10/12/2026
What is "Liberty"?
Is it freedom from just being tacked or attached in some way? What about freedom from pressure, even the invisible mental kind?
This is a video from soon after B and I both arrived in France in 2014. He found the indoor very scary as it was totally enclosed except for the one giant door you can see him looking towards off camera.
I was there as a working student and during every lesson or practice session, B was so distracted by desperately looking at the giant door that it made our sessions redundant and frustrating... especially because our instructor at that time had no knowledge or patience for working with young and/or green horses. 🤦♀️
As it was a very windy, wet winter- working outside, where B was more comfortable, was not an option. I decided to start spending time in the indoor late in the evenings when no one else was there and letting B just be totally free. If I left him to his own devices however, he just stared out the door the whole time and got more anxious. I needed to redirect his focus to help him relax, but I wanted to keep it a low pressure, low demand experience.
This is where B helped me to develop my own ideas about liberty work and the way in which I could find it the most beneficial and helpful.
It is just to help the horse change their association with a place, the work, the person, the experience. It isn't because pressure is bad. It is because horses tell themselves repetitive, stressful stories about whatever it is they are finding aversive:
"Oh no it's this totally enclosed arena where I'm trapped and can't escape"
"Ah we are doing that thing again where I feel like I don't know the answer"
"Yikes this person scares me"
I now use liberty as a tool to show or remind the horse that things be totally different than they are expecting. In this case, by just repeatedly asking B's attention to return to me and making lots of little requests for tricks and things he already knew, he slowly got much more confident and began to treat the arena as not a dreadful place,
or a place of work,
or a place where high demands happen,
but just as another space we live our lives in.
To me, liberty just means horse directed. If they don't want to interact or respond to me, okay. No coercion, no punishment, no increase of pressure will come from me. Maybe the session is me just sitting there with them holding space. Sometimes that alone is extremely useful, and sometimes it's not. As with every tool, there is a correct fit for every horse, time, and place. 😊
https://youtu.be/qPQKaME7_lk?is=3hwgis_Ycusocx3s
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