviour, so that is something that needs to be addressed too. But we have got to move away from just trying to get rid of behaviour we don’t like, it is not helping horses and it is not ethical. Shutting down horses is really easy, apply pressure until horse does thing (or stops doing thing) and quite often now we see people adding a treat to make it seem kind. Really listening to horses and learning how to assess what’s going on is hard.

If a horse is acting like they’re in pain, then they’re probably in pain. If your horse moves away when you go to tack up, is girthy or is tense to mount, you likely have a discomfort/pain issue regardless of any checks you’ve had done and if we ignore this one day they might shout a lot louder to get you to listen. 🐴

01/09/2026

Such a lovely video to watch ❤️ Lucy is a brilliant trainer and a fierce advocate for horses

30/08/2026

Bit of a vent today after hearing yet another horrible story from a friend of mine who practices in another area of the country. There are so many stories I wish I could share from my own experiences but I cannot do so and remain professional, so I’ll share this one from someone else to give you some insight into what its like trying to advocate for horses in this industry.

My friend was called out to a horse who was showing worrying signs of aggression on the ground, they were told the usual “she’s had all the checks”, upon assessing the horse they explained the horse was showing clear signs of pain, showed the client how they could find further resources to learn and spent a long time with them explaining the behaviour in depth. The horse threatened to kick when she was touched anywhere behind her withers and was biting when being led. My friend explained that it wasn’t ethical to train this horse and referred them onto the vet urgently.

3 days later the horse appeared on another professional’s social media being chased around with a flag and slammed in the face with the lead rope clip if they even thought about pinning their ears, talking about how they had fixed the horse’s horrible dominant behaviour and that the horse “trusted” them as a leader now. They pulled the horse to a stop and approached to feed them a treat, to prove the training is kind of course, the horse backs away unsure if they are about to be punished again. The horse was of course still grimacing in pain, but they had learned any communication of their pain resulted in punishment, so they were now obedient so we can just call them fixed and use them how we wish.

This isn’t about having different opinions over training methods or losing business. Those of us who choose this path are generally extremely empathetic people. This is not just a job to us that we can easily switch off from when we drive away from your yard. I worry about your horses, I think about your horses when I’m not with you. I research and analyse and seek further opinion to help you and your horse in my own time, because I genuinely care about their welfare.

I feel like there’s a perception that we just go out and feed horses treats and have a lovely time, that advice is followed and all of the horses get the help they need. Sometimes it is like that, most often it is not. Many horses I meet are not in a good way physically or mentally, and those things can be really hard to hear, it is not fun to have those conversations. The industry has such a long way to go even with meeting horse’s basic needs and there is so much pushback for people to deal with, its really tough out there.

I have really limited what I see on social media because I cannot stand watching this treatment of horses dressed up as good for them. Unfortunately simply by existing in places where people are handling horses it seems unavoidable to witness abuse that I can realistically do nothing useful about. Just last week I pulled into a yard car park to witness someone repeatedly punching a worried young horse for not wanting to go near the mounting block.

There are clients I have been out to who have clearly painful, compromised horses who I refer to the vet with support, only to see those same horses turn up with another trainer trying to “fix” them, using their stressed behaviour for social media engagement. For them to eventually give up after a few weeks/months when the horse just won’t improve and actually then take the horse to the vet. They are then praised as extremely ethical and so good at listening to horses for stopping and vet referring. Despite the fact we just tried to train and ride a blatantly sore, under muscled, compromised horse for several weeks until they screamed.

I used to torture myself wondering if I could have just worded things differently or found the right thing to say to that particular client I could’ve convinced them and prevented that horse suffering further. I realise now there is nothing I can say if people aren’t ready to hear it.

