Can you teach an old horse new tricks? ABSOLUTELY! Senior horses are special and have much to give, yet they are often overlooked due to injury, age, and... outdated ideas that horses can become "too old" to learn new things. I've run across many people in my day who have told me that they would "LOVE to try training with positive reinforcement, but my horse is just too old and set in their ways. I'll wait for a new young horse to try it." This is NOT true. Your horse is NOT too old to start learning something new with positive reinforcement. The benefits are tremendous, and you can have so much fun together.

On Instagram I asked my followers recently to share with me whether they thought that “respect” could be trained. Here are the responses: 39% Absolutely! 23% Nope, not possible. 18% I’m not sure 20% Its Complicated First, a big shoutout to everyone who messaged me to share their thoughts on this! I’ve compiled a simplified list of the messages: •Fear or obedience often mistaken for respect •Respect has many definitions •Respect as an abstract concept is feelings based (trust, understanding, regard for) • Horses are unlikely to understand respect as a concept •Respect can also be action/learned behaviors (potentially interchangeable with boundaries) • We can train boundaries and earn respect • We can train behaviors we feel are respectful but we can’t be sure the horse feels respect • If they can be respectful then the flip side is true too (being disrespectful), which implies premeditated actions or malicious intent Here’s what really stood out to me though…. When I asked people how their horse showed them respect and what that felt like, they almost all said they felt safe, that the horse was aware of them, and that the horse was responsive. There was a strong level of understanding and trust. This is important because it really gets down to the root of the issue. Disrespectful horse = we feel unsafe and unimportant Respectfully horse = we feel safe and important It’s even more interesting when we consider that many of the behaviors we consider “disrespectful” are completely normal social behaviors amongst horses. We just don’t like them because we are not horses. We break easier 😅. Ultimately, whether or not horses can understand the concept of feeling respect towards each other or towards us… I believe it’s up to us to clarify desirable behaviors to our horses. We cannot train the concept of respect, or train respect into a horse as if it’s a singular behavior. But we CAN teach desirable behaviors that result in us feeling respected. Through clear, consistent, kind, and patient training we can achieve the interactions we are looking for with our horses.