Michelle Edwards Horsemanship

Horsemanship that feels good to you and your horse.

This content is intended for active students to reinforce the things we discuss in our lessons.

Pressure is cruel when the horse can’t make sense of it.

This article was originally written in response to the video of an Olympic equestrian athlete coaching a young rider by repeatedly whipping a frantic horse in order to encourage a desired movement.

If you watch horses in a herd, they use pressure both implied (at a distance) and directly to communicate as a herd. Mainly, a horse higher up in the herd uses pressure to move the horses beneath it – to move them away from resources, or simply to establish dominance. There is a reason for the pressure within a herd, and there is a way to get away from the pressure. In the great majority of situations, horses understand how to get away from pressure in these situations and are able to do so.

Photo of a student being conscientious of how and when she applies pressure while working with her young horse who learned at a very young age (from birth, previous owner) that pressure was meaningless and troubling.

That is often not the case when humans interact with horses. We humans love to apply pressure in all kinds of scenarios, and it is meaningless and senseless to the horse. Because it is meaningless and senseless, it is cruel. I will admit, I have actually not watched the video, but rather heard descriptions of it. It sounds as though the horse is incredibly confused – unsure of what to do and very, very scared. Doing things like kicking out, switching leads and making desperate attempts to figure out how to make the incredible amount of applied pressure go away. I don’t think that many people would disagree that such a high degree of pressure being applied to a confused horse that is likely trying its guts out to do something incredibly physically demanding is cruel.

But this is where I want to take the conversation a step further. The reality is that applying meaningless/confusing pressure, even in much lower doses, is also cruel. Applying more pressure than necessary is also cruel. And these are things that are done by the vast majority of horse owners every day. Tight, unyielding contact on the reins, for which there is no escape is cruel. Constantly driving a horse forward with legs, spurs or a whip is cruel. Repetitively chasing a horse in circles with a lunge whip or flag is cruel. Missing the timing of a horse trying and continuing to apply pressure is cruel. We often don’t recognize these things as cruel, because we have normalized them, or because the horse isn’t expressing the level of anxiety seen in the aforementioned video. But I work with horses every week who experience the unintentional cruelty mentioned above and I can very much see and feel the psychological scars.

Leading is an example of something that is often taught without clarity, and with unnecessary pressure. If holding the horse too tightly under the chin, there is never relief of pressure. A young horse will often back or stop because they are confused by the pressure, and as a response, the handler may let up on the pressure because they don’t know what else to do when they get an “incorrect” response. So in essence, if the horse moves in the desired direction, the pressure doesn’t let up. If the horse moves away from the pressure, it does let up. This will quickly create a very confused horse.

One of my students has a horse who repetitively backs her way into any fence, object, or person nearby, while viciously kicking at them. She does this because she was in training at an incredibly high stress facility – immense amounts of pressure, from which there was no escape, were applied. She was unable to physically comply with some of the demands, and none of her more subtle expressions of confusion and physical distress were acknowledged.

I once met a sweet little quarter horse who was nervous wreck. He’s been trained with clarity and was very attentive. His new owner purchased him for a lot of money. She brought him home and commenced running him around a round pen — 5 minutes at the trot in each direction, followed by 5 minutes at the canter in each direction. She’d stand in the middle waving her flag while the horse ran and ran, completely unsure how to get the pressure to stop. There was no way out and the effect on the little horse’s emotional state was hard to watch. This owner wasn’t beating her horse. She wasn’t even asking him to do something he wasn’t capable of completing. But the confusion and unrelenting pressure were cruel just the same.

The lack of clarity and unrelenting pressure a setup like this creates is beyond explanation.

Don’t get me wrong, in order to learn how to do just about anything with a horse, one has to apply pressure without clarity on the journey to learning how to communicate with clarity. And there are most definitely times when a high amount of pressure needs to be applied — to cut through the horse’s thought, usually for safety reasons or to change a dangerous, long-ingrained pattern. With good guidance and purposeful practice, I do believe we can develop into good horsemen and the cost to the horse can be minimal.

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