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Reverence Equine, Shrewsbury, VT (2026)

04/27/2026

The last two years I've been able to take horses in for training at my farm. The way my set-up is laid out, my round pen is in the middle of a small track system flanked by grazing fields and all members of my herd can audit - as I like to say - when I'm working with a horse in the round pen.

When I get a new horse for training for that first week or so I'll shut everyone off from the track when I take the new horse out. It's largely for practical reasons: I don't know this animal, they don't know me, and most of the time they are coming to me because they need some help in the "understanding humans can be helpful/are important" department. So I need time to foster that without too much interruption.

But pretty quickly, I start leaving everyone as they are when I bring that horse out for work. I also do this with members of my herd: I tie, groom, trim, bath and tack up within a space the entire group shares.

This evolved with some intentionality on my part. Co-regulation is a serious and wholly-underutilized tool. I need my horses to know how to be around other horses who are doing other horse things while not getting emotionally involved in those other things. I need them not to experience a rise in tension every time a horse approaches us when we're doing something together. I need them to be able to step seamlessly back and forth from with the herd to with me and sometimes with me WHILE they are in the herd.

Co-regulation is like a duet of the nervous systems: a mutual and generally subconscious process where one nervous system influences another. It works bi-directionally to stimulate in times of concern, play and elevation as well as to calm and de-escalate back into a parasympathetic state. A horse with good emotional regulation and a wide emotional range is a valuable asset. Both of my geldings fit into this category and a large part of that is because I've made an effort to develop that in them. While Whiskey is not sound for regular work, Lewis will be a horse that - once more educated under saddle - I'll use to work other horses off of.

For the time being, they both offer their services in other ways. They have hay and some spring grass and everything else they might want at their disposal and yet day after day they come to "audit" outside the pen.

Eventually I'll start allowing a horse loose in the pen while I'm working with someone else. It's an excellent way to work on things both animals might need, or I can use a dependable and experienced horse in this department to ease the worries of the other horse. I can move both horses around together at once, allowing both to work on "being with me" mentally while sharing a space and moving around together physically.

Do these practices carry risks? Yes, they do.

But so does NOT doing these things. I've seen more problems arise from the latter than the former. Unfortunately, our standardized ways of keeping horses often not only prevent us from giving our horses this sort of education but actually discourage it. It rarely gets included in horsemanship instruction despite its immense value. It seems to swing these days between being a trendy, en vogue practice and being a lost artform.

I've never been one for trends. I have learned, however, that some of the old ways become such because trends take their place, especially trends that promise a quicker path to the same results...and we all know how that usually works out.

04/24/2026

What It Means to Do It "The Right Way": Part II

A few videos online prompted me to go down a thought rabbit hole about the idea of "correct".

Who decides who is correct? Who decides "this is the right way, and all other ways are less correct than this way"? Where in the bylaws we apparently sign when we become horsepeople do we indicate how we go about navigating who is "right" and who is "wrong"?

I used to feel like this was pretty black and white. In a lot of cases I think it is, if we're assuming we all operate on a baseline set of ethics and principles.

There are times, though, where there feels like there is more wiggle room than I think a lot of us are comfortable admitting there is when it comes to how we define "ethical" or to "have principles".

A few years back I went to visit my mentor, and there was a horse there that week that struggled quite a bit with being mentally present. My mentor later called him one of the toughest he'd ever seen in terms of his reluctance to consider a human might be meaningful. For several days, it was hard to watch. We talked about it one night at dinner after someone mentioned how difficult it was to see my mentor have to firm up quite a lot to get this horse to start to believe his way of dealing with his existence wasn't going to work anymore. He said something I will never forget as long as I work with horses.

"Sometimes, leaving them the way they are is worse than having to go through the hell you might have to go through with them in order to help them feel better about life."

