The Psychology Behind Herd-Bound Horses (and How to Fix It) - Kerry Thomas

So I typically kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. OK, my name is Kerry Thomas and I specialize in her dynamics and sensory soundness, Essentially everything that has to do with the operating system running the machine. I’ve spent more than 30 years of everything from wild horse research to all the different sporting disciplines across the spectrums of all the different disciplines from eventing, racing, you name it. I’ve been involved in pretty much every aspect of breeding, troubleshooting, therapy, anything that has to do with for psychology or the whole behavioral genetics and how the horse is interpreting their world and responding to it or reacting to it. I hyper focus on those things.

So I always tell people I’d like to give you the owner’s manual and the relationship guide for your horse. You coined the term like sensory soundness, but for riders and people who may not have heard of it, how would you define them? Sensory soundness, I coined that phrase this out of familiarity with physical soundness. So that’s something that we’re all familiar with and because of my specialty is in the navigation of stress and the internal processes of the horse from their sensory system, that’s to physical senses and their emotional senses. Now the sensory system really is the merger between the external world and the internal horse.

It’s that Nexus. And so Century Soundness is really fundamental to the operating system running the machine. It’s how they’re interpreting their environment, how they’re responding to it, how associations affect responses or reactions. And really it is the core and it’s the underlying core of everything the horse is and how they respond and how they treat and really also how we breed horses too. Every force has strengths and vulnerabilities, and identifying what they are is paramount to your coaching and development strategies and your breeding strategies.

So you’ve spent a lot of time studying how horses like function in herds. How can riders better understand herd dynamics? There’s a lot to that and understanding for dynamics is really understanding that the horse is and it’s a common thing to know that a force is a herd, A herd wired animal, hence the name of my new book Herd Wired. And it is a herd wired mindset. What it means is they’re predicated upon mutual dependency and individual strengths and vulnerabilities connect the herd.

Ironically, it is the forces of vulnerabilities that actually is the tensile strength of the herd construct. Because my weakness may be your strength. So I’m going to put myself in a position that I don’t feel isolated. Forces seek 2 fundamental things. I did a lot of work in predator prey research as well to learn the offensive and defensive nature of this dynamic.

Forces seek harmony in their environment and contentment with their peers. So harmony and contentment is where a force wants to be and they have that in their herd dynamic in the hierarchical structure in nature. In the domestic world, though, we interrupt that and forces are going in with quote UN quote, buddies and friends that we most of the time. So that for them. And it’s really important to understand that a herd of forces is not comprised of the number of physical forces in that herd.

It is comprised of the emotional connection between them. So you often times get, I travel internationally and I’m always happy to look at people’s farms and horses. And obviously we all love horses. And anytime I get to go look at pretty horses because I think they’re all beautiful, I say yes, of course I’ll be right there. And I oftentimes sit back and watch a herd of horses.

That’s to say anywhere from depend. Depending on the circumstances, there can be a number of up to 20 horses in a pasture. And I try to explain to people that you may call that a herd of horses, but truly not. You may actually have 5 or 6 fractures in there that you may have 5 or 6 different herds. And it’s really important to understand too, that when you remove a horse from the herd, you’re isolating them.

So when we isolate the herd animal, we’re exposing their strengths. And I don’t have to use the term weakness because I think it’s more of a vulnerability, but you can vulnerability, you can find strength. I think of weakness as a physical issue in my lexicon. So it’s a vulnerability and we don’t have them, whether you’re human or horse, but understanding that they exist and that when you remove your horse from that, you’re also taking into account everything the horse has been dealing with inside that herd they’re bringing with them. There’s a lot of carryover.

It’s like going into a room and being with the family picnic. Here’s certain family members that you like to hang in with and certain family members that you don’t, and you sometimes put yourself on edge. You just get along just to keep the peace. You don’t want to be exposed. You try to be camouflaged, disappear in plain sight.

That’s what the horses do in the hearse that we often times curate for them in the wild. They can maneuver and go in and out, find their own friends, find their own family. That’s going to have the luxury of freedom of movement. When we put fences up, capitulate that desire. And so now you’re stuck with you instead of as can be a lot of bickering.

And there’s if there’s not a really concise hierarchy that’s fitted together. That’s one of the effect though for us when we take them out of there, when we ship them, when we try to train them, when we go to performances and things like that. The long, it’s a long answer to your question, but there’s just so many factors to it. And our job, our responsibility is to, I would say, be the bridge and not the block, to bridge the gap between the natural hair dynamic and the domesticated world as best we can. Yeah, I grew up in the kind of common American competition setting.

So although we had a boys field and the girls field and a lot of individual paddocks, I actually got a job at a sale barn. They had basically 2 paddocks and there were like 35 horses in one paddock and 15 horses in the other paddock. And the big field was the first time I really got to watch horses choose their friends. And you realize that we called it their cliques. Like when it would rain, we had bundled trees and some of these horses would go and hang out with this group under these trees and then we’d have this separate kind of subgroup of horses that would be especially feeding time.

We fed out of feed bags and basically the horses came up to us in their order. We didn’t choose who got fed first. They came up to us and it was really the first time I watched horses who you would have the top horse in this one group come up and then you’d have the top horse in the other group come up and they would stay separate. But like in their group, there was always an order to which they got fed. I was like, oh there, like they can choose who their buddies are.

It was a sail barn, so there were a lot of changing dynamics. The horses who, you know, if they were there long enough and they were maybe the top horse, they were always the top horse. It didn’t really matter. And if maybe another top horse type came in, he just would create his own new. Forge Drone Pass.

