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

LS Horsemanship, Stokesley (2026)

05/06/2026

Forage and behaviour 🐴

I know I talk about management a lot but I cannot understate how important appropriate forage is for your horse’s wellbeing.

Some of the biggest, positive behavioural changes I see are simply from providing the horse with more appropriate forage. By appropriate forage I usually mean long stem fibre like hay, or, if you’re lucky enough and have a horse who isn’t grass sensitive, long, mature grass. My first management change for most horses is finding a way to provide them with forage that doesn't run out.

Last summer so many of my clients were battling with parched fields with very little grass, this summer many people are battling with short grass that is constantly flushing with the wet/sunny weather, this is not good for any horse’s gut regardless of their weight. When grass is very short there is very little gut fill which means, regardless of how many calories are being consumed, horses are not getting enough fibre to keep their guts healthy. We need to supplement with hay to keep our horses healthy and happy when this is the only grazing we have access to. If your horse has sloppy, green droppings then his gut health is suffering.

I understand that many yards do not allow you to put hay out in the field but we can always come up with a solution, some simple ones are:

🐴 Bring your horse in through the day/twice a day to eat hay
🐴 Rest parts of your field so it can grow longer and you can strip graze it
🐴 Take your horse out hand grazing on longer grass
🐴 Supplement with fibre blocks/hay replacer type feeds

I know that we think out 24/7 in summer is best, but if my only choices were out with no long stem fibre or part-stabled with hay then I would choose the latter for my horse’s overall wellbeing.

Some signs that your horse may be feeling hungry are:
🐴 Being grumpy towards other horses/resource guarding
🐴 Chewing wood
🐴 Waiting at the gate
🐴 Frantically pulling to grass/food when leading
🐴 Being desperate to come in from the field
🐴 Pushy behaviour
🐴 Generally tense/spooky behaviour

You’d be surprised how many spooky/stressy/pushy horses settle down once they are provided with enough fibre consistently. Even if your horse is being given hay daily, if he finishes it all in a a few hours, he then has another 20hrs of the day he knows he’s going without, this creates stress around the food and they will likely gorge it even faster.

I know lots of horses being diagnosed with ulcers at the moment but we have absolutely got to get the management right if we want to get rid of them successfully, otherwise we find ourselves stuck in a loop.

We need to provide enough long stem fibre, even for our overweight horses. I am a huge advocate for trickle feeding to increase the time it takes to eat the same amount of forage and also increasing the amount of steps your horse is doing daily. Putting hay/water at opposite ends of the field, creating a track system, hand walking your horse etc. 🐴

Please have a look at my friend Kelly's resources Horse Weighbridge North East if you're struggling with your horse's weight and diet. We will be doing another live together soon 😎

03/06/2026

“Hand feeding teaches horses to bite” 🐴

This is a myth perpetuated by many that scares people away from exploring more ethical training methods. The only way hand feeding could teach a horse to bite is if we waited for the horse to bite us, then marked the behaviour and rewarded them for it.

If a horse gets nippy or pushy around food, then this is a symptom of a wider problem. The food itself didn't cause this problem, it was already present and the food just highlighted it. Horses who are stressed are quicker to become frustrated and perhaps nip at us. Stress could be from poor training, the environment, their living situation, pain or discomfort in the body, maybe hunger or being restricted from food, and so on and so on. Usually several of the above.

There is also a huge difference between horses being a bit nippy and horses lunging at you aggressively to bite. The latter are rare and this is a serious behavioural problem which needs to be addressed carefully and probably involves serious underlying pain, trauma or neurological issues. I have never ever seen nipping from frustration turn into horses aggressively attacking humans. And it's ridiculous to scare people out of doing something nice with their horse by pretending it's a slippery slope to extremely dangerous behaviour.

One of the biggest frustrations for any of us who advocate for training with food is when we're told, "I can't use food it will make my horse too pushy” or “it doesn't work”, when actually this is a skill issue, alongside the outside stress levels we already mentioned. If you're using high value treats and your horse is frustrated and confused about how to get them, then yes, they're highly likely to get pushy and nippy. That is normal frustration behaviour which has been caused by sloppy training, not by the presence of the food. However, anyone can learn to use food safely with their horse and actually train their horse to be calm around food.