I went home that year thinking about that sentence. It changed a lot about how I felt around the idea of what it means to be "fair" and "kind" and "working in the true interests of the horse". It also changed a lot about my horsemanship: given the type of horses I usually end up working with, it shaped how I began to approach fearful, traumatized, confused and anxious animals. I empathize with them, but I do not pity them. I don't tip toe around their concerns and avoid conversations I know will be hard. We're going to talk about the things that feel hard to talk about. I'm going to listen to you. I'm not going to ask you do something I don't believe you can do. I am going to hear you when you say "no", and all I'm going to ask is that you try. If you try, we can figure the rest out together. Because I think - like people - the thing these horses really need is validation of their worries and consideration the response to those worries receives. Stuff starts to shift when the horse realizes the person sees them.

And so I worked really, really hard to become someone that can usually leave a horse in a better place than I found them. I've found helping horses heal has helped me heal. It's kind of a masochistic way to go about it given the amount of difficulty and sorrow there can be in the process, now that I think about it.

The videos I watched of a particular horseperson weren't about helping troubled horses, but about something completely technical in the way of what we call "correct riding". I asked about it in a member group I'm a part of, and one of the responses indicated that this person, too, had see that this horseperson did this thing differently than what we'd consider to be classically "correct", but that she has started to be able to see what this person is doing, and how they'd eventually arrive at the same place but just got there pretty different.

And so I got to thinking about how we decide what constitutes "correct". It seems like one of those things that should be so obvious you can't help but walk right into it. If you don't believe a particular thing is "correct", there is obviously something entirely wrong with you. You might even be unethical, or immoral, or some other descriptor antithetical to what it means to be a "good horseperson" or a "good rider".

But then I watched my mentor work with that gelding, and it transformed the way I looked at everything I thought was "correct".

The longer I walk this planet, the more I feel like I'm finding that there is very, very little out there that's black and white. Life is messy and ever-changing. Our understanding of that messiness is also a constant evolution, and the best thing we can do to keep growing is to stay open to that evolution when it knocks on our door.

04/20/2026

What It Means to Do It "The Right Way": Part I

I am in state of a perpetual spring cleaning when it comes to how and why I do the things I do, use the tools I use and apply the methods I apply. One of the benefits of teaching is that as you meet new people, you're constantly having to adapt in varying degrees to the needs of those in front of you.

You're also constantly questioning your own work, its efficacy, and whether you could do better or differently. This has its pros and cons.

One of the things I hear often from people I visit with is how frustrating it is to know whether they are doing "the right thing". There have been times where I have been the harbinger of bad news, pointing out something that the person thought they were "doing right" while explaining why it does not appear to be working so well for them. Queue the exasperation. I have had on numerous occasions conversations around how to effectively "blend" two ways of doing things, when those two ways appear to be opposites. Those conversations often foray into why one person can do it one way and be "right" and someone else can do it another way and also be "right", when it feels like their is a chasm between those two ideals.

There are many, many instances where "right" is subjective. I have three rules to determine if something falls into this category:

1. If it's not working for my horse, it's not "right".
2. If it's not working for me, it's not "right".
3. If it goes against my baseline horsemanship principles, it's not "right".

The hardest thing about being a student is that we can't be blind followers, no matter how much we'd sometimes like to have someone just give us the answer. We have to put some degree of work in. How much work we have to put in will depend on our natural aptitudes and skills and confidence. Some people will have to put in more work than others, but none of us learn via osmosis. We have to do a certain degree of figuring for ourselves. This includes determining what is "right" for us.

There are other things that are categorically not subjective when it comes to what is "right". I found such an example in my mailbox this weekend. The cover photo of this publication looks lovely: the horses are clean and attentive, the handler smiling with ease and confidence, and yet the halters on these horses are seriously problematic. The purpose of the halter is not just something to clip a lead to: a correctly fitted halter (regardless of material) distributes pressure across the sensitive features of the horse's face should they pull against it. A core part of this is ensuring that the throatlatch pieces do not lay over the flat of the horse's jowl, but fit comfortably behind and underneath the jaw so in the event the horse braces, pressure isn't centered squarely over the horse's poll. No amount of butter-soft leather or ergonomic shaping is going to change what happens if these halters engage with the horse's face. And, the very design of them is such that you can't fit them properly, yet here the photo is, on the front page of a reputable company's magazine likely seen by tens of thousands of patrons.