Yeah, and it was really for me just the first time. And the cool thing for me was we had, they were boys and then girls. And so I really got to watch the boys who were very playful and social and the girls were very much so catty almost. And it was a very different dynamic amongst the two herds. And if I may, that’s one of the things early on in my research, especially in the wild, I began to see these.

You have your family herds and then you have your bastard hurts. When I had the luxury of studying both of these types of hers in the natural setting without fences, without people and things like that. And as time went on, I began to realize that there were layers to the herd dynamic. There’s layers to the psychology, if you will, the behavioral genetic code and the and it’s really predicated upon their job in nature. One of the first questions I asked myself was how do these large animals in these worlds live in these open spaces?

How does it protect your leadership? And leadership is concealed as camouflaged and it’s based upon emotional intelligence, the degree of sensory soundness and efficiency and things like that. But it is not strength. It is emotional strength, if you will, emotional intelligence that leads that. That is leadership in nature.

Excuse me. And when I began to see was that the Phillies and mayors they had a more of, I broke it into two parts, the group dynamic, the group heard dynamic and the individual dynamic for what I call the individual heard dynamics. If you ever come across my work in IHD or GHD, which is some of my lexicon is it is the individual heard dynamic and the group heard dynamic. Phillies and mayors because of their role in nature. And then this is rough, roughly speaking, of course, but I always say around 75% of the female psychology is focused, underwritten by the group for a dynamic.

The reason is because their job is they’re in the herd. They need to know everything that’s going on. They need to be able to multitask to be high level mayors and that’s their job. They’re in there, they’re running the household, if you will, like my mom would know what we did before we did it. She could see it coming from a mile away.

The male psychology is Morse again, use the 75% of the individual herd dynamic because of their role in nature. Their job is to protect the herd first to breed run of shrag. There’s run of any kind of predators. So they’re very linear. They’re a very 1 to 1 based.

And that’s why bachelor herds can be comprised of two horses, five horses and that’s kind of thing. But they only really need one buddy where the Phillies and Marys and nature seek more of a group thing that they like to be busy bodies in a way. They like to be chatty and involved in things and in the herd and like in everybody’s business. And that’s general terms, of course. But to give you a comparison where the boys that you know, and very often in nature, I would study family units and never see the stallion, but maybe once a day or once every four times out of seven days a week, he would be on the perimeter, circling the perimeter.

He would come in and check on the family herd. But he would be the century out. So he could be by himself or have one underlying youngster with him generally. And those things, that’s the underwriter of Basic Instinct. Those things never go away.

Now our breeding has can alter that and course handling and care and things like that contribute or contributing factors to how these things are expressed, but they’re always there underlying. And so when I’m evaluating forces or picking up forces at a sale or trying to troubleshoot or things like that, I’m always looking at how that is functioning and what are the strengths and vulnerabilities of the individual force within those dynamics. And they play a massive role on how forces are handled and training and how they tolerate stress thresholds. Yeah, it’s I personally have had a lot of mayors as kind of competition horses and it wasn’t until four years ago I got my first real alpha man. And she was very different than the other lower I all the mayors I’ve had prior, I could throw them out with anyone and they would always be bottom of the total.

And she was very spooky, but not in a way of like necessarily reactive, but she just always needed to know what was going on. She needed to check out the perimeter. She always, if something like I remember she had a paddock that was on a tree line where a lot of deer would come in and out of the trees. She would always be the one to go check it out. And if it was scary, she would come back and be like, OK, let’s move.

Or if it wasn’t scary, she’d be like, OK, we’re good. And it was a learning curve for me as a trainer because I realized I couldn’t. If something caught her attention, I had to let her through it versus some of the other bears that could have been a shoulder ring and be like, let’s get back to work. Why is that? Well, it goes back to the sense of isolation and exposure.

Again. I talked about how Mother Nature conceals her leadership. So let’s look at the fabric of a normal herd construct and and I’m talking about in nature. Of course this is different for domesticated herds, but the numbers are pretty much the same. The large majority of forces will fall into the mid level fur dynamics.

There are not super strong and sentry soundness. They’re not super strong and heard dynamic prowess and internal strength, but they’re they’re rate in that mid range and they’re at the bulk of their herd and that’s how the herd sustains itself. We can have too many leadership presented to splinter off and leadership in nature likes to stay hidden and camouflaged. When a high level forest male or female feels that they don’t have the camouflage, the now this is the emotional camouflage. If they can’t find emotional camouflage, they feel a sense of exposure.

So all forces can feel a sense of exposure when they’re isolated from the heard construct. But you’ll see responses turn into reactions quicker and higher level forces because that sense of exposure and isolation creates A tremendous amount of anxiety because they’re really missing that fabric. And so that’s where we come in, learning how to let them outsource to us. These horses need shared leadership. You need to meet them where they are and they’ll often times see an effort to control and respond with wait a minute.

No, you’re either equal to me or you’re below me, but you’re not going to boss me. So there’s a kind of a time to pick and choose your battles and when to do things. And I find it’s really important to give these horses an emotional escape route, a place to go to in their head basically, and let them don’t try to curtail the movement, try to control the movement. Take it from a reactive thing to a responsive thing. Reactive is something that’s a knee jerk, basically a nervous reaction and response is still movement, but it’s purposeful You can drive purposeful, but you really can’t steer reaction all that well.

