19/09/2026
Last week we celebrated 38 years of marriage. If, on our wedding day in ’88, Patrick had asked me to change who Trudi was, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.
Of course, we have both changed over time. Almost four decades of living life is bound to do that. The edges have been softened. Some big changes too, who knew he would give up eating meat! But I didn’t make him, he chose to join me in his own time and for his own reasons.
Love has meant giving each other the space to be the individuals we are. Not some homogeneous couple, but two individuals who are pretty good together.
People love their horses. They don’t marry them (although I haven’t verified that one), but they do love them. Why then do we fall in love with a horse only to try and change them into something different?
Does the love not extend to the animal they are, with all their own needs? Do we love them more with pulled mane and sporting the latest colours? Do we love them more with every hair clipped – sleek and sporty? Do we love them more when they smell less ‘horsey’ and more ‘rosy’?
Because the changes we ask for aren’t the softening of sharp edges. The sensitive one is supposed to be chilled and accepting of arenas, noise, travelling in rattling vehicles. The one who prefers to move is supposed to stand still and suck it up. The one who tells you so clearly that something hurts is supposed to stop telling you (and suck it up). We say we want a partnership and then set about removing every part of them that might make them a partner.
They don’t choose us. They don’t get to check us out, to see if the field works, if the friends they’ll (hopefully) live with work for them. They can’t walk out when we turn out not to be compatible, when they repeatedly ask for better and we ignore them. We take away their choice of friends, accommodation and challenge. Sure, we keep them safe. But at what cost?
And yes, I train horses. I change behaviour for a living, but it’s almost always for horses who are having a hard time, and what I’m changing is the circumstances they’re living in, not the animal they are. Most of the time the horse isn’t the one who needs to change, it’s the human.
I’m not insulting humans, it’s just that nobody teaches us this. We have an image in our head of the horse we expected, and it takes a lot to ignore that and look at the horse in front of us and love them for themselves and make room for them to be, well, them.
I’m lucky in a fellowship of like-minded horse lovers. We love the smell, the dirt, the sound of chewing, the bum pushing closer for a scratch. We already know we don’t need them to change and are willing to love them as they are.
I know in circles outside of mine there are more folks interested in keeping horses clean and rideable than in letting them practise being a horse. There are questions we need to ask. It’s not just worrying about a social licence to operate, or about losing equestrian sport. It’s accepting that sentient beings have needs that we go nowhere near to meeting.
Photo (T Dempsey 2026) of horses grazing the water’s edge at the Skern, North Devon