It is also so difficult to navigate with other professionals, often a vet/bodyworker referral isn’t enough, it has to be the right vet/bodyworker. So many professionals in the industry are also indoctrinated into this behavioural psuedoscience instead of seeing behaviour as the communication it is. It seems we are also used to seeing compromised, under muscled horses as the norm. I cannot imagine taking my dog to the vet, explaining that they are showing signs of pain and having the vet say “well have you considered he is just taking the p**s out of you?” instead of actually trying to investigate and help my dog. Yet I have seen this happen repeatedly in the horse industry. This is why I am so fussy about the professionals I work with and why I recommend the specific professionals I do to my clients. I need to know that professional will take my client and their horse seriously and not be dismissive. I am always hoping to add to that group of professionals so its not so difficult to advocate for our horses to get the help they need.

I have had to start screening people and saying no to some prospective clients to protect my mental health. I used to go out to anyone who wanted me, but it was becoming soul-destroying. I try really hard to make sure my social media and website present what I do well so the right people find me, but even that is difficult as everyone is marketing as ethical now, despite their actions showing otherwise, so we all get lumped in together. I understand that this is really hard, I understand the human draw to take the easiest route out when everyone around you is pressuring you to do so, but we owe it to our horses to do so. We’re all they’ve got.

There are so very few of us actually walking the walk, we are still swimming against a heavy tide, that’s why it all feels so difficult. But there are more and more of us, things are changing, not quickly enough for the horses but we can only try our best.

I thought I would share this as I know many of us feel the same, it is exhausting and perhaps this gives some insight into why I have disappeared off socials recently. 🐴

29/08/2026

Most behavioural issues are not training issues 🐴

Most of the content we see about horse behaviour is about behavioural modification and nothing else. About taking a horse into a training space and using whatever technique the trainer sees fit to try and modify the horse’s behaviour. We see debates over this method or that method, or this tool or that tool. We are so often completely missing the bigger picture of that horse’s lived experience.

There is this attitude that your horse should just cope in the living situation you have provided for them and that’s fine, or even that the rest of their life is irrelevant to how they show up in training.

You often hear the “all the checks/no pain” line being bleated out now, but I’ve never seen a tutorial and heard “we’ve made sure this horse has all of his needs met and isn’t living in a chronic state of stress due to his living environment”. Most horses are simply taken into a training space and put under pressure until they’re obedient, and we call this behavioural work.

I’m going to tell you a client story, as always names have been changed to protect privacy. Liz has a horse called Rupert who started planting and refusing to walk out to the field. She was told he didn’t respect her and had no manners. She had a recommended horsemanship trainer out who showed her how to use a flag to make him move and a halter to make him stop. He became very obedient and she was able to make him walk to the field by flapping the flag behind her or making him run through groundwork exercises when he tried to plant. This is behavioural modification. If she didn’t have the flag on her he would go back to planting within a few days.

Liz actually called me out for help with clipping his feathers, but as with all my clients we had an in depth chat about his whole life. It turned out Rupert’s turnout field was very bald and he was being pushed off the small amount of hay they were allowed to put out by the other horses. She had been told this was fine and actually good for him because it would keep his weight down. Rupert was finding his turnout situation extremely stressful and he was communicating this the only way he could. There was no way Rupert could thrive in this environment and Liz actually ended up moving yards quite quickly once she understood what was going on. He is now in a suitable situation where the horses have enough forage that they don’t feel the need to resource guard and he happily walks out to the field no issues.

We see scenarios like this play out again and again. We are just seeing horses being hassled into obedience and having their communication shut down. When people say more ethical training methods don’t work, whether they realise it or not, what they really mean is I can’t force the horse to do things using that gentler method, therefore it doesn’t “work”. I’m not interested in forcing horses to do things, I’m interested in helping horses and helping people who want to be kind to their horse understand how to do that.

Some people have their horses for years and realise they’d never really known their true personality until they started going down this path. They’d only known their horse under chronic stress.

Truly ethical behavioural work is about so much more than just training. As anyone who’s had me out will know we are always going to have those conversations, nothing is irrelevant. I am here to advocate for horses and show people how to do better, not to people please and just tell people what they want to hear to avoid having uncomfortable conversations. 🐴

29/08/2026

Enjoy a moment of peace with Dan this morning 🥰😴

Keep the sound on 🔊

What do you think he’s dreaming about?

