Foust/ Patten's Farm

10/19/2026

Ponies need to exercised and we look for ways to get ourselves motivated to keep moving. One of our students came up with a clever way to help us move the ponies and help friends and family enjoy exercising with socializing. The Pony Hiking Club came to be. The ponies are a favorite. Each hiker challenged oneself and a pony to try obstacles and jumps. It was great fun and encouraging each other to try something out of their comfort zone. We enjoyed a small meal shared with their family.

10/08/2026

10/02/2026

👍 yes!

Whose Feelings Are These Anyway?😒
When Your Horse's Anxiety Becomes Your Anxiety

Yesterday, in Part 2 of Horse-Human Emotional Entanglement (HHEE), I explored the Animal Lover's Dilemma: what happens when our perfectly reasonable desire not to harm our horse quietly morphs into a belief that a good horse owner should never make their horse uncomfortable.

Today I want to go one step further, because there is another mammal involved in this relationship, and unfortunately it has opinions, childhood experiences, insecurities and access to social media.

US.🫣

Imagine your horse becomes anxious. His head comes up, his muscles tighten and his attention locks onto something in the distance. You notice immediately because you know your horse well.

Then your stomach tightens. Your breathing changes. You become hyperaware of him. Perhaps you shorten the lead rope. Perhaps you start reassuring him. Perhaps your brain begins rapidly searching through its extensive catalogue of Things That Could Go Horribly Wrong.⚠

Your horse notices that you have changed.

He becomes more anxious.🚨

You notice that he has become more anxious.🔄

Congratulations. We now have two anxious mammals, each monitoring the other for evidence that there is definitely something to be anxious about.😱

This is where psychology gives us a useful distinction between "empathic concern" and "personal distress".

Empathic concern is essentially: You're struggling and I care about what is happening to YOU.🫵

Personal distress is closer to: You're struggling, and watching you struggle is now making ME uncomfortable.😫

Both can happen at the same time.

That distinction matters enormously with horses because once ANOTHER individual's distress becomes sufficiently uncomfortable for US, we can become highly motivated to make their distress disappear.

Not necessarily because we have carefully determined that stopping is what the horse needs, but because when the horse settles WE feel better too.

This doesn't make us selfish or uncaring. It makes us human. But it does mean that sometimes what feels like empathy may contain a rather inconvenient second ingredient: our own need for emotional relief.🥲

Some people are particularly good at monitoring the emotional weather around them. They notice tone, posture, facial expression, silence and tension. They can walk into a room and know Susan is furious with Barry despite Susan insisting she is "fine" while putting teaspoons into the dishwasher with unusual force.😕

That sensitivity can be an extraordinary strength.

But sometimes noticing becomes monitoring, monitoring becomes responsibility, and responsibility becomes:

"Everyone needs to be okay before I can be okay."🥺

Then we buy a horse.

A species capable of communicating mild dissatisfaction through approximately 746 combinations of ears, nostrils, tails, feet and facial expressions.

Suddenly our emotional monitoring system has found its dream job.

The horse raises his head. Noted. Tail swish. Definitely noted. Ear back. Oh dear. Horse moves away. Interesting. Horse looks at us.

Oh God.🤯

This is where HHEE can begin quietly running the show.

We become so attentive to maintaining the horse's emotional equilibrium that their discomfort starts controlling our behaviour. We reassure, accommodate, retreat, change the exercise, reduce expectations or otherwise try to make everything nice again.

I call this smoothing.😔

Smoothing isn't inherently wrong. A skilled horseperson may recognise that a horse is overwhelmed and deliberately reduce the difficulty. That is good horsemanship.

The difference is whether I changed my approach because I learned something important about the HORSE, or because the horse's reaction created something uncomfortable in ME.🫣

That distinction can be remarkably difficult to see from inside ourselves.

It is also why I am cautious about the idea that being highly sensitive to horses automatically makes someone particularly good at understanding them.

Sensitivity tells us that something changed.