With many horses this starts with delivering food rewards into a bucket and not from the hand. This is so we don't accidentally create the idea that the human is a walking enrichment puzzle to shake the food out of, which so often starts happening when we're trying to learn by ourselves. 🥲

Horses are extremely intelligent, many people are shocked at how easy it is to train their horse once we are meeting their needs and they aren't stressed about training.

Every horse is different, and this is why we need to learn about training with food as a skillset just like anything else. You wouldn't expect to canter and jump on your first ever riding lesson, yet there's this strange attitude towards training with food in that you can do it well and judge its usefulness with no previous experience or skill set. And I'm saying this as someone who used to heavily eye roll and judge people who trained with food.

In conclusion, if a horse is nippy around food, that is information that we have work to do around managing their stress levels and improving our own skillset to help our horse’s feel calm and safe around food. It is extremely easy to wind a horse up with food, there is so much to learn to do it well. It can be daunting as it feels so different from conventional training.

Please don't be put off from trying to train this way if those are you concerns. Drop me a message if you’d like some help. 😊

Pictured is me somehow not being eaten alive while hand feeding both of my horses and hosing them off at liberty on a very hot day last year. 😅🥵 They learned to park at their respective cones and wait patiently. ❤

01/06/2026

I’m sticking to my word of posting more video footage of quiet, ethical training. It can be a really vulnerable thing for someone to have footage of them training shared publicly so I want to thank my clients for allowing me to do so.

This is lovely Monty who came to her owner very frightened and uncatchable. She arrived with a headcollar on which had snapped across the noseband, she managed to get her into a field safe headcollar which stayed on for several months as she was unable to take it off or catch her to put it back on.

It would take anywhere from 15 - 30 minutes to catch Monty as she had to distract her with treats while she grabbed the cheek strap of the headcollar, she could not grab the noseband or Monty would panic.

Monty’s owner has spent a lot of time helping Monty feel better but was still only able to get the headcollar on by distracting and bribing her nose in with high-value treats.

This video shows very small snippets of a larger, more nuanced process but Monty now happily comes over to have her headcollar put on. We are using low value food (not treats) and Monty has free access to hay in her stable meaning if she didn’t want to engage she could just go and get food from elsewhere.

It is really important when horses are frightened to give them the choice to opt out, this is what builds confidence quickly because they feel safe. Horses who are frightened have often felt trapped or pressured before which is why they have such big reactions to things. By training like this Monty learned she could predict what was going to happen, knew that we wouldn’t add any pressure if she wasn’t sure and that really nice things happened when the headcollar was present.

This is so different to bribing or distracting a horse with treats while you do something they don’t like, it is also very different to applying pressure to the horse until they do the right thing to find relief. It’s that element of choice that really helps them feel better.

If you want to learn how to train like this with your horse drop me a message 🐴

29/05/2026

“Don’t worry he won’t do anything” 🐴

Something I’ve been pondering this week is how wanting to be kinder to horses is often perceived to come from fear or nervousness. That the only reason you might back off when a horse shows some anxiety is that you’re worried the horse is going to do something to hurt you.

This comes from the widely held, but misguided, belief that horses are trying to dominate and take charge of us. That we must push through any effort they make to express their discomfort otherwise we will ruin the horse and teach them they can intimidate us or “get out of work”.

I go out to see a lot of horses who are showing behaviours that are perceived as aggression, pinning ears, biting, threatening to kick etc. Every single person has been told they must never back off as the horse is trying to dominate them, the horse knows they are “too soft” and the horse is taking advantage of this. This just is not the case. Horses are not aggressive animals, they are gentle and very easy to train when they feel safe and have their needs met. Behaviour is communication.

When a horse resorts to these loud behaviours they are shouting, usually because their quieter communication hasn’t been listened to. The majority of horses displaying “aggressive” behaviours are in pain, even if they aren’t experiencing physical pain they are definitely not okay mentally and ignoring their communication, or worse punishing it, will make life worse for them. Often punishment works in that it gets the horse to shut down and stop communicating their discomfort, other times it makes the behaviour escalate into something more dangerous.

