One Equestrian’s Approach to Understanding Your Horse
Most of us learned to ride from someone who learned from someone else. Somewhere back in that chain, a lot of what got passed down was about control. Get the horse to do what you want. Correct the behavior when it doesn’t. Move on.
It works, more or less. Until it doesn’t.
“We treat horses the way others tell us to, as well as the way we were treated as children,” says Gwenyth Browning Jones Santagate of Douglas, Massachusetts. “That usually borders on abuse, even for experienced equestrians.”
That’s not easy to hear if you’ve been around horses for a while. But most of us eventually hit a point where we start questioning some of what we were taught. A horse we thought we understood stops responding. The correction that always worked suddenly doesn’t. Something isn’t connecting and we’re not sure why.
Gwen’s father told her early on that if she really wanted to understand an animal, she needed to look at things from its point of view. She tried the formal traditional methods anyway and hated them. Eventually she came back to what she calls her feel methods — patience, observation, trust — and stayed there.
What pushed her further in that direction was a hard experience. A mare her daughter trusted completely, a genuine babysitter horse, was severely abused while Gwen was away. When she came back, traditional discipline was useless. The mare had shut down. So Gwen had to find another way in, and she did.
Most of us were taught to correct first and ask questions later. You spend enough years around horses, though, and you start paying closer attention. The body language. The fear responses. What your timing is actually doing. Whether the horse trusts you or is just tolerating you.
That doesn’t mean discipline or structure disappear. It means slowing down enough to understand what the horse is actually reacting to.
There’s been a lot more conversation lately about groundwork, pressure and release, understanding horses as prey animals. You see it in the magazines, at clinics, on websites. Not everyone calls it the same thing. Some call it feel. Some call it natural horsemanship. Others just stop doing things that don’t seem right and start paying closer attention. It tends to produce better horses, and often more thoughtful riders, too.
What Gwen keeps coming back to isn’t a branded system. It’s just paying closer attention to the horse and trying to understand what the horse is actually experiencing. Most problems in the barn have an explanation on the horse’s end. Sometimes it takes slowing down enough to look for it.
Gwen is running a two-session teleseminar this summer covering how horses think and what to actually do with that in day-to-day handling and riding. Sessions are June 22 and July 6, 2005. Details and registration are available through EquineTeleseminar.net.
Last updated: May 23, 2026
Originally published: June 15, 2005