It doesn't necessarily tell us WHY.😎

I can correctly notice that my horse has become aroused and incorrectly decide he is frightened. I can notice resistance and call it trauma when the horse is actually confused. I can interpret frustration as fear, learned behaviour as an emotional boundary, or pain as disobedience.

Feeling something strongly doesn't make my interpretation accurate.

Sometimes it just allows me to be wrong with tremendous conviction.

The skill I want us to develop is something different: emotional differentiation.

My horse can be frightened without me becoming frightened about his fear. He can be frustrated without me urgently needing his frustration to disappear. He can dislike something I am doing without me immediately concluding that I am doing something wrong.

That doesn't mean becoming cold or detached.

It means remaining sufficiently separate from the horse's emotional experience that I still have room to think.💪

So today's HHEE question is:

"When my horse becomes emotional, can I remain curious about what is happening, or do I immediately need to make the feeling go away❓"

Because perhaps our horses don't need us to prove how deeply we understand their anxiety by joining them in it.

Sometimes the kindest thing we can offer a worried horse is one nervous system that hasn't joined the emergency.💪

Tomorrow, in Part 4, we cross to the other end of the lead rope and ask what all this emotional smoothing might actually feel like to the horse.

Collectable Advice 304/365

If this made you recognise yourself, please consider hitting SHARE. Somewhere out there, another deeply caring horse owner may currently be trying to calm their horse, calm themselves and remember what on earth they own a horse - an that to me is really sad, because there is a way out of this dynamic.❤

@

09/26/2026

Ten Horse Problems. One Surprisingly Boring Explanation.🧐

If you own a horse and have access to the internet, congratulations. You have access to approximately four billion explanations for why your horse is doing something you would rather it didn't.

I researched the top ten questions people ask about their horse's behaviour. They look like different problems, but to me they are remarkably consistent.

Why does my horse spook? Why won't my horse load? Why does my horse buck? Why won't my horse go forward? Why can't I catch my horse? Why does my horse bite? Why won't my horse canter? Why does my horse behave at home but lose its tiny equine mind somewhere else? How do I calm my anxious horse? And, of course, the philosophical heavyweight: how do I get my horse to trust me?

These appear to be ten different problems, which is excellent news if you are in the business of selling ten different solutions.

Perhaps the spooky horse needs magnesium. The loader needs a special halter. The anxious horse needs nervous-system regulation. The biter needs boundaries. The bucker needs a saddle fitter. The difficult-to-catch horse needs connection. And the horse who won't canter presumably needs you to purchase a webinar at 11:57 pm before the cart closes forever.

But there is an irritatingly less glamorous possibility.

Many of these problems can be investigated using exactly the same process.

First, is the horse physically struggling with what you are asking? Pain, weakness, poor balance, fatigue, unsuitable equipment and other physical problems can make a reasonable request difficult or unpleasant. That deserves investigation.

If the horse is physically capable, things become surprisingly practical. Does the horse understand what you are asking? Does your cue reliably mean what you think it means? Is the horse motivated to respond? Can they confidently perform the behaviour here, under these conditions? Has the skill been learned well enough to survive excitement, uncertainty and distraction?

And here we encounter equestrianism's slightly awkward problem.

Horses need a consistent system of communication with us. Every interaction is either making that communication clearer and more reliable, or muddying the waters and making it harder for the horse to know what is expected.

Which means there is more to riding horses than riding horses.

People quite reasonably go to riding lessons to learn to ride. But much of the know-how required to solve these problems sits somewhere else, under the deeply unsexy heading of - horse training.

Horse training sounds like something professionals do when they start young horses. It isn't.

Every time you teach your horse what your leg or rein means, to stand at the mounting block, walk onto a float, leave another horse or respond when the world becomes exciting, you are training.🤯

You don't need to become a horse trainer. You need enough training know-how to help your horse understand you, find the right response and develop confidence in you, the activity and the environment.

Because sometimes ten horse problems aren't ten separate problems.

Sometimes the horse is physically struggling. Sometimes there simply isn't enough clarity, confidence and reliability for the horse to know what is expected.