You find yourself hanging on, then your anxiety builds up and when you begin to anticipate that yourself these horses are hypersensitive, they’re going to also pick that up a long time ahead of you even expressing it. And so you have to be mindful of that as well. So there’s lots of different layers to that. But when you meet them where they are and when you find that harmony in contentment with each other, Oh my gosh, the ultimate thing that you want in your relationship with your horse, no matter whether you’re going out for a hack or you’re competing at 5 star. One of my friends who I coached in Perth, Australia, Tegan Lush.

She’s an amazing five story adventure and I’ve been working with her for played a long time and going through the processes of your forces, movement, running through your intention. When you have that synchronicity, when you have that type of relationship, now you’re riding a smooth Ferrari basically on a smooth road and it just feels, Oh my gosh, we can do anything. Then that’s when the relationship clicks. They can be few and far in between, but when you have it and experience it, it’s like nothing else as. I’m sure it has been a very large learning curve for me because a lot of the horses that I’ve had were either, I really don’t know.

But a lot of the horses I had prior, I would get into the dressage arena. And if it was feeling good, I could be like, OK, yeah, this is feeling good. I’ve become a little bit of a showman. And with this horse, if my brain left at all to be like, OK, yeah, like, this is good. I wonder if someone’s watching out the window like she is all of a sudden.

Nope, we’re not doing this. You’re not here with me. And so for me, it was a big emotional learning curve to be like, OK, I actually have to be more mindful and I have to meet her where she is versus some of these other horses who. And granted, it makes her a great cross country horse because there’s plenty of times where I go, shit, I missed that distance and she goes hold my fear mom. And but yeah, one of these things that I’ve been playing around with in my head is this idea of I find that mares are sort of warriors when they when things start to happen, they start to worry And geldings, I noticed when things start to go a little sideways or whatever, they feel more insecure.

And obviously there are not really geldings in nature. Think I know what you’re helping. It’s interesting because I just finished, I’m writing a series of lectures to take the beats of the Netherlands to give in November. And I just finished one on where I covered this very topic. And, and the long and short of it is I call these coal forces just in misfits within the herd structure because they can be many different things, a Geo and it can be many different things and all at once and they can have swings of moods.

They can be very insecure. The insecurity is inherent because they struggle to find their proper fit. They’re trying to discover who they are. If I’m trying to put it in a human term, they’re trying to work to sort themselves out. If they find a comfortable fit and they find a good herd mate or something that gives them that emotional camouflage, they really hate to be away from it.

They can get attachment disorders. It comes so they’re strong. At the same time, if they’re in a situation where they’re not fitted, they can be like, get me the heck out of here. This is, Oh my God, I’m, I’m pace. I can’t handle this.

Get Me Out of here. I’m running to the gate. Get me the someone’s coming. Oh my God, I’m going to run away from them. So there’s a lot of different fluctuations, but it’s because they struggled.

They had basically been stopped in a moment of time along their psychological growth pattern. My wife and I just watched the movie Dracula from Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, that version a while back and there was a young girl Pitt and she became a vampire and she was staying at whatever 12 years old and she was like, that’s where you’re going to stay now forever. And it’s the same thing from a psychological growth pattern. They can have some trouble finding their fit and how they learn and grow is going to be partly in the group dynamic, but the individual dynamic hasn’t hasn’t has a chance to manifest fully. But they they, there’s still some of that there in between and that kind of causes a lot of internal struggle.

And that internal struggle, it is where that comes from. And then some of them are just depending on the individual or just chill. They’re great babysitters, they’re great cold hold my hand and that kind of thing. There’s a companion horse and though they’re fun to ride and those kind of things so you can have a wide variety, there’s really no no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the gelding psychology. It just depends on the individual, how they were handled before, how much of life skills they’ve had a chance to learn.

I know it’s a different subject, but it certainly plays a role in the horses ability to learn and grow and how they handle associative stimuli. Is early weaning is a problem because there are certain things that only porchers can teach one another that we cannot teach and when a force is weans young for the sales or it’s a domesticated world, it’s a business. OK, so it is. I spent you know, 20 some years going through the 3rd better horse sales and in the third industry worldwide, some of the things are not the best from my point of view. But it’s also a business that how we balance that between finances and reality when in the horse herd fnamics.

But I have found that horses that can stay with their family longer have a better chance going forward to manage stress to speak horse properly. They learn the proper dialect. They got reprimanded by mom or somebody in the herd when they were acting up and they learned right from wrong. Basic these basic life skills that when they’re weaned early, now they’re learning a different dialect, they’re learning slang if you will, and behavior patterns oftentimes is met with a strong hand by the person because all you can’t move around like that and you got to stand here. I got to get the hold of their arms and it becomes a battle of attrition and that can parlay forward and have some residual.

I remind my clients and students that there was a fine line between training and trauma and pushing through a threshold that’s a black hole in the horses. Psychology is only going to leave scars where training and learning should be, so we have to be careful of that. And it’s not the same for every horse. There’s so much there. Trauma is such an interesting word because people think trauma and they think like more victim or more veterans.

And and then I listen to some of Gabor Mante’s stuff and he’s, yeah, when you leave the horse in a baby in a crib to cry, that’s traumatizing to the baby because they don’t know why they’re left alone and whatnot. And I think sometimes it’s really the same for forces where we can’t just explain to them in English. So if they just get on the trailer, like everything’s going to be fine to them. They’re like, Oh my God, I’m about to step into this black hole and I don’t know what’s going to happen. And then if you have patients and whatever, which a lot of us do until you’re standing at the trailer.