If we learn to listen to their quiet communication and respond accordingly, they will no longer need to shout at us. This can take a long time when a horse has been ignored or punished for it their whole life and feels the need to defend themselves, especially when pain is involved.

When I meet a new horse I will perhaps greet them then gently reach my hand out to see how they feel about me touching them. Sometimes this is met with a horse looking away from me and pinning their ears, so I will immediately drop my hand and back off to let the horse know I’m listening to them. This is how you start to build trust with a horse. But often this is met with the phrase “don’t worry he won’t do anything”, which when we think about it really means “don’t worry you can continue to do whatever you want to him, even though you’re doing something he is communicating he really doesn’t like, because he is too gentle to actually hurt you”.

I do not back off when horses communicate discomfort to me because I am scared they will escalate and hurt me, I back off because it is the respectful thing to do and I want to start creating a rapport with that horse and let them know I will listen and they are safe with me. They don’t need to shout. Not being injured by horses is just a nice extra bonus.

This is not a judgement of people who have been taught this, it is a reflection of how horses are viewed industry wide. As long as the horse will tolerate something then it is fine to do it. We must not let the horse know they can have any control over what happens to them or else they'll become really dangerous. 🙄

Back in the days when I used to get on strange horses for people I remember hopping onto a horse who was extremely tense. He jogged away from the mounting block and I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get him to walk on a loose rein and allow me to relax and wrap my legs around him. After a while the owner said to me “you can trot him you know don’t worry he won’t do anything”, and I realised that she thought I wasn’t trotting him because I was nervous he would explode. I had to explain that trotting him was inappropriate because he couldn’t even relax in the walk and it wouldn’t do him any good. We are always rushing and expecting our horses to just put up with things and improve when they are clearly struggling (turned out this horse had raging stomach ulcers and kissing spine but that’s another story).

I really want horses to be listened to before they have to shout and become labelled aggressive and dangerous. I encourage you to take some time with your horse and observe how they really feel about what you’re asking. Are you just going through the motions and carrying on because you know your horse won’t protest too much? Do you notice when your horse doesn’t want your touch? What happens if you pause and listen? 🐴

I am currently writing my next webinar "How to build a good relationship with your horse" which will cover topics like this one, I will add the link to express interest in the comments 😊

27/05/2026

Successful training 🐴

We all want to have good training sessions with our horses, we want to end every session feeling like we have achieved and progressed.

For me success used to look like linear progress, making a plan of what I wanted to achieve in that session then doing what I needed to do to make that happen, very often at the detriment of the horse. My only metric of success was whether I could get the horse to “do the thing” or not.

Could I get the horse over the scary fillers?
Could I get the horse to hack out round the block alone?
Could I get the horse to stand at the mounting block?
Could I get the horse to load onto the trailer?

If I couldn’t complete what I set out to do in that session I would feel like I failed, I was often applying heavy pressure to horses and becoming frustrated if they wouldn’t “do the thing”. I had been taught if I quit I would be ruining the horse.

Often even if the session was deemed “successful”, I would feel an itch of conflict in the back of my mind over my treatment of the horse, we are all conditioned its okay and normal to “get into it” with horses. A flick with the stick, a kick in the ribs, a yank on the rope, refusing to let them turn away. I knew I was causing horses high-stress at times, but I believed that was a necessary evil to train horses.

As time went on and I learned more about behaviour, I would often feel apologetic towards horses after a training session, the conflict inside of me became bigger. One lightbulb moment for me came when I was trying to repeat a jumping exercise with my horse to make him more careful, he found it too difficult and was repeatedly hitting the fence and not improving. He eventually fell to his knees and I remember turning to my friend and saying I wasn’t going to jump him anymore as it just wasn’t for him. I felt horribly guilty that I had frightened and hurt my horse. That was the start of very slow spiral down this road for me.