Herein lies the frustration so many share: parsing out "right" from "wrong" and all of its grey area. I have, again, a couple of rules about this:

1. Learn to think critically for yourself. As one of my teachers said to me, "you have eyes: use them!"
2. Be okay with discomfort: being uncertain or in a state of questioning is not a weakness and has a lot less to do with being "right" and a lot more to do with confidence in your ability to work through something.
3. Be wary of those who either A) cannot explain why something is "right" and B) are self-assured that they are. There are lots of reasons why I might do what I do and a lot of times it's based on experience. That is valid...and also needs to be stated if someone asks.

And finally, #4: just because you see it, someone does it, and it works for them, doesn't mean it's "right". It may not be "right" for you, your horse, your situation, your principles, etc. It may just also be black and white, plain as day "wrong".

If all of this muddied your waters more than clarified them...congratulations and welcome to Being A Student! You're in good company.

04/17/2026

Some time ago I learned of a pretty well-known horseman who died after the horse he was in the process of mounting threw its head up and made direct contact with his skull. The blow killed him.

The horse he was mounting was being held by the owner so it would stay still for him to climb aboard.

There are a lot of things we do with horses that I consider the practice of to be "cheating death". Not necessarily because doing these things are a sure way to get yourself killed or seriously hurt (although some of them certainly fall into that category) but because they are an obvious indication that the horse is not okay with what we're doing, and the more not-okay the horse is, the more likely we are to wind up with a poor outcome. The problem is in that the practice has become so normalized and accepted as a reasonable thing to do that the part about the horse not being okay gets completely glossed over. We just do what we want to do anyway and go on about our day.

Getting on a horse that won't stand still for you to get on him is one of these. A horse that won't help you climb on is a horse that is not confident about having someone on him. I want the horse to have no change of facial expression whether I'm standing beside him or sitting astride. That, to me, is a confident horse, at least insofar as mounting is concerned.

Horses that aren't good to have their feet handled is another. I've noticed a correlation over the years between horses who aren't great at having their feet handled and those that struggle with anxiety under saddle. They tend to fall into the same category. A horse who can't be alright with a foot being taken away for a few moments is probably also not going to want to allow a person to direct where his feet go while being ridden. He's protecting his ability to put them where HE feels he needs them. Or he might not know how to balance comfortably without all of his limbs where he feels they ought to be.

Then there's horses who have "no fly" zones on their body. Maybe it's the sheath/groin area. Maybe it's the tail head. Maybe it's the face or ears or the muzzle. I once met a mare who was really fussy about having her elbow on her left side touched. When a horse won't let me respectfully come in and touch a part of their body, that gives me pause. Sometimes it's a matter of simple exposure and conscientious handling can fix that. Other times there is a physical root cause creating discomfort that may or may not be able to be remediated.

These are just a few examples but they are incredibly common ones. Are they guaranteed to see you to your grave? No. But they represent spots where corners in that horse's education have been cut. Where we're cutting one corner, we're usually cutting others. The more corners cut, the more likely it is that one day "something happens" and now we've had a wreck.

I can't control the "somethings" that might happen in the world, but I can sure prepare my horse to the best of my ability to be able to handle them should they come to pass.

04/03/2026

When we are working with a very scared or traumatized or anxious horse, we must be aware of what I've come to call "the teeter totter".

If you grew up around children's playgrounds, chances are you can visualize what I'm talking about. Sometimes they were those old-timey, two-dimensional wooden teeter totters, where a person sat on each end of the board, held on to the handle and pushed off the ground with their feet to create the up-and-down motion. Other times they were plastic or resin animal figures mounted on heavy metal coils secured to the ground. You'd mount the teeter totter and your shifting weight would bounce you back and forth and side to side. Sometimes it got pretty wild on those, with kids ending up near parallel to the ground or being flung off entirely, usually in fits of laughter.