But when so then like talking about the weaning stuff. I don’t I’m not really into like breeding or anything, but I do get a lot of off the track thoroughbreds. And I have this one mare right now and she is a mess. If I take her places with another horse like while she goes out and that’s her thing, like she doesn’t care. But like when she’s left alone at the trailer or whatever, she’s screaming, pawing, doing all of those things.

And someone just in passing was like, oh, were you weaned from your Mama too early? And it was the first time that I had ever realized that. Oh my God, Like even something as simple just it’s something that has to happen can leave such an imprint on them when I guess one, when is a proper time to wean a horse? And also, can I just notice that I got a horse who maybe was weaned too early from its mom or whatever? I mean, by the law of averages, you can probably figure every horse you’ve gotten is probably been a little bit too early unless it’s been a home bred.

And so one thing we have to remember, one thing we have to keep in mind is that forces their emotional intelligence, their intellect stops at association. They don’t have the intellect of reason. So they’re going to associate. Their emotional intelligence only goes so far, very feeling and emotional sentient creatures and all of those things. But their intellect doesn’t have the luxury of reason to say, oh, but yeah, we’re OK, get me on the trail.

We’re tying me this way. It’s 15 miles to our destination. They live in moments. They live in moments and there’s moments or have associations with them, and so how can you tell? That’s the golden question.

There’s a lot of tells that a horse will show you along the way because when a force is weaned early, even if they don’t show any residual effects within a certain period of time, these things layer their experiences and associations after a while. What was a small thing at the weaning stage is now, three years later, a massive block to their capacity to train and fulfill, and it’s almost like they’re seeing ghosts. It comes out of nowhere. These are things that have been layered over time. When I’m asked about leaning horses, I like to at least see video or go see the horses because a young horse will begin to show you how they use their sensory system, how they use their sensory soundness.

You know how far along they are on that psychological growth pattern that says, hey, you know what, it’s going to hurt a little bit. It’s going to sting a little. We can take this Band-Aid off now because in nature, mom is going to kick me out. Those kind of things. They’re going to show you when they’re, they were more purposeful in their movements and less reactive in their movements.

They’re going to show you when their sensory system, you’ll look the horses and don’t look at them as just look at them from an emotional standpoint and just see how fast the sensory system is working. Are they using their senses in a defensive manner or are they using their senses predominantly in an offensive matter on my ski in the world and a bright eyed, bushy tailed or is invisible thing scaring me and there’s again, this is general terms. There’s a lot of layers to this. This is not the blueprint for what to do, but these are just some things that there are telltale signs that I’ve learned by comparing wild horse herds in in the mountains of Montana and Wyoming to prior Mustangs and things like that with their domesticated environments. And I’ve had a chance to observe a lot of horses because I’ve been involved in helping breeding programs.

So I’ve had a chance to cross juxtapose these two things, which has been my laboratory. My laboratory has always been Mother Nature and that’s where I all my classwork has been done basically. So having a chance to compare that because to me, I’m very fortunate that I was able to see it on both spectrums, on both ends. They will let some horses, they’ll wander off and be away from Mom for a long period of time. At least tend to think that’s the sign.

It is among the signs, but it depends on how they are acting when they’re away from Mom and how Mom treats them when they come back. If the more aloof she becomes, the less monitoring she becomes, the mother’s going to tell you that I’m sending you off to school, essentially. So there’s a lot of different ways you can tell. None of it is as good as just, I’ll come back in a few months and if you’re still with your mom, you’re still with your mom. And I go down to town to get some supplies and get back up to my camp and they’re separated, OK.

And so you’ve mentioned the term like family heard. Does that legitimately mean family or is that just a term to describe the closeness of a herd? It’s. A little bit of both for me. Family heard is in nature, it is their core family, mom and dad, brother, sister, cousins that essentially that kind of thing.

And those numbers can range from four horses to 8 horses. It’s it’s kind of fluctuates. Sometimes you may have family visitors and sometimes they leave and go on vacation, that kind of thing. But do you have a core family? And then in our environment, if well, it’s counted to be awful rare that a full family would be together.

I’d actually never seen it. So the family unit is, hey, you can pick your friends and not your family. And as long as the emotional connection fits together, because even in nature there can be blood relatives that don’t get along. They don’t, we know how that is. So you’re like, you know what, I, my family is the friends that I keep and I feel my farming and contentment with this group.

So now you’re my family. And actually it’s a really important thing how in nature that they fend off inbreeding, a physical directive, it’s an emotional directive. So when they don’t have that fit, they’ll go off on their own and find new families basically that aren’t blood and things like that. So it’s really a safety valve in nature that keeps the fresh DNA in divorce herds. So I wanted to chat a little bit about herd boundness.

Hey, I have a horse. He doesn’t want to leave his buddy. He leaves the barn and he’s a mess. For the most part. I do find that it’s geldings for mares.

Mares might worry about their friends, but like for the most part you can go get your ride done or whatever it where the geldings, they just implode, explode it. It’s really like a mobile. When they’re checking for them. When they’re checked out, they’re checked out. So how you explain what herd boundness is and maybe how a horse gets to that point?

So her bound is as 100% psychological, it’s fully emotional. And you mentioned the guardians because this is not something we see in nature. They have the freedom of movement and herd bound is is not a thing. Getting kicked out or heard is far more common than her being heard bound, but it is. It goes back to and we’ll use the guarding as a comparison.