28/08/2026

“You can’t train pain” 🐴

Many of my clients have previously been told that their horse can’t be in pain otherwise they wouldn’t respond to any training. It can’t be pain otherwise the horse wouldn’t be okay to hack out. It can’t be pain otherwise the horse wouldn’t “improve” with groundwork exercises. This is a false and harmful narrative.

I would really like us to take obedience much further down the list as an assessment criteria for pain, seeing as most horses are trained their whole lives to perform obedience or face negative consequences. It is currently pretty high up on the list, probably only coming in under overt lameness or obvious injury.

There is this idea that stand-alone behavioural issues are common and pain/discomfort is rare, this is untrue. We are constantly seeing horses being put through training as some sort of diagnostic tool to see if its pain or behavioural, but the only parameter we seem to be assessing is their level of obedience.

Once you develop an eye for discomfort you can see it long before a dramatic lack of obedience. You can see it in their faces, their poor musculature, their poor posture, the way they stand, their poor hoof balance, their chronic tension. But all of this is ignored as it is so normalised and the attempts to train continue.

To give an example, we might see a horse who walks away from the saddle, but after learning they will be followed with the saddle until they stand still, they eventually just show a tense face and allow it. This runs through to the rider mounting perhaps. They are maybe lunged/long reined/start hacking out. They become more obedient, the tense face never leaves but it isn’t noticed. We mistakingly see the coerced stillness as a sign of relaxation. For many horses this will be seen as a success story as they continue in their obedience and can get on with their “job” keeping their feelings quietly to themselves. For some horses we start to see the explosive behaviour, only at this point do most people consider pain.

I’ve given a gentle example, many people are doing much harsher things to horses than following them around with a saddle until they stand still. Chasing them with whips, ropes or flags and creating explosive behaviour under the guise of showing the horse “leadership”. It is really easy to shut a horse down into obedience if you make life unpleasant enough, even a painful one.

Seeing someone bully a horse into obedience and then use that obedience as proof that they are not in pain or discomfort makes me feel quite ill.

There is also this idea that groundwork exercises are suitable for any horse and can’t harm them. But extensive backing up, having to repeatedly disengage your quarters or having to throw your head up as you are repeatedly slammed in the face for overstepping a “boundary” you didn’t know existed absolutely can and does hurt horses.

I keep seeing supposed behavioural tutorial videos where the narration doesn’t match the footage. I can see a horse desperately trying to communicate their discomfort only to be told to shut up and accept that their voice will be ignored. I can also envisage the vet visit months/years into the future when the horse finally breaks down and we discover the underlying issues that were there the whole time, we will say “nobody could’ve known”. But we do have the ability to listen now, even if we may not have all of the answers, we can listen to our horses and advocate hard for them.

Unfortunately pain and discomfort are not rarities, from how we’re breeding horses, the high-stress environments we’re keeping them in and then the high-stress/inappropriate ways we’re taught to train and ride them. Most horses I meet are experiencing discomfort in their bodies, many of them significantly. There is this idea that behavioural issues are common and pain is rare, this is untrue.

We keep seeing this push-back that people are being over the top always putting pain on the table, I don’t think we’re putting pain on the table nearly enough. When you’re asking an animal to carry you around on their back and perform, the absolute least we can do is make sure we’re careful.

When we’re watching the videos that come up in our feeds, turn the sound off and really watch the horse. Are we watching a horse learning that things are safe or are we watching a horse being taught their resistance is futile and the thing they’re worried about will happen to them no matter what? Are we watching a horse “find confidence in leadership” or are we watching a masterclass in hassling a horse until they shut down and realise they must obey? 🐴

I have about 82 posts I want to write and my brain feels like a whirlwind of incoherent thoughts, but here is the first one I’ve managed to get out in several months. I also want to say, as I've never mentioned it, that I do not, and will not ever, use generative AI in any of my work or writing. All of my writing comes through the struggle of my own brain and nothing else 😅

03/08/2026

Ari is 3 years old and has been making great progress in-hand hacking.