An anxious horse is like one of those teeter totters that is being held in a tensed position on a hair trigger. There is no gentle back and forth. There's not really any movement at all, just stored energy, waiting to be let loose, and once it's loose it builds on its own momentum and spirals out of control. It's a mental state, one wherein the horse has very little ability to adapt or relax in what might be asked, and one where the slightest miscalculation on the human's part causes the horse to fly into blind panic. To succumb to the teeter totter, if you will.

There are a couple of ways people commonly try to deal with this. One is to never cause the teeter to totter - in other words, to stay well below the horse's threshold so that he never becomes reactive. The problem with this is that it leaves the horse in that tensed state in perpetuity. We never get him to a better place because we're not trying to, we're just trying not to make things worse. Sometimes you can get by with this for a little bit but it tends not to work out long term because the horse's state never ultimately changes.

Another way is to "cut the cord", or do something to simply release all the teeter totter's energy. This is how a lot of commonly used desensitization tactics work, under the guise that if we just "expose" the horse enough, he'll eventually get over it/work it out/move on. It's also the idea behind excessive lunging and the like: let the horse release all their energy and that will bring about calmness. Problem here is that is not how remediation of anxiety works, and you create a cycle where you must rely on finding all the things the horse might need to be desensitized to or perpetually lunging the horse to wear them down.

Ultimately what we need to do is let the tension out of the teeter totter one little bit at a time. We need to acknowledge and respect that precarious place the horse finds himself in and aim to lessen it, inch by inch. We don't want to cut the cord because that leads to chaos, but we don't want to leave the horse where he is either. We need to work within whatever few millimeters of space that horse has and endeavor to increase it over time. We can tell when the horse is starting to be less effected by the teeter totter when he can recover quickly and without too much trouble from something that might have worried him quite a bit before.

The question then becomes how to "do" this - how to get good at assessing a given horse's teeter totter - and the answer is an unsatisfying "just go do it". Of course, there's a bit more to it than that, but one never learns if one never endeavors to start learning. I do find that those of us who fall into the category of natural-born "do-ers" struggle with this more than those who naturally like to observe. A do-er is more likely to "cut the rope", whereas an observer is more likely to let the horse languish where he is. You need both pieces in balance, and that balance is ever-shifting based on the horse in front of you.

THAT is the part that takes practice: managing your own inner teeter totter while attempting to help the horse manage his.

03/30/2026

When we got our current dog, Dante, I had really strong feelings about how I wanted to train him.

Specifically, I had really strong feelings about not wanting to use what I considered to be aversive stimuli. I had a particular concern, at the time, of subverting my dog's emotional responses and causing him to respond based on fear or a desire to avoid something happening, versus a desire and willingness and openness to pay attention to me.

And so for a while, we avoided that. Everything was largely based in positive reinforcement.

And it didn't work. Not one bit.

Dante is a German Shepherd Dog. I've had them for years: I love the breed, and if I can help it I'll never have anything else. I've had GSD's who took really well to utilizing R+-esque techniques and training styles. Dante did not.

I absolutely hated, at the time, the idea of the e-collar. What I learned later on was that I had no idea how to properly use the tool so that I HELPED my dog find better emotional regulation, better focus and a willingness to offer me that focus. And I subsequently learned that its proper use not only helped my dog tremendously but that it also did nothing to harm subvert or instill fear or worry in him.

Dante NEEDS boundaries. He needs them as much as he needs water and food and air. He is highly intelligent - I hear my mentor in my head all the time saying "their biggest asset is also usually their greatest detriment" - and possesses a strong drive, but that intelligence and drive gets him into trouble when he isn't given clear parameters to work within. I have learned the hard way that if he learns something works once, he will check whether it works until the day he dies. He is not lacking in motivation - that he has plenty of - but he often needs redirection when he gets too myopic or singularly-focused in his thinking.

This is all to say there are many, many roads to Rome. I have yet to find that my concerns in a particular method are founded once I do the work of learning how to apply that tool correctly. I have also learned time and time again that not all tools apply to all situations. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution in ANY animal education scenario. There are simply tools, and some of those tools are more appropriate for certain animals than for others.

