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

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