He is a bold, confident young horse but had a really big scare a few weeks ago when he suddenly encountered a big herd of running cows.

It seemed to have really knocked his confidence and he was very easily becoming spooked and stressed even on familiar routes.

He is still his usual, confident self in the field at home but becomes anxious once he is out on the lane. We are sticking very close to the field and walking the same short stretch until he feels relaxed and confident. Then we will stretch to going further again.

We used the animal standees to throw something new and strange into the environment that would be safe for him to investigate. Some horses also do think they are real animals at first and can be quite alarmed.

By allowing him to approach in his own time and making sure he had a calm, positive experience he was soon confidently walking through the animals even when they changed positions.

Building confident, resilient, safe horses comes from putting a lot of calm, positive experiences into the bank. This is how you build a good relationship and a horse who looks to you for guidance.

Adding pressure when horses are worried is a sure fire way to build negative associations, and while you may create obedience if you bully them enough, the horse will not feel safe with you.

Ari was also able to do some training with a tractor turning hay right on the fence line after this, he was initially very worried by the noise but was able to stay, keep eating his grass nuts and eventually regulate his own stress so we could then turn and walk on calmly.

20/07/2026

Prerequisites for training 🐴

I often use the phrase “not in a trainable state” and I want to explain what I mean by that. If you’re having issues with your horse it seems logical to think the answer is to get straight into training but often these horses are too anxious and stressed to learn.

When horses are stressed gentle asks won’t work so this is often used to justify the use of high-pressure. If I ask quietly the horse is ignoring me so I have no choice but to use more pressure right? I used to spend a lot of time disengaging horses quarters, moving their feet and backing them up out of my space until they “relaxed”. I would often cause explosive behaviour as I added more pressure on top of an already stressed horse. I wasn’t achieving relaxation, I was achieving obedience and probably pushing horses into shut down.

If we cannot train gently then the horse isn’t in a trainable state.

I used to struggle with this years ago when I first started to move over into more ethical horsemanship. I still felt pressure to achieve “results” with clients and I remember going to a pony who was extremely stressed. He was box walking frantically and was lead around in a chain. I spent 45 minutes walking this pony around an arena trying to gently ask him to halt for a second and walk with me, it didn’t work he continued to scream the whole time and I was conflicted because I knew how to get a “result” using my old methods, but I wasn’t comfortable doing so any more. I tried to explain to the client that he wasn’t in a trainable state and offered some advice on how to improve his general stress-levels, but I’m sure that client was left disappointed and rightly so. Not because I should’ve produced a “result”, but because I was still trying to people-please instead of advocating for the horse and offering other solutions right off the bat. If I met that pony now we’d be going to an area he felt comfortable and eating some low-value food out of buckets and playing treat scatters until he was able to down-regulate.

So if we have a horse that is not in a trainable state, how do we get them into a trainable state?
🐴 We need to address their chronic stress levels, this means looking at their management and adjusting it accordingly so their needs are met and they feel safe.
🐴 We need to address pain and discomfort.
🐴 We need to improve the horse’s associations with people and the training environment by using positive reinforcement to help down-regulate their nervous system.
🐴 We need to stop handling, riding and training them in ways that scare them or cause high-stress.

Loud and difficult behaviour is not a justification for being hard on horses and using high-pressure or punishment. It makes great click-bait but it is not ethical no matter how you try to dress it up. If we’re seeing rearing, bucking, bolting, kicking, biting, pulling back etc we’ve already pushed too far. We need to learn about behaviour and nervous system states so we can see what the horse is actually experiencing when we see this sort of training and not be taken in by the pretty narratives we’re sold.