But humans have a funny emotional attachment to our tools in a way that sometimes narrows our own ability to be effective in helping an animal. We attach morality to tools in such a way that we demonize anyone who does things differently than we do. We fail to look at the animal in front of us and allow them the final say on a tool's efficacy and appropriateness.

A tool is just a tool. How we use it makes every bit of difference.

Pictured: Dante, the goofy floof, in action.

03/26/2026

About 13 years ago I started trimming my own herd.

At the time I had a young mare with front feet that were difficult to maintain. She grew long, shelly toes with slung-under heels. The standard four-to-six week cycle left me wanton and multiple professionals told me she just had "tough feet". At age six, she was diagnosed with navicular changes in both front feet. By age seven, she was in front shoes with a rocker. She stayed pretty sound for a year so or until my farrier went back to school and we ended up moving through a couple of folks who did their best but couldn't set her up to stay sound even in the same type of shoeing package she had been going in. By age nine she was chronically lame. I laid her to rest in December of 2016.

I ended up asking a trimmer friend to show me a few things. I bought a hoof knife, a rasp and a stand. I started watching videos online. I researched endlessly and curated a small number of practitioners whose online presence and work demonstrated not only an understanding biomechanics and natural hoof function but the ability to "read feet" and improve them over time through the trim. I attended two different dissections and paid particularly close attention to the discussions around hoof form and function.

I slowly started doing my own "mini-trims" in between regular maintenance trims on the rest of my herd. I made sure to ask questions of my trimmer and have her point out where I might be able to improve my technique. I did this for a couple of years and eventually ended up apprenticing for several weeks under a student of Buck Brannaman's who also did all her own hoof care. I was under horses every day and came home ten times more confident in what I was doing.

Learning how to recognize what constitutes a healthy, functional foot in my horses and then learning how to build one has been the best investment I've made in my horsemanship hands down. It seems at first glance like it should maybe be an "accessory skill" - one that might be nice to have but not necessary to get by.

I now consider it essential.

We all know the saying "no hoof, no horse" but I don't think we take it seriously enough. We can't, not if we're offloading arguably the most impactful aspect of a horse's soundness onto a third party without at least having an understanding of what they are doing, why they are doing it and how it's affecting our horse.

I realize that might sound hard to some. I'm not saying everyone needs to do their own hoof care.

I AM saying it is our responsibility to be engaged in the process, because what happens in the foot affects everything above it.

03/23/2026

Properly educating a horse is a lot like building a fire.

You need patience: good things take the time they take.

You need persistence: some fires take a little longer to catch on.

You need temperance: do too much too soon and things get out of control.

You need discernment: the medium you're working with must inform how you attempt to shape it.

If you're overly cautious and interfere too much, the fire will never take.

If you're reckless and impulsive, you might get burned.

There will always be some newfangled fire starter on the market.

Someone will always be saying they can do it better.

And, at the end of the day, most people don't want infernos. They also don't want weak, feeble flames. They want something in the middle that has room to intensify if needed but can be dampened if necessary.

There has to be balance, always.

Good c**t starters understand this. We need to be able to build something that lasts and things that last are not built in days but in years. They are built stringing many, many moments together over time. They are built with care and consideration and thoughtful planning with the ability to pivot quickly when we must and stay the course the rest of the time.

Can you get away with less? Maybe. I just don't know why you'd want to, not with so much at stake.

03/20/2026

Struggle is a natural part of learning. Growth doesn't happen in a vacuum, nor can it occur when we're well within the confines of our comfort zone. To change, we must get a bit uncomfortable.

It doesn't have to be a lot of discomfort, though. We don't have to go cliff diving. And in fact - it isn't as simple as just jumping off the cliff. There is a sweet spot, a zone in which we can still function, be present and process through something without being tipped into a sympathetic nervous response where now we feel we're fighting for our lives. In that space, no growth can occur.

So why, oh why, do we still sometimes buy into the idea that a horse can just "get over it" when they demonstrate significant concern or fear or worry?