If we were talking about how they’re struggling to find their fit, if they find a fit that makes them feel camouflaged mostly and they feel safer, they don’t feel isolated, which equals exposure was equals anxiety, which equals stress. And then, Oh my gosh, get me the heck out of here, Give me my blankie. Someone is coming to kill me and might be in those things. When you see a horse that’s acting dramatic, those expressions that now talking, it tells you just how deep that runs. That kind of deep.

The horse feels isolated really equates to a sense of emotional isolation, that sense of being alone and you can be around other forces, other people, doesn’t matter. We’ve all probably felt alone in a crowded room and you feel like I’m always looking at you and every move you make is, oh, someone’s going to see if you ate 2 cupcakes or you went back from that slice of pizza or whatever the case is. You were talking to sellers. I didn’t think you liked them. So you, you feel like the whole eyes are upon you and that’s how the horse feels.

That’s compounded by the associative aspect because again, the intellect of association and not reason that says, oh, it’s OK. And so it can be a really traumatic thing to have that happen. One of the ways that we try to deal with it because the best thing to do is try to identify these things before you invest in a horse. And I was told my clients, I wish you would have came to me before you invested in a source because we could have avoided all these things. But now we’ll go ahead and try to sort through it.

And what you need to do is to slowly increase the time that the force is away from that and it’s circumventing the circuitry. If you will pretend you’re taking him out and take it for a little walk and then go back. You don’t want the force to associate every single time that you show up with a trailer with a halter that, oh crap, I’m starting to feel the anxiety. Someone’s coming to the house. I can tell something’s going to happen.

And you feel that stress and you don’t want to be first thing you want to do is to take just remove yourself and being the cause of any associate of stresses that are related to that. Every time I see you, we’re not always doing the same thing, though you can pull. I love to do trickery to relayer these things and see how far we can get with bringing in the trailer, going through the motions and then not after they doing it. Let the horse think you’re going to do it that they anticipated. And then now this is not what we’re done.

Then now we have a different layer. We have interrupted the circuitry, if you will, the emotional circuitry and do things that in layers and spacing. It takes time. No one said forcemanship is easy. You know, the nature of forcemanship is to take that view from the hoof and be responsible for being bridged and taking those steps.

And you’ll learn a lot about your horse and yourself by going through those steps. But it’s really about time. It’s not the distance. Horses don’t view distance in the same way we do. It’s about time.

You want to stretch that umbilical cord further away in time. So we were 5 minutes away today, 6 minutes the next day, those kind of things. And you want to because if you increase the time that the force can be separated and keep them busy needs to have a purpose. Nothing. There’s nothing worse than not having a purpose.

Just physical exercise for a horse is physical conditioning. It’s not psychological purpose though. Give me something to do. I know this is we’re going to this cool. We’re going to here.

I need to have a purpose in my actions and it’s a small increments but it’s all about increasing the time and duration away and it it may be 5 minutes and maybe 10 minutes and maybe 1/2 an hour. Yeah, I was watching a comedy special two weeks ago and a guy made a comment he was like, yeah, I’m 36 this year. And a lot of people would think, hey, at 36, isn’t it time you stop blaming your parents for your issues? And he goes, listen, if you had a building with a shaky foundation, would you feel safer on the 36th floor? It really does make me think.

It all really does go back to how much capacity does your horse have? Like emotionally, we’ve been talking horse to horse dynamics. How is it possible for the horses to recognize us as a part of their herd? Yes, but you can’t. It’s going to be a one to one relationship though.

You’re not going to your relationship with your horse is going to be your relationship with your horse and they part of the herd is a general term. What you want to build is a relationship. You know that the relationship is predicated upon communication and we all know you has respect to space blah blah blah. How do we do that? And learning your forces how self-awareness from their body doing small things.

You have to remember that you are touching your horse emotionally long before you’re touching them physically. And so you can engage and communicate with your horse by being around And sometimes the greatest things and greatest ways to build a relationship with your horses to do nothing at all with them. Just be with them because the herd members on put in falters on put the saddles on put me on trailer. So if you want to be in the herd, we won’t be inside the fold. Don’t always ask me to do something, just be with me.

Learn my communication dynamics, learn my reactions to different things or my responses to different things. See how far away from me you are when I start to notice you or say OK from the right side, I am 6 meters away from the left side. In every horse in my work I’ve created after many years a century soundness mapping system and I have identified 6 basically century zones around the horse and I incorporate this into my work and teachings. But learning to exercise all of those zones without physical touch is warming up the sensory system. We have to warm up and engage the psychology before we ask the physical force to to do anything if we want to have a good relationship.

And this is there’s a lot of small things that you can do. And I always say interrupt the routines. Physical routines build conditioning and muscle and all those types of things, right? But emotional routines, psychological routines are pretty dangle and boring. Sometimes it becomes like a heavyweight and disrupting that routine emotionally.

Like you don’t always want to be that. Like you had that friend that you talk to once in a while, but every time you talk to them, they’re asking you to move something. They’re having a problem with a boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or partner. So you the only time you ever hear from them and you love them, but the only time you ever hear from them was when something is cooling. You know what?

So when the phone rings or when I look down and see that text pop up or that number pop up, I don’t want to talk to something. So because I know it’s going to be something bad, so I’m already anticipating it. You don’t want to be that phone call, that text for your horse. You don’t want to be the association like, Oh my gosh, every time he or she comes into the barn, this is what’s happening and I’m not into it today. Don’t be that friend to your horse because that’s a relationship that is very tenuous.