Horses are not testing you, they are not being stubborn, they are not "too clever for their own good" and it is completely illogical to think pushing an already anxious and often frightened horse into even more stress to get compliance is helping them feel better. If we do this we are not just getting compliance but also creating horrible associations with people. If we cannot train gently then we need to go back a step and work on the horse’s emotional state first. 🐴

16/07/2026

The “mis-sold” horse 🐴

Facebook is filled with posts about “dodgy” sellers.
“Don’t buy from her she sold me a horse that nearly killed my daughter”
“The horse is spooky and he was sold to me as bombproof, he must’ve been drugged, I want my money back”
“The vetting must be dodgy, he passed a 5 stage but now he’s been diagnosed with kissing spine, the seller must have known”

All I can think of when I see these posts is where the poor horse ends up in all of this.
Speaking about horses like they are a piece of faulty sports equipment instead of sensitive, sentient beings with feelings and emotions. They have the ability to feel sad and grieve for their friends just like us and we ship them around like cargo and then expect them to be obedient robots. We are taking an animal who has evolved to find safety in a stable herd in a stable environment and ripping them out of that repeatedly, sometimes they never have it at all.

Then on the physical side of things, alongside orthopaedic issues, old injuries and stomach ulcers, we have horses who are being trained and ridden in ways that are detrimental to their bodies. We are still stuck in this view that as long as you can physically sit on a horses back then it is appropriate to ride them regardless of how they are muscled or how they are moving. I constantly see horses for sale who to my eye are unable to carry a rider in a healthy way with their current musculature, neck braced up and back dropped, but they are out cantering and jumping and being compliant.

We simply judge horses on their obedience and nothing else, we need to expand our eye and our knowledge to recognise more subtle behaviours and to be able to assess horses bodies beyond whether they are lame or not on a vetting.

I don’t think this post is even really about buying and selling, its more a post about how warped our perception of horses is and how we can have more success when looking for a new horse going forward. Here are some things to think about when viewing horses:
🐴 They should not need someone to hold them while a rider mounts
🐴 They should not show tension at the mounting block (high head carriage, whites of eyes, rider needing to keep a short contact to stop the horse from moving)
🐴 They should not leave you feeling like you can’t move on their back, they should be fine with you shifting your weight, doing the girth yourself, adjusting your stirrups etc
🐴 Look for conflict behaviours such as tail swishing/pinning ears/trying to move away when presented with their tack (ask to see the horse tacked up out of cross ties)
🐴 Look for how they respond to you approaching and touching them, you might have to observe closely as their communication may be very quiet if they’ve been told to shut up before
🐴 Do they interact with their environment with curiosity and optimism, or do they appear disinterested or perhaps anxious/fearful?
🐴 Learn as much as you can about musculature and hoof balance so you can make some judgements for yourself, remember vettings are absolutely not a fail-safe nor are they a performance work up.
🐴 Listen to what the horse is telling you, not what the humans are, horses don’t lie.
Remember that the horse is likely being ridden and handled daily by people who are very competent at training horses to be obedient, we cannot use compliance as our only measure of whether a horse is comfortable with what is being asked of them, we must learn to read more subtle behaviour.

Then when you do get your new horse home please have empathy for what they have just been through. We need to be providing a species-appropriate environment. We cannot move a horse to a new place, have them living in solitary confinement for 2 weeks and just expect them to be fine. Please understand that it is extremely common for horses to develop stomach ulcers from the stress of moving, it can happen very quickly.

Give your horse time to settle with their new friends and in their new environment. Spend time doing enrichment activities with them, perhaps take them hand grazing, allow them to get used to you and the new place with no pressure. Listen to the horse in front of you, not the horse you tried in the viewing.

It is the norm for horses to be chronically stressed, many horses are carrying around pain and discomfort and still being very obedient, this is why it is so hard to navigate. When we are seeing obedient horses we are often just seeing shut down horses, then we are shocked when the wheels fall off at their new home. Please just give your horses time and listen to them, they don’t owe you anything, it is not their fault, they didn’t sign up for any of this. Please don’t just throw them away because they don’t turn out to be what you wanted. Give them a soft place to land. 🐴

As always feel free to PM me if you need some support in this.

LS Horsemanship

02/09/2026

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30/08/2026

29/08/2026

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