I no longer judge the success of a training session on obedience at all. Success to me is the horse having a positive experience where they feel safe and listened to, definitely not one where the horse has been pushed into high-stress. Progress often isn’t linear and that is absolutely fine. When you train with this mindset every single training session can be a success, we can simply choose to make it so by making good choices for that horse on that day. If they can’t get to the same point as they did in the last session, that is absolutely fine.

The pay-off in the relationship when we train with the horse’s emotional experience in mind is huge. What is so amazing about training gently and allowing horses more agency is that they become so much easier train, as long as the ask is appropriate, and also much safer to be around. Horses who are listened to don’t need to shout loudly.

I’ll give you some examples of successful training sessions I’ve had over the last few weeks:
🐴 A very nervous horse learning to put their own head into the headcollar.
🐴 A horse who has issues around the mounting block standing calmly while someone walks up onto the first step and back down.
🐴 A horse confidently walking 100yds out of the front gate and calmly eating food out of a bucket away from their friends.
🐴 An anxious horse being able to stand calmly while someone touches their left hind leg.
🐴 A previously uncatchable horse coming to call.
🐴 A horse who would go to the back of the box to avoid being bridled who now comes to engage with it at the stable door.
🐴 A nervous young horse being able to have their front hooves trimmed by the farrier for the first time after weeks of preparation.
🐴 A horse who has had traumatic loading experiences being able to confidently eat a food scatter off the ramp.
🐴 A horse who used to find being wormed really distressing voluntarily putting a syringe in his mouth.
🐴 A horse who struggles with having their back legs handled being able to be poulticed daily for an abscess.

All of these sessions involved giving the horse the agency to say “no thank you I’m not comfortable”, most of these sessions the horse was loose and able to completely leave the situation if they chose to.

A comment I get a lot from clients is their yard friends just think they’re “doing nothing” when they train their horse. We are so used to quick fixes and pushing horses through. Truly ethical, gentle training that is “for the horse” prioritises the horse’s emotional experience. If we are seeing high-stress such as bucking, rearing, bolting, pulling back, kicking etc we have already failed them and we need to back off and rethink. Many issues come from expecting way too much too soon and also failing to read the behaviour.

I never thought I’d get such a buzz from watching a pony willingly put their nose into a headcollar or watching them willingly offer their hoof, but I genuinely do, honestly more so than I ever did from kicking horses over jumps or dragging them onto horseboxes.

Once you really learn to read behaviour and you can see all of the subtle communication, this kind of training becomes really exciting.

I’d love to hear about any of your little training successes recently. Clients also welcome to answer even though I already know 😊🐴

25/05/2026

We cannot assess a horse’s wellbeing based on their obedience 🐴

Horses are constantly judged based purely on their obedience.

A “good” horse is seen as one who complies with our demands without question, a “problem” horse is seen as one who doesn’t. And this may be as far as people want to take their thought process if all they care about is using a horse to do what they want to do.

However those of us who care about our horse’s life experiences and want to be more ethical need to think more deeply.

It is great that pain is talked about so much more now as a potential reason for “bad” behaviour, we have learned that a lack of obedience is often a sign of pain. The issue with this is, in the absence of obvious lameness, we are often taking a horse’s obedience as proof there is no pain present, regardless of other stress/discomfort behavioural indicators. As long as the horse is “doing the thing” then we accept this as good enough.

When you are trying to advocate for your horse with professionals this can be a really tricky one to navigate as this is the industry norm. I have had to advocate hard for client’s horses with some vets when they have suggested the horse is just “taking the mick” and we need to be firmer. It is so normalised that we should have to battle through with horses.

Once we start really learning to observe behaviour we can see through the cracks. I watch so many “problem” horse videos showing the horse being put under pressure and allegedly “fixed”. What we are actually seeing is a horse going from not being obedient to being obedient. But they are still showing clear indicators of tension and discomfort, such as facial expressions, calming signals and often uncomfortable movement that perhaps doesn’t come under the scope of obvious lameness. But the horse is declared fixed and happy based purely on the evidence that they are now obedient and doing what the human wants without protest.