And it doesn’t mean you don’t like each other and don’t love each other, but one of the individuals is always happy to see you and the other one as opposed. So you just want to be mindful of those types of things that to break that up and you will build. It’s about building your relationship. And when you, I always tell people that the emotional part of the horse, the sensory system, the psychology, all these things must precede physical training and coaching. You want because from a sensory soundness standpoint is that the sensory system’s job is to clear space ultimately for the body to move through, clear the space around me so I feel safe whether I’m going at a trot, so I’m galloping, if I’m racing, if I’m jogging, if I’m just walking or if I’m just standing still.

If the my sensory system is clearing the space for me to move through that space freely. I always use a football analogy. It’s like a blocker of clearing a space in the line for the running back to move through. That’s the sensory system job. And when we helped a horse engage with that and warm that up and get it like flexible, I think of a slinky and stretching it out and warming it up.

So mental warmups are really important. Mental warmups that lead into precede physical action are extremely important, but it’s also just important to mentally engage with your horse without doing anything physical. Yeah, I, I relatively recently within the last couple of years have realized because I can be very a type personality. We’re doing conditioning sets today and then dressage tomorrow. It’s very organized to a fault almost.

And I have realized I’ve four horses that are my own personal horses. So I screw around with them a lot. And I’ve started dedicating one day to play. And that is if I have a horse who maybe struggles hacking, like I’ll get on for a hack, but I let them choose all the places to go. And I actually had one who very recently, she, she’s a show jumper, knows her job, She gets very excited in the jumping.

And starting two weeks ago, I couldn’t get the source to trot. And I was like, God, this is so weird. I had the body worker out at the bed. I had the the saddle fitter. I was like, OK, everything’s good.

Which means that it’s coming from an internal thing. And I started doing this and actually by accident, I was just setting up a video camera so I could film my ride. And I noticed just from needing to walk her around the arena to set up all my different beacons and stuff. When I got on, she had no problem. Going forward, she had no.

And I think it’s because I had checked her boxes of like making sure she saw that everything was good. OK, there’s nothing going on over here or whatever. And I just realized like, oh, there’s, there just is always so much more to riding than just the riding. And sometimes it can feel a little slow or like not impactful. But then nothing in the training changed other than the fact that she got to see kind of everything and take a breath.

And before I even got on and I realized, OK, this horse may just have to like literally do a lap in hand before I bring it to the mounting block. Yeah. I always remind, especially if I’m talking to younger students and clients, is that horsemanship is not about ribbons. Horsemanship is not the fancy saddle. Horsemanship is not about any of those things.

That those are human things, you know, those are not horse things. We put importance on those when their goal is to help us achieve our goal. But ultimately, that’s not what it’s about, building a relationship and those kind of things are what, at least in my opinion, some people can differ from that. But my opinion is that horsemanship starts with the horse and extends out to us. It’s not us onto the horse.

I’m going to ask, just recently I did a few interviews with Vandal and off camera, one of the questions was, so Carrie, what do you think the biggest impediment for? We’re talking about race horses is for horses to success. And I said human ego. If we don’t want to get in their way when I’m evaluating forces and I do that video and live, but I’m always looking for is this horse going to get in their own way? My primary job for high level athletics and looking for athletes is does this horse have the emotional capacity to physically fulfill your goals, can emotionally handle the rigors and the demands of becoming that athlete first of all and sustaining that.

And then so then you have to find the physical part of the horse too. But yeah, it’s really all these things work together. You hit on something which is really important. So you basically you’re having that mental warm up in something else that’s really important as part of the sensory system. Not to get into a century soundness lecture, but it’s really important to understand that there’s something what I call the interpretive ratio.

It’s basically how fast the Psycho century can interpret things in the environment relative to the speed of motion, whether the horse is moving or stimuli moving towards the horse. The sensory system ideally needs to identify, interpret, and to do the whole century process at least two times faster than they’re physically moving or two times faster than stimulus is moving at them. And if they’re moving in a race, other horses, then it’s both. But when the forces can do that, they keep a good working cushion between the outside world and the inside world. So I have a workspace in here and that’s where treating and learning and things like that take places in that cushion when outside stimuli, when the interpretive ratio gets too close, if it comes one to one and it now the horse is basically hitting themselves mentally and mental fatigue starts to set in.

Nothing will mitigate your success more than mental fatigue because once that sets in, the gig is up, the horse is not learning anything. You can try to do physical training, but you’re going to have to use strong tools and pools do not replace emotions. Overrule that. Identifying your forces, interpretive ratio at different speeds because This is why some horses can’t go up through the ranks. You can compete at one level, but as things speed up and there’s more pressure and now the interpretive ratio, I need a three to 1 interpretive ratio because of all the pressures, stress, carryover, things are moving faster or things like that.

And so that is what separates the ranks emotionally as far as competition. And so identifying that simple thing can let you know basically what level competition you can be going for. So there’s so many different things. That’s why I spent basically my whole life studying these things. And it’s, Oh my gosh, you got to do this and you got to do that.

And let me show you this. And then we teach you that or just there’s so many things to it. But but that is true. What you’re saying, going back to forksmanship, is so much more than just writing. Yeah, I know.

