09/13/2026
YOUR HORSE CAN SMELL WHAT YOU’RE FEELING
Chazot Thoughts — The Smell of Humans
Humans have a rather touching belief that they can hide things from us.
Fear.
Anger.
Frustration.
Nervousness.
You straighten your shoulders.
You control your breathing.
You put a smile on your face.
And you think:
There. The horse won't know.
We know.
You forget that the world you experience is not the world we experience.
Humans depend enormously upon vision. You look at a person and read the face, the posture, the expression.
We horses possess a very different sensory world.
Our sense of smell is extraordinarily important to us. Our long noses move large volumes of air with every breath. Our olfactory system gathers chemical information from the environment, and we possess a prominent vomeronasal organ—an accessory olfactory structure that is greatly reduced in humans.
Considering the relative size of your noses and ours, this does not surprise me.
Frankly, we sometimes wonder how you breathe through those tiny things in the middle of your faces.
I once watched him sitting beside Bretelle, our Boxer.
Both were breathing rather loudly.
Looking at their respective noses, I naturally assumed the noise was coming from the human.
I was wrong.
It was Bretelle.
But humans have something else that gives us information.
You sweat.
And you do it even when you don't think you are sweating.
Emotional states produce physiological changes. Anger, frustration and fear are not simply thoughts hidden somewhere inside your head.
Your body participates.
And your horse is standing beside that body.
This is why he often told riders:
“If you are angry or frustrated with your horse, or if you are afraid of him, he will feel it. You can eventually lie to yourself, but not to your horse.”
Perhaps he should have said:
We can smell it.
One student was frightened before riding.
She tried breathing exercises to control her fear—to make it disappear before approaching the horse.
He stopped her.
Fear, he explained, is not something to be ashamed of.
Horses are large and powerful. Caution around them is entirely reasonable.
The important question isn't:
How do I hide my fear?
It is:
What am I actually afraid will happen?
The horse might bolt.
The horse might buck.
The horse might spook.
Sometimes those things have happened.
But often the fear comes from something else—from everything the rider has been taught might happen if control is lost.
You must be the leader.
The horse must obey.
The horse must submit.
You must remain in control.
And suddenly the horse beside you is no longer a partner.
He has become a potential disaster that must be controlled before he does something dangerous.
Your body changes.
Your muscles change.
Your breathing changes.
Your chemistry changes.
And then your horse perceives you changing.
He becomes concerned.
You perceive his concern as confirmation that something is wrong.
Your fear increases.
His concern increases.
And two intelligent beings can become frightened by a danger that neither one originally created.
So he did something quite different with this student.
He introduced her to Manchester.
Manchester was approximately 18.2 hands and 1,800 pounds—the largest and most powerful horse in the barn.
Not exactly the horse most conventional thinking would select for someone dealing with fear.
That was precisely the point.
She worked with him from the ground.
There was no illusion that she could physically dominate him.
If Manchester decided to return to his stall, there was very little she could do about it.
But he didn't leave.
He stayed.
He listened.
He responded.
She made mistakes.
Manchester noticed them.
And still he stayed with her.
Because partnership does not require one body to be stronger than the other.
It requires two minds willing to communicate.
As they walked toward the arena, I looked at Manchester.
Be easy with her.
Manchester was unimpressed with my advice.
He wasn't interested in babysitting her.
He wanted her to discover something much more important:
who we really are.
We feel extraordinarily subtle changes in the human beside us.
We do not need domination to understand you.
We need clarity.
We need consistency.
We need you to listen when we answer.
And perhaps most importantly, we need you to stop pretending.
When the student returned from working with Manchester, she was breathing hard.
She was sweating.
But she was quiet.
Something had changed.
Caesar lifted his head, moved his nostrils toward her and announced it before I had even properly investigated:
“She lost her fear.”
The woman looked at Manchester differently now.
Not as 1,800 pounds of horse she needed to control.
As Manchester.
She asked if she could shower him.
He told her they would work together again the following day and that when she felt ready to ride him, she could say so.
She looked at Manchester.
Then she asked:
“Can I ride him tomorrow?”
Perhaps humans spend too much time trying to convince horses that they are brave.
You don't have to convince us.
You don't even have to be fearless.
You simply have to be honest enough to begin the conversation.
Chazot
Science of Motion