When we hear people talking about their horse improving, often the only metric that has improved is their obedience. This is a good thing for the human but not necessarily a good thing for the horse. I’ll give you a few real life examples I have seen:

🐴 Horse has undiagnosed hock arthritis, is very stuffy under saddle and the owner struggles to get them into canter. Trainer gets on the horse and flicks the horse with a whip if they don’t respond to the leg aid. The horse doesn’t like being flicked with the whip so they learn to respond to the leg aid to avoid it. Horse now goes into canter easily. Horse is still in pain with hock arthritis, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

🐴 Horse has an undetected sore back from a badly fitting saddle. The horse now bites and threatens to kick when the saddle is presented. The saddler says the saddle is fine so the owner gets a trainer in. The trainer approaches with the saddle, as soon as the horse pins their ears the trainer slams the rope/clip up repeatedly into the horse's face chasing them backwards. They do this repeatedly until the horse stops pinning their ears while the saddle goes on. Horse is still in pain and the saddle still doesn’t fit, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

🐴 Horse has undiagnosed kissing spine and stomach ulcers. The horse is very tense at the mounting block and the owner has had a nasty fall. A bodyworker clears the horse of pain. The owner hires a trainer who tells them the horse just needs to build confidence. The trainer teaches the horse that if they move away from the mounting block they will be tapped with a stick, the horse doesn’t like being tapped with a stick so they eventually learn the only place it will stop is by the mounting block. Rider can now mount without the horse moving. The horse still has pain from kissing spine and stomach ulcers, but they are obedient now so nobody thinks there is an issue.

These “success” stories are flooding our social media feeds all of the time, we have to move away from viewing obedience as the only goal if we want to be ethical and we have to be careful of the narratives we create for our horses. An obedient horse does not mean a happy horse. 🐴

I go in depth into case studies about this in my "Is it pain or just behavioural?" webinar which I'll link in the comments.

24/05/2026

What else do you do on a warm bank holiday afternoon except clicker train the cat in your pyjamas 🐱😎💁🏻‍♀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

23/05/2026

Client story - “dangerous” horse 🐴

These stories are shared with permission but names have been changed to protect their privacy.

I was called out to see Harry as his owner Faye was at her wits end. Harry is a very large young horse who she bought from a reputable sports horse dealer. Upon coming home he was quite strong to lead to/from the field and he started to become difficult to mount and nappy when ridden. The usual comments of “he’s just trying it on/you’re too soft with him/he’s too big to be getting away with that” started.

Faye had a bodyworker out who found a few tight spots but said there was nothing significant to worry about. When his behaviour further deteriorated Faye went to the vet where they couldn’t find any lameness but he was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and given the appropriate treatment. He scoped clean after 4 weeks but his behaviour continued to be challenging. The vet told Faye that he thought this was “definitely behavioural” now and he was just a big young horse who she needed to get a professional trainer to sort out.

She booked a session with a well-recommended behavioural trainer. Harry had developed a pattern of panicking and ripping the rope out of your hands while being led to/from the field. Their assessment was that Harry was extremely dangerous because he’d learned he was stronger than Faye and he didn’t see her as a good leader. The trainer put a thin rope halter on him and immediately set to work making him move his feet and back up and come forward, if he didn’t respond quickly enough he was met with a short, sharp yank on the rope. The trainer then led him out towards the field, as usual Harry started to panic, the trainer yanked his head round sharply to the side with their full weight on the rope. Harry turned towards them and then went to leave again in a panic. This escalated until Harry was rearing, eventually he gave up and complied. The trainer then spent the next 45 minutes walking him to and from the field, yanking on the rope at any sign of anything except compliance. (I know all of this detail from the owner and from the videos posted on the internet as a success story).

Faye felt uncomfortable with how Harry had been treated, but also felt thoroughly berated and embarrassed by everyone saying his behaviour was her fault for being too soft. After the training session Harry was more compliant to lead but he became increasingly difficult to catch and put a headcollar on. This is when Faye contacted me.

Harry was very worried when I met him, he could not stand being touched anywhere near his poll, whilst I referred her on to a different bodyworker we needed to do some “crisis management” in the moment so she could safely lead him to and from the field. We basically got him eating feed out of buckets, and walked bucket to bucket, when he was calm we went a little further until he could do the whole field walk with bucket stops along the way.

