HorsesExplained

Have you got your Summer issue of Canadian Horse Journal yet?
If not, go get it. If you do, open page 18. That's where you'll find my article.

I am so excited and honoured to be able to talk to a wider audience about horse mental health. And I am equally grateful that there are media outlets willing to support this conversation.
The story I tell here may seem like a simple feel-good horse story. But it actually goes much deeper. It is about how we understand horses—not just through the lens of behaviour or training, but as living beings with their own needs, emotions, experiences, and ways of coping with the world.

Horses are animals we have chosen to keep in our lives. With that comes the responsibility to educate ourselves, to understand their needs, listen to their behavioural communication, and support not only their physical health but their mental well-being as well.
I hope this article gives readers a reason to pause and look a little deeper at the horses in their care.
- Joanna

Most of us are trying to fix our horses. Their behaviour, their attitude, their training. We are constantly looking for ways to influence them, improve them, and make them listen better.

But not understanding the horse is not the student's fault. A student can only work with what they have been taught.

Instead of spending all our time learning how to influence the horse, maybe we should spend more time learning the horse himself. How he thinks, how he learns, when he can learn, and what causes the behaviour we are trying so hard to change.
Only then can we truly start communicating with him in a language he understands. And when we improve, our horses often improve with us.
Otherwise, we run the risk of placing more and more mental and physical restrictions on a horse who is already trying to understand us. A horse who may be speaking the only way he knows how. A horse who is being corrected for communicating.

How would you feel if somebody standing next to you kept poking you constantly? Not necessarily hard… but without any break.

One moment they poke your back so you move forward. Then your shoulder so you move away. Then your side and your back at the same time. No pause. No clarity. Just constant pressure. Sometimes smaller. Sometimes bigger. But always there.

I would lose my calm too. At first I would try to respond correctly. Then I would probably become annoyed and start arguing with the pressure. And what if that still did not work?

Eventually I would become dull to it. I would stop listening carefully and start treating it like background noise, trying to catch single clear words inside all the chaos.

This is exactly what happens to many horses under saddle.

A lot of riders were never truly taught how leg aids work in horse riding and horse training. So the horse lives in constant pressure without ever fully understanding where the answer actually is.

Horses do not learn from pressure alone. They learn from the release of pressure.

That release is what creates clarity. That release is what tells the horse: “yes, this was correct.”

Without it, many horses become dull to the leg, frustrated, reactive, anxious, or mentally checked out.

So if your horse is dull to the leg… he probably does not need more leg.

He needs less of it. But clearer.

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So many of us wish we could talk to animals.
Who didn’t secretly want to be like Doctor Dolittle growing up? Or feel fascinated by people who seemed to have this incredible connection with animals… like Simona Kossak, who lived in the forest surrounded not only by friendly ravens, but even wild boars.

And yet somehow… making the step from wanting to “talk” to animals to actually listening to them is so difficult.

As humans, we wait for big gestures. Big reactions. Something obvious.
But in horses, strong reactions are often not signs of personality. They are signs of inner conflict, stress, fear, frustration, or emotional overload.

A horse that has to scream in his silence is not doing it because he is difficult.
He does it because the quieter communication did not work before. The tension in the body. The hesitation. The wider eye. The rushing. The shutting down.

Horse behaviour rarely appears out of nowhere. Most horses try very hard to communicate long before things become “problems.”

This is such a huge part of horse psychology and horse emotions. Learning to recognize these small changes before behaviour escalates changes not only training, but the entire relationship between horse and human.

And the beautiful thing is… it is never too late to start listening.

Horses want to be understood.
And when they feel understood, they often stop needing to scream.

That is when communication becomes quieter. Softer. Clearer.
And suddenly it feels less like controlling a horse… and more like understanding one.

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I think one of the biggest problems in horse training is that people only start paying attention once the behaviour becomes impossible to ignore.

When the horse starts rushing. Spooking. Refusing. Shutting down. Becoming “difficult.”

But horses usually communicate discomfort much earlier than that.

The problem is that many riders were never taught to recognize those earlier changes. The small tension in the body. The loss of curiosity. The hesitation. The emotional withdrawal. The horse becoming mentally somewhere else before the behaviour fully appears on the outside.

So people react to the final stage instead of understanding what led to it.

The more I studied horse emotions, stress, nervous system responses, and behaviour, the more I realized that behaviour is often information, not disobedience. Very often it is the result of something building underneath for a long time.

This became such a huge part of my work with horses that I created an entire module about it.

Not about “fixing” horses.
About learning how to read what the horse is feeling before things escalate into bigger behaviour, conflict, or shutdown.

Module 1: Reading Horse Emotions is now available on horsesexplained.com