Holistic Equine Relationship Development - HERD

RUPTURE & REPAIR

The idea that in relationships to others, that rupture is normal, but the repair that happens afterwards is what forges a strong connection and a healthier rapport afterwards. A rupture could be a disagreement, an accident, a miscommunication. Anything that causes a break in the flow of good between the two. And this, I have found certainly belongs in horsemanship.

Finding the ability to mature beyond a Behaviourist framework of crafted Yes Questions and Yes Answers only, moving past the Positive Only ideal, and evolving into a place where challenge, push back and firmness is a place holder, without ever tipping over into the dangerous or the abusive.

Yet, as much as I believe there is Rupture and Repair... sometimes there is Rupture and Remove.

And this is where I am finding myself now. I am at a place where in almost every aspect of my life, I am stating who and what I am, and removing anything for which repair is no longer possible.

When you break a vase, you can glue it back together. Or melt down the parts and reforge the glass.

But what about the part when the broken pieces see themselves as Whole? What about the Rupture that causes the breakaway to be a total transformation, so much so that those parts never fit back together again? What about the Sovereignty to refuse to be reforged, because you love who and what you are?

I find myself at this place with Popular Horsemanship. I am not interested in being a bridge, nor am I interested in repairing bonds that would cause me to augment my integrity as a horseman. I think many of us feel this way. We are not interested in Light Force, or Acceptable Sometimes Violence. Many of us want a TOTAL DEPARTURE from a broken system and never want to go back to it, or invite it to return.

And I think we are allowed to do that. To remove it. And move forwards with something else entirely.

BOUNDARIES vs EMOTIONAL ENMESHMENT
COMMUNICATION vs APPEASEMENT
GRACE vs GUILT

I watched a TikTok video this morning where a handler had to escalate pressure to get their horse to give them some personal space, because things were getting a little unsafe, and what struck me wasn’t the horse’s response, but the handler’s…

They were overcome with guilt and shame that they hadn’t been able to train ‘perfectly’ to prevent it.

Meanwhile, the horse appeared completely unbothered. If anything, the earlier confusion about whether the handler wanted closeness or distance seemed more stressful than the correction itself.

I’ve seen this pattern often, and have experienced it myself.

And rather than brush it off as a skill issue, I think we need to take a much deeper look…

This often mirrors how many of us experience boundaries in our human relationships.

TO ERR IS HUMAN…

It’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to recognize and navigate boundaries perfectly 100% of the time.

Like the frog in boiling water, sometimes we don’t recognize there’s a problem until things start to heat up.

And while I think it’s great to use these moments as learning opportunities and allow hindsight to guide us, guilt and shame shouldn’t drive us.

We need to give ourselves a little bit of grace instead of guilt.

It’s not healthy to shame spiral every time we have to set a boundary.

This often comes from confusing a boundary with punishment.

In this example, what the horse experienced wasn’t harm, it was clarity, and this is where it’s really important not to project our own experiences and feelings about boundaries onto what the horse is actually experiencing and feeling in the moment.

WE CAN’T SET BOUNDARIES WITH POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT…

We can positively reinforce behavior around our boundaries.

For instance, “Thank you for giving me some space, I really appreciate that!”

But we cannot communicate the threshold of a boundary through positive reinforcement.

Read that again.

Because it’s a lot deeper than a technique, and it’s absolutely applicable to our human relationships.

In human relationships, trying to maintain boundaries with positive reinforcement alone translates to fawning and appeasement behaviors, and I see this leak into our interactions with our horses all the time.

We often try to navigate boundaries solely through positive reinforcement because we’re afraid.

If setting a healthy boundary risks severing a relationship, that’s often an indicator of emotional enmeshment, where individuals aren’t allowed to BE individuals in a relationship.

COMMUNICATION ⧣ CONFLICT

In this situation, the horse wasn’t wrong, and the handler wasn’t wrong, and this is a common dynamic in human relationships, as well.

But settings boundaries can feel jarring to both the one setting them and the one receiving them, because we’ve been conditioned to equate boundary-setting with failure or conflict.

In horses, navigating proximity and distance and practicing collision avoidance are natural, and have nothing to do with dominance, and have no negative impact on relationship.

Maybe we could learn something from that.

Horses model that mutual give and take is what makes room for real connection.

The welfare problems in the horse world are really just a mirror image of the problems that plague humanity as a whole.

Prioritization of capital, instant gratification and status above all else.

Individualism taken to the point of extremity, where people feel entitled to behaving however they want without consequence and believe they should be able to do so even in cases where it causes active harm.

Denial of evidence based information in favour of clinging to the false comfort of familiarity. The immense desire to run from information that creates discomfort.

Shame based culture that perpetuates the idea that to grow and change is to be flawed. That it’s somehow shameful to admit to being wrong and change your trajectory accordingly.

The mob mentality of this feeds into people doubling down and continuing to repeat the same mistakes because there is such a fear of admitting wrongdoing.

Black and white thinking that does not allow for true growth. The belief that in order to be a fan of someone, we must idol worship them and overlook their flaws when the truth is that to be flawed is to be human. What speaks the most about someone’s character is how dedicated to personal growth they are.

The welfare problems we see in competition are just the capitalistic desire to constantly product manifesting from within the horse world.

People feel entitled to the obedience of horses, to the labour of horses, simply because they desire a specific outcome and believe it’s their right to obtain it.

People justify a lack of ethics in favour of chasing whatever training methods they feel will bring them desired results sooner, even if they come at a cost to the horse.

Repairing the ethics in the horse world are going to need to involve a systemic shift in what we normalize within human society as a whole.

The world doesn’t revolve around us, despite the fact that we’ve tried to create the notion that it does.

It may feel oppressive to stop centring human desires above all else but that’s just because a lot of us have grown up being taught to center our own wants over the needs of our horses.

This makes it far more convenient for people to blame problem behaviours in horses on “disrespect” or “naughtiness” because it’s an easy way for humans to evade taking accountability and truly looking at the role they play in their horse’s suffering.

We need a revolution of values.

We love to say “the horse always comes first” but this is seldom actually true in practice.