And when a horse doesn't have a reliable answer from us, it comes up with its own.😎

Sometimes the horse doesn't need ten different solutions.

Sometimes we just need more know-how.

Collectable Advice 299/365. Please SHARE to spread the idea that there is more to riding horses than we realise ❤

09/24/2026

Getting frustrated and pulling on your horse when you make a mistake in the pattern does not fix the why nor does the judge want to see you taking it out on your horse. Learn from mistakes and have fun.

09/22/2026

Get curious.

If You Have to Keep Pulling, Kicking and Insisting, Read This👇

There is something wonderfully obvious hiding in plain sight when you’re trying to get on with your horse.

If you constantly have to pull, tug, kick, insist, correct, escalate, reach for the whip or resort to hope and prayers because your horse has “ignored you”, something has gone wrong.

Because if your horse understood the light signal, was physically comfortable enough to respond, felt confident doing what you asked and had learned that responding mattered, why would you need all that extra persuasion? Not to mention the hope and prayers.😬

This is where things get interesting.

A gentle squeeze of your legs is a language. The feel of a lead rope through a halter is a language. Pressure on the bit asking for a turn or halt is a language.

None of these things arrive pre-installed in a horse like factory software.

We create their meaning.

And then we have to protect and maintain that meaning.🤓

Sometimes horses genuinely don’t understand. Sometimes they’ve become habituated because every signal is loud, relentless or meaningless. Sometimes they are protecting themselves from pressure. Sometimes their feet hurt, their backs ache or their joints are stiff. Sometimes they understand the signal but don’t yet feel confident following us somewhere that feels confronting or vulnerable.

Yet we often call the resulting horse lazy, naughty, stubborn, spooky, heavy, dramatic or sensitive.

Those words become much more interesting when we turn them around.

What if they’re actually pointing towards a gap in our horse-training knowledge?

That isn’t an insult. It’s incredibly liberating.

Because horse training isn’t something “horse trainers” do before handing you the finished product. Your horse is learning every time you interact with them. Every lead, halt, turn, transition, gate, puddle, float, mounting block and trail ride is training.

You are already a horse trainer.

The exciting part is that you can become bloody good at it.

There is an extraordinary buzz when a horse becomes so tuned into your signals that it feels almost like they’re following your thoughts. Not because you possess mystical horse-whispering powers, but because you’ve created such clear meaning that the tiniest signals make sense.

So when your horse frustrates you, get curious before you get louder.

Your horse might just be showing you exactly where your next bit of horsemanship needs to be learned.❤

Collectable Advice 297/365. Please SHARE with someone who might need the freedom of discovering that what they don’t know yet is something they can learn.

09/19/2026

What could have done differently to make the ride better?

It is always interesting to see how riders talk about their horses after a trail ride. I see it all the time—someone will start out by saying their horse is the sweetest, kindest animal who tries so hard, but in the very next breath, they complain about how terrible the horse was on the trail, asking for opinions on social media on how to fix it from people who don't even know the full gist of what is actually going on.

We focus so heavily on what went wrong or how awful they behaved, rather than just appreciating the fact that we got to go out and ride. What happened to just enjoying the ride? What happened to the pure joy of simply spending time with them?

When we get caught up in that cycle, we lose sight of the relationship. At the end of the day, our horses are only as good as we are, and chances are, it is our own riding causing the issues. Could an unbalanced seat be forcing them to work twice as hard just to stay upright? Could improper use of spurs be completely shutting them down? Could incorrect riding be restricting and affecting their breathing? These are just a few of the physical issues we create, yet we still expect them to perform perfectly. Horses do not just bolt or run off to be a jerk, and they are not just inherently lazy.

Instead of jumping online to pick apart what our horses did wrong, what if we flipped the perspective? What if we asked ourselves, "What could I have done differently to make that ride better for my horse?"

Let's stop playing the blame game and start celebrating the quiet moments, the partnership, and the simple privilege of hanging out with our horses.