A quick foray into trauma-informed understanding of how learning occurs shows us there really is only one path to get from struggle/discomfort to integration/clarity in such a way that whatever the thing was causing the discomfort can now be navigated without further trigger to the nervous system: we have to stay within that "sweet spot" where growth can occur. Beyond that is a no-man's land of compensation, coping and un-integrated nervous responses. Those ways of handling the discomfort can at times LOOK like integration, but the horse always has tells.

One of my mentors has a saying: "a relaxed horse will always look the same, but an anxious horse will express that internal angst in all sorts of ways."

There are plenty of ways in which it's not only still accepted but applauded to use this idea of the horse "getting over it":

- Hard tying a horse that does not tie well and letting them fight it out
- Pushing a horse up to an object that they are demonstrating concern about
- Completely separating a buddy-sour horse with the idea that eventually they'll just give up pacing, calling, running the fence, etc.
- Stalling a horse that is not used to confinement without any introduction and expecting them to acclimate
- Moving to harsher methods of handling a situation in order to discourage the horse from doing something we don't want them to do

This is laziness on the human's part: outward functionality does not equal internal clarity for the horse. A horse that eventually settles or stops moving their feet from exhaustion has not integrated anything. A horse that eventually stops doing the thing you don't want them doing because they were forced to has not learned anything of value. There is no understanding gained and no confidence developed. Instead, the horse's ability to be fully present and participatory in periods of stress breaks down. The Buddhist ideology has a beautiful way of describing this: "bhava" (becoming/existing), wherein trauma creates distorted patterns of becoming where the mind fixates or flees from certain experiences, pulling awareness out of the present.

We can see this in the shut down horse, the hypervigilant horse, the tense horse, the dull-eyed horse. We can see this in horses who have been pushed - in the pursuit of change - into that no-man's land of coping and compensation.

Don't ask your horse to just "get over it". Show him how. Take the journey with him instead of leaving him to fend for himself.

Pictured: Lewis, becoming a Zen master of tying. He's excellent now for when I'm close by but still struggles a bit when I give him more space. This photo was from about 100 feet away: I've taken to doing our paddock cleaning while he is tied so I can keep an eye on him and "help" him if needed. He's getting better every day.

03/17/2026

Do you "see" problems?

In my non-horse career, my role is in operations, i.e., "the organizing of the doings". It's my job to conceptualize, build and understand in a very detailed and intricate way all workflows and protocols, and to be able to troubleshoot, alter and revamp them as needed.

A good chunk of that includes being able to "see" problems before they become such. It's my weird superpower, if you will.

When you learn about or become aware of something, your brain naturally starts to pay more attention to it. The more aware you become, the more you actually "see". To be fair, you WERE "seeing" what was happening in the sense that your eyes were registering whatever it was that was occurring, but once something becomes relevant to us or is given greater context, now we've gained awareness. If you buy a red truck, all the sudden you're seeing tons of red trucks on the road, etc.

Ultimately, we have to have awareness of a problem before we can begin to address it.

What I come across in the horse world fairly often is folks who aren't really "seeing" that there is a problem. They know their horse has trouble with being caught or standing tied or taking a canter lead. They know their horse walks off at the mounting block or is ear shy. They know their horse isn't great to have its feet done. It's just not seen as a "problem" unless one of a few things occurs:

1) Someone gets in a wreck, or gets hurt.
2) The situation becomes stressful and difficult enough that it can no longer be "managed".
3) Someone suggests that the thing might actually be a problem.

Sometimes, one (or more) of these things DOES occur and still nothing changes. I can't explain why that is other than I have been there myself and it can take reaching a tipping point within ourselves to overcome whatever naiveté or ego or pride or ignorance is standing in the way of our recognizing we need to do something differently.

We can also become paralyzed by the knowledge that we know something is a problem but don't yet know what to do about it, or have ten different people whispering twelve different solutions in our ear. We can become more paralyzed still when we recognize something as a problem but become convinced by naysayers that we're not actually seeing what we think we're seeing or that it isn't, in fact, a problem at all.

At the end of the day and irrespective of how we choose to handle something we see, we have to see it before we can do anything about it.

Reverence Equine

04/27/2026

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