And it can, like I know with that specific horse who didn’t want to pick up the truck, like when I first got her, she had been trained kind of low level by another trainer for maybe a year. And then I got her, I realized basics had been missed. So I went back, redid the basics, and I go, yeah, I just don’t think this horse thinks quickly enough to be a top of that horse. But she’s super scopy and super careful. We’ll make her a show jumper because she’s insanely scopy.

And then I look at her race record, I’m like, she’s raced over 60 times and one hundreds of thousands of dollars and I go, maybe it’s not. Maybe she thinks so quickly she just can’t make the decision fast enough. Like she’s insecure in some type of decision making way. And she’s my most kind of not herd bound because again, she doesn’t care about leaving the herd, but when the herd leaves her, she cares. So it’s also taking them all as individuals.

And like, they are all so different. And I have one, I live at the barn so I can go out with my real palter everyday. And they might walk up to be 10 days in a row. And then on the 11th day, they’re like, lady, I don’t want to see you. And I go, yeah, cool, we’ve got a lot.

And then I have some that work for two or three days and they’re like, yeah, this is good. And then they’re good for another two or three days. But it’s, I think we’re a lot of people struggle and it does all come back to human ego and human pressure. But people want to do right by their horses, but then they also want the ribbons and the success. And I think it’s hard for riders and I think especially professionals to balance the needs of the horse with the I have to get this done in order to keep the business going or.

It’s a double edged sword. I know a lot of really good horse owners and trainers, just for example, in thoroughbred racing around the world that it can get a bad rap. But there’s there’s ugly in every discipline. It doesn’t matter. There’s good and bad and everything.

And there it’s a struggling between balancing the books. Can I keep the barn open? And this horse really should have two more days off. And then you get into the Gray area. Does does the vet start training the horses and things like that?

It’s an ugly part of it. One of the things that I work towards in that industry and different industries really is pretty competitive and price wise, we meant things to steep. There’s a lot of competition there too is trying to show that yes, I understand you’re bouncing the books and you got stamped to pay and the fee to buy. But if you take these steps in the long run, you’re playing the long game here, unless you’re trying to short sell your horse, you’re playing the long game. Let’s put this premium advice because it will.

It’s like starting a new business. You had to put in the work, put in the grind, and you won’t see the fruits of that until a little bit later. However, you’ll have longevity. I’m all about let’s give this horse longevity and let’s have a champion potential for as many competitions as we can for as many years as we can so the worst doesn’t breakdown. We’re not dealing with ulcers that are affecting all these different things.

And now you have, if you can just get yourself to that point then, and it’s easy. It is a struggle. There are ways to strike the balance, but ultimately that’s not an excuse in my book. The horses didn’t actually be put into those situations. We put them in the situation.

You know what, money be damned, you have to be accountable to that. And most people really love their horse, but don’t love your ribbon more than you love your horse. I guess that’s the moral of the story. Yeah, no. And it is now that where there’s a fine line between trauma and training, and it’s like that in every aspect of do I emotionally push them hard today?

Can I physically push them hard today? Sometimes you physically push them hard and emotionally they tap out. And it’s I do think they’re good. Pride myself on the fact that I’ve never treated any of my horses for ulcers. They’ve never shown symptoms of ulcers.

They’ve never. I feed a commercial feed like I’m not. They’re not on a forage only or whatever. I take the time, especially when they come off the track. They might need an initial, but once they get into the program, I do my very best to, OK, can we stop the anxiety, stop the stress before it manifests into something that they’re froth thing pawing.

Sometimes you can’t help it. You put your horse in a situation that you thought they were ready for and they just weren’t ready. And I don’t think anyone is expecting everyone to be perfect all the time. And I think we’re going to start seeing just more and more of it being horse centric then competition centric. And I think that’s the glory of what you do and getting the word out of, hey, actually, yeah, it might take you an extra year or whatever, but if you get to save $600 a year in ulcer treatment, isn’t that in itself kind of?

And I tell you what, most of my career, I mean, I can’t tell you how many times and anyone in the voice industry will understand this, but I just almost walked away so many times from the commercial industry that the private sector was like, Oh my God, I just cannot deal with this. But at the same time, when I travel around and I do lectures and get clinics around the world in different places and I get often times here, Oh, how could you work in the horse industry or the thoroughbred industry? And you know, you can say that about any industry. And I want to be involved in all industries because wherever the horse is at, that’s where I need to be. Like I feel like that’s I’ve done all this work in research and I have been pushed it on and ignored and all these different things and it’s been a heck of a hard grind to stay just even keep chasing it and dream I’m going to make a difference somehow, some way.

If I can just help one horse. Over time, I have been able to find what and you’re dealing with human emotions just as much. I’ve been learning to navigate the human being and their egos and what their goals are and the finances that they have and still fit in natural hard dynamics and educating them on what’s happening and why this is happening and how you can avoid it from happening and what you need to look for. First of all, then don’t buy this horse. Send me to the Dang on sale and let me look at your horses because this is going to be your program that I’m not going to pick a horse that I don’t think can psychologically handle it period.

I never do anything on a percentage basis. I always charge a flat fee if I’m doing something like that because I never want to be in a position where I have to find a horse for you to make my day rate. No, this is the price. Whether we find 10 horses or no horses, OK, it’s not going to change because I would rather my responsibility is to the horse and that kind of thing. But over time I’ve been able to show certain clients, high profile individuals around the world that, hey, you can do it this way and you can guess what?

You can get your picture taken, you can make the money, you can get all the delays and your horse can still be happy and safe and sound and all these things. And it’s so striking the balance and, and basically I had to find a way to protect the forces and increase the client’s wallet. That’s what everybody comes down to. And I find that I’m doing more educating and clinics now than I used to do because I’m shifting in that direction so I can help more people. That’s my passion.

