A Community Post from YouTuber and Professional Horse Trainer Shelby Dennis
(Posted here with her permission -- Source: https://www.youtube.com/c/ShelbyDennis/community)
[Preamble from me: I have a couple of low-key “campaigns” for this blog: 1) posting/sharing content to get people over their fear of my personal favorite animals, including spiders and horses, and 2) trying to shift the focus of anti-bullying campaigns from the behavior of children among their peers to the responsibility of adults who teach those children.
I found Shelby Dennis’s channel when looking for horsey things to post. Then, the other day, she posted this message about how bullying horses is considered normal by a lot of horse trainers and riding instructors. And how she was taught to become a bully by the adults in her life. And how she’s trying to unlearn all of that.
So this fits two goals for my blog at once. And that’s why I asked her if I could share this here.]
I started riding at just 4 years of age.
At the same age, I started watching role models and adults openly mistreat horses in the name of teaching them how to “safely behave” around people.
I had loved horses since before I could even speak and initially was deeply uncomfortable with what I witnessed.
But, those I trusted as experts were doing it, so it must be okay, right? After all, adults were all knowing and knowledgeable.
A knee to the belly when a horse bloated for the girth being done up.
Reefing on the mouth of a horse who dares pull back a little or spooks sideways as you lead them to the arena.
A punch to the nose of a horse who is merely just trying to explore and interact with the world using his mouth, as his species is supposed to.
I saw all of this and more on a regular basis for the first several years of my riding career and it changed me from being the happy go lucky horse loving kid I was to being a child who still loved horses but was taught to take my frustration out on them.
In the process, I developed incredibly poor emotional control and was encouraged in using horses as a means for anger management, that I was justified when I disciplined my horses because they were being bad. I needed to show them who was boss, because that’s what I was told.
It may have been more damaging to me, as a child with undiagnosed ADHD as controlling difficult emotions was already hard for me, so this quite possibly was one of the worst lessons I could’ve learned in terms of where to direct my anger.
Breaking free from what encouraged me to not only elevate my level of anger but to redirect it onto the innocent beings that are horses has been a lot of work.
When you’re in fight or flight mode, you’re not thinking properly as is. It’s incredibly easy to sink into lifelong habits, so undoing what I was taught to do from such a young age took a lot of self reflection and accountability. It took a lot of mistakes, too.
And, I felt a lot of guilt during it. I made myself angrier by adding in the addition of anger towards myself, something I’d initially not been taught to feel because I was encouraged to feel righteous in my discipline of horses.
It’s been a lengthy journey of self reflection and really trying to sit with the gravity of what I was put through at a young age.
A child cannot be expected to fully understand how wrong the lessons they’re being taught are because they often trust the adults in their life implicitly. I was no different.
Even adults, when new to horses, are at the mercy of their first teachers, they may just be slightly more likely to see through the charade than a kid.
So, when you look at your faults as a horse person and start to feel guilty and beat yourself up, try to also sit with that discomfort and understand that you were misled by people much more experience than yourself.
That the true wrong is the fact that so many of these types of role models are readily available in the industry, not being held accountable and continued to be encouraged in teaching these ways. It makes it hard for us to avoid these types of teachers because they’re allowed to teach the way they do and there’s very little pressure, even still, for them to self reflect to the extent they need to.
New riders deserve access to better teachers. Teachers who won’t wrong them or their horses. Teachers who set good examples for them instead of setting them on a path of a lifetime of correcting mistakes and bad habits they picked up at the very beginning.
All of this starts with us persistently pointing out these issues and demanding the world we want to see. After all, we were the ones keeping such trainers in business. If the demands of those paying changes, so does the content we are being taught.
Horse show organizations also need to be pressured to help along with the process. If horse abuse no longer affords people ribbons and attention and instead impacts their livelihoods, they will no longer be as quick to engage in these methods at the expense of their horse because it no longer serves them.
Change is possible but it starts with the masses recognizing where it’s needed, even if it means being honest with your faults and where they started.
Check out her other links:
Website: http://milestoneequestrian.ca
Patreon: http://Patreon.com/sdequus
Facebook: http://Facebook.com/milestoneequestri...