The new bodyworker referred him back to a different vet to image his neck. He had significant bony changes in several parts of his neck. I cannot imagine how sore he was during that training session. All of his stress and behaviour was pain-mediated.

Harry has had his neck medicated and is now undergoing an appropriate, gentle rehab program to see if they can get him comfortable. He is enjoying enrichment activities with Faye and they have several tools in their toolkit to help him manage when he gets anxious. She spends a lot of time hand grazing him down the track to the field to try and improve his horrible associations with the place. It is difficult for horses to trust that those scary, painful things aren’t going to happen again in the same environment.

We have got to stop justifying yanking horses around by their heads, if that is the only way we can control them then we need to make better choices about the situations we’re putting them in. It is so normal to pull horses around without much thought. It almost seems as if people think the horse “deserves” it by choosing to be “rude” when they’re just scared and anxious and trying to get to safety. We seem to see lameness as the only sign of pain or injury after an “incident” has happened, I think a lot of horses are walking around with really sore polls and necks just from being pulled around like this. The horse’s poll and neck are not made of concrete, there are delicate structures everywhere.

You'd be surprised how many "dangerous" horses are no longer dangerous when we listen to them and stop setting them up to fail.

Next time you’re leading your horse take a moment to really think about what you’re doing and what your first reaction is if he hesitates or gets tense. Do you always have a bit of tension in the rope without realising? Do you immediately grab or start pulling if he hesitates? Do you yank a bit out of anxiety if you think he might be about to spook? If we can be consistently thoughtful and soft around how we handle our horses, we have a much better chance of our horses feeling safe and relaxed with us. 🐴

21/05/2026

Mares are horses too 🐴

If we put 2 horses side by side showing the same stress behaviours, but one was a gelding and one was a mare, I guarantee being “hormonal” would be very high on the list of people’s explanation of the mare’s behaviour. While the gelding may have ulcers, kissing spine and other sources of pain thrown onto the table, its almost like mares are seen as a different species.

I find the way we speak about mares can have a particularly nasty under-tone, no doubt stemming from the misogyny ingrained into all of us from a young age. It leaves a really sour taste in my mouth watching people laugh at distressed horses “haha she’s so sassy, little witch!” who are just desperately trying to communicate their discomfort.

It is so normalised that mares are "grumpy" that we actually highlight the ones that aren't by saying they're "not mareish". We literally think its normal for mares to be stressed and upset and that's just how they are. I hate the term "mareish".

I have a client who’s horse started napping and rearing, after a basic trot-up and palpation of her back, for some reason I still cannot fathom, she was prescribed a course of Regumate “to see if it helped”. Regumate is not something we should be giving to horses lightly and with absolutely no solid evidence of hormonal issues, but I hear of this happening commonly when we have a mare who is showing behavioural issues.

Upon assessing this mare I could see she was on a very restricted amount of forage and also didn’t have adequate muscling to carry the rider comfortably. She was scoped and diagnosed with stomach ulcers, we of course implemented management changes then worked on building her body up again. The napping behaviour never returned as now she was comfortable. This was such a simple, basic deduction from assessing this horse, and yet we jumped straight to a hormonal issue and disregarded anything else simply because she was a mare.

I am of course not saying mares cannot have hormonal issues. This idea of “oh she’s just hormonal”, okay, if that is the case she is likely uncomfortable, perhaps she is in pain and she is not up to training today, it is not a justification for ignoring the horse and carrying on. Grumpiness and irritability usually come from pain and stress, it is not stand-alone. I know if I’m feeling grumpy and irritable I want to be left the hell alone.

Another thing to note is that often horses who are having hormonal issues improve hugely when we improve their management to be more species-appropriate and reduce their chronic stress-load, just like us.

This is absolutely not a generalisation of all mares, but I have anecdotally found that mares tend to be quicker to express how they’re feeling, which I’m sure plays a huge part in their unwarranted “difficult” reputation. They’re just harder to bully.

Have any of you had your concerns dismissed because your horse happens to be a mare? 🐴

LS Horsemanship

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