But I still do the private sector when someone calls me. And that’s really been my thing. But it took a long time to get there. I jeez, I can can’t tell you. Yeah.

Just all of this stuff I’ve had to go through to to really fight that battle. Here I am. So here we go. Yeah, it really is so hard. And I know I’ve taken sort of two years, ish, year and a half off of the competition world because one, it’s really hard when you’re trying so hard to do right by the horse and you want to go out and compete and then you go on social media and bet your friend just like on this thing or is doing this.

And but it’s also really hard. And I was having this conversation with another horseman of it’s hard to go into these competition settings and you just see the anxiety of the horse and the frustration of the rider to be able to keep your head in the game. And but at the same time, it’s like have to start going back out there and doing it to show that, hey, no, there’s another way. Like you don’t have to wrestle your horse in the wash stall or chase it on the end of a lunge line or whatever in order to have a nice fun time. At the end of the day, we should be having fun with.

It and you can, you can do it right and actually win better. Do it right and win better. And if you have to use equipment to get your horse to be with you, your horse doesn’t want to be with you. If you if you need line, if you need that round, then not that they’re bad things, but I’m just saying these are the only ways you’re going to get your horse to want to hang out with you. Guess what?

You don’t have a relationship. It really is all starts with building that relationship and going forward. And then you can win bigger and better is what I say. And then do it together. You don’t want to win, but your horse still lose.

Does that make sense? When your horse wins, you’re going to win, you know, and I’m going to bring tears because it’s just something that’s so important to me to share that you can actually do both, you know, and horses are, they can very much enjoy it and love it and want to do it. Oh, I had a horse buck me off at a competition and she continued jumping her course. So I go, I think I’m the problem here. She clearly likes the job.

She doesn’t like whatever I’m doing, but she likes the job. And so if, as we’re finishing up here, if you had to give advice to riders who are balancing the want for the competition and the success, but they really want to start doing right and noticing things with their force, what advice or suggestions do you have for those people? You do it in small decrements. You don’t have to do everything at one time. Make small subtle adjustments and changes and really think about taking your view from the hoof.

Try to understand how your force is interpreting their world, identifying things in the world, and responding to things. Learn the difference between a reaction and a response. A response to something is still movement. It’s an expression, but it’s purposeful. It is athletic.

You can do something with it and it’s important to try to overcorrect that. If it’s still something that you can drive basically and steer and use it that way instead of trying to have the force capitulate to you. When you’re doing things are you notice you force is reacting, Give them space and time to react to and to always never go into another obstacle. Let’s just say you’re going in when you’re going across the cross country course, for example, or your show jumping ring and you’re going over the jumps and the obstacles. And when you’re practicing or training, let your horse make sure that your horse has fully processed what just happened before you go to the next try to avoid carry over stress because you’re trying to avoid carry over stress.

Be mindful that in practice, I need to give up a course of purpose, keep them focused, but I also don’t want to overdo it. I wanted to give them a, an emotional a place to say no and go into a different spot. And then we’ll stuck around do it again because you don’t want to be associated with something bad, just small to interrupt the stagnant routine. You can still have a physical training regime, but don’t let it fall into the emotional stagnant routine. This is exactly what we do every single time.

Physical consistency is important, emotional inconsistency of also important. And the reason that is, is because we tried, we want to circumvent a force’s ability to anticipate something that you’re going to do. Because if they begin to anticipate, now you have an anticipatory response mechanism that kicks in and it’s muscle memory, right? So you now you’re stuck with it. But if you enter the emotional routine gently and I’ll just blanket and Sal’s not for you, but I have you tied up anyway or did not do small things like that keeps the relationship fresh.

It’s like, how did you have such a good marriage all those years? We played a little tricks on each other, we teased each other. We we kept it fresh, this kind of thing. And so don’t let it get stagnant. And just because you something to watch on TV and or you have an appointment or things like that.

Your horse doesn’t live by a clock. So don’t ask them to live by yours. So this has been such a great conversation. One, do people follow along with what you’re doing? You can find me my name Kerry M thomas.com is KERRYM thomas.com have a new book out called Heard Wired in pursuit of discovery.

It just was released. You can get that, but visit the website, check things out. I have a whole presentation area. We have events section to see what’s coming up or get ready to do. We’re getting ready to kick off the Human Horse Connection tour for 2026, but we’re starting it in the Netherlands in November and I’m accredited by the World Dutch Equation Federation.

So I’m teaching over there in Europe for people to get points for the license and things like that. So I’m heading over there for November, but I’m getting lectures, workshops and clinics. Just reach, we have a question. I have a couple of services that Ioffer 1 is a full profile, the Human Horse Connection. If you just have questions you want to ask me, you want to just want to book a console.

You have a couple questions about training or things like that. You can zoom with me. You can schedule your own zoom time, 30 minutes or an hour time frames and things like that. Explore the website, check things out and social media is Facebook, of course, is my name. But then my business page is sensory soundness and sensory soundness.

And you can get all those links on the website. And my wife just made a really cool YouTube video for the book and she’s very creative. It’s cool. I didn’t, she surprised me for my birthday. So it’s a cool video about the book for wires.

So you can check that out on our YouTube channel as well. But I really thank you for having me on. It’s been a pleasure. Just thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you so much, I’ve learned a lot.