All Horses Are Bad

Yup, you heard me: All horses are bad. At least, every horse, at some point in their lives, does something unwanted by a human, which can be labelled "bad." Some behaviors are worse than others, but my point is, horses are just trying to survive given what skills they have already learned in their lives, and all humans are just trying to survive with the their own set of skills.

My wife was once offered ten thousand dollars for her very talented and sweet mare Pepper (pictured above standing on a rock at a trail-head.) She politely turned down the offer. The fact of the matter is, Pepper did not come to us the "perfect horse" that she is. She actually came to us knowing very little, and was even afraid of a few things she learned to be afraid of thanks to some human or other. Her nickname at her previous barn was "the bitch." Now Pepper is not a bitch, she was presumably smarter than the people with whom she found herself surrounded at the time, a not uncommon situation for a lot of horses.

There is a saying in horsemanship that the horse either rises or falls to the skill level of the rider/handler. Had my wife sold Pepper to the woman for ten thousand dollars, and had the woman been less skilled than Lorri, perfect Pepper would have fallen to the skill of the other rider. Likewise if the woman who had theoretically bought Pepper were more skilled than Lorri, then Pepper would have risen to the task. That is a testament to how smart horses are and how skilled or not humans are.

The biggest problem with humans is that some of them are lazy. A large number of humans would like to purchase the perfect horse without actually doing any work to either get the horse better or to keep the horse at the skill level where they were when they got it. I have had many people over the years jokingly ask me if I would trade my horse (with whom I have spent countless hours) with their horse, who they just pulled out of the barn for the first time in a year. My answer, of course, is always: "no."

Instead of committing to doing the work, i.e. taking lessons, watching videos, spending some quality time with their horses, making a few mistakes here and there, teaching them to have the appropriate response to pressure, people would rather have someone else do the work for them. When they do acquire a horse that is skilled and handy and safe, things go OK for a while, but then after weeks or months of having the horse, different behaviors pop up that they don't know how to handle. The horse has not changed, but has just come down to the level of the rider. What happens next is all too common. The horse gets the blame for their bad behavior and then is sold down the line to the next person too lazy to commit to doing things in a different manner, and then the horse gets sold again and again and again, and may end up at the kill pen.

So what can people do? First of all, recognize your current skill level and commit to getting it better forever, and secondly, recognize that if you are having problems with a horse, it may not be the horse's fault. Spend some time with that horse and show them what you would like them to do. You might be surprised how intelligent many horses can be, and how easy it can be for them to learn new things.

No matter what discipline you are in, if you need help with your horse, please seek it out someone qualified to help you. There is an internet meme which reads, "Most people don't need a thirty thousand dollar horse. Most people need a thousand dollar horse and thirty thousand dollars worth of lessons." Please do not send a horse down the road to the next home until you are truly sure that the horse you just purchased is not for you. Better still, take someone who knows horse behavior with you to see your next potential riding partner to check them out. The old saying goes, "most horses don't have a future, they only have a past." Let's do something to change that saying - for the horse's sake.