Dark Horse Therapeutics

08/18/2025

Pretty neat round

Karl Cook and Caracole de la Roque clock in a speedy round to take 🥈 in the $32,000 Adequan WEF Challenge Cup Round 8.Check out our other social channels:US...

08/18/2025

“The capacity of the horse to respond to the body tone.” 🤩

08/17/2025

More good riding

08/17/2025

Great riding

08/17/2025

The first time I wrote about nosebands and cavessons—and how I prefer to leave them at a) the tackstore and failing that b) the high and inaccessible bridle hook in the tackroom—was back in 2018:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19mFsU5tEE/

The second time, I wrote a lengthy piece called, ‘Cavessons or Nosebands, Yea or Nay?’ back in 2022:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CpQcgRjj1/

So, this movement towards getting rid of the mouth shutters is in no way new. While I do ride in the rawhide bosal, also—and it does prevent some of the huge releasing of the jaw, if it is adjusted correctly—I’m pretty much against using cavessons, unless I’m driving a horse.

Driving bridles REQUIRE a cavesson to safely hold the cheekpieces of the bridle against the horse’s face. To remove the noseband means that you are risking ‘peekaboo’ glimpses of the carriage in a bad moment, if your horse ever really needs hanging onto. So, a warning might be in order, depending on what you are planning to do.

I have always espoused ditching the cavesson for riding, for as long as I have been schooling horses, which goes back to my youth, when we called those little rawhide nosebands—de rigueur in stock horse training pens—mouth shutters. Yes. Here's another post from 2018:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16aeutqZUo/

There is a reason western performance events do not allow a cavesson of any kind in competition, nor have they ever, to the best of my knowledge. They cover too many sins.

We should want to see what the horse is saying about our bridle, our bitting, our schooling and our rein handling! We should want to see if there is tension, fear, pain or happy acceptance. Shouldn’t we?

Note that many bitless bridles are no better than bitted bridles, when it comes to allowing full releases of the jaw. So, going without a bit does not necessarily mean that your horse is feeling more relaxed. We will have to find other reasons to make these choices, hopefully, on grounds and aims that are guided by the horse.

Some horses will absolutely go through a period of sticking the tongue out, crossing the jaws, getting the tongue over the bit or gaping the mouth, even without any action of the reins. This is normal and will most often resolve itself as the horse gets busier—aka more active—with the hind end. Mouth issues are almost always fixed by concentrating on the opposite end of the horse.

This, of course, is Lyric… a six-year-old Friesian x Haflinger pony cross. She’s still quite green, as we have started and stumbled through our training for quite some time. With each newly-revealed problem—from bucking to bolting—we’ve uncovered physical issues and for the first time in the three years that I have known her, Lyric and I are facing what seems to be smooth sailing.

I’ll have you know that this state of uncomplicated wellness comes as a blessed relief!

The pony is not built for lightness but she is proving to be athletic in the way of large people who are beautiful, light-footed dancers. She is learning to release stress in a more beneficial way, than of blowing up, entirely. This, too, comes as a relief, especially to her ageing jockey!

We ride in as uphill a way as her schooling and physical body currently allow, taking our puff breaks with an entirely loose rein. Her yawns are so huge that she cannot walk while doing them; she stops and puts everything she’s got into releasing her tension.

I can only imagine what it would feel like, in her nervous system and in her physical body, through her breathing, the poll and TMJ, if she were unable to release in this way.

Even if you are forced to wear a cavesson to compete with, I say there is a huge argument for allowing your horses to find total relaxation without them, while you are doing your daily schooling. A few days of riding with a loosely-fastened noseband before you show should be enough to acclimatise your horses… and if not, I would question whether such horses are really ready to compete.

And yet, cavessons—the cranks, flashes, figure-eights and dropped nosebands—continue to be allowed and are sold with every single English bridle that is made. If they were sold separately, many people likely wouldn’t bother putting one on their horses, despite the continued teaching that cavessons are somehow necessary to making a compliant, submissive horse, or ‘stabilizing’ the bit in the mouth.

While many of our dressage gods, past and present, have made use of the dropped noseband while schooling the horse in the snaffle, I question their necessity. Having a western stock horse background has shed some light for me on the whole concept of yielding coming from physical or mechanical constraint. I am no longer a believer, I guess.

Nosebands aside, there is so much of the gear we regularly use on our horses that actually makes the job of improving their bodies, way of going and wellness so much more difficult. Standing martingales/tie downs, splint boots and bandages (bell boots and skid boots can be necessary protection, as needed), any sort of ‘auxiliary’ reins that use mechanical means to force a horse into position, lungeing ‘systems’ meant to engage the hind end…

I’m not buying them. I’m not interested in short-term goals and long-term, they have proven to be more hindrance, than help.

Photos: Kerry Duncan McCartney.

08/16/2025

Ooooo so guilty of a crunched digging heel myself!! Constantly working on this.

I teach students that I would much rather see them bump or, yes, even kick, than raise a heel and dig, dig, dig, nudge, nudge, nudge. A big whack with the whole lower leg doesn’t look pretty, but a hard bump or kick that fully releases, and is spread across a wide surface area, is much much kinder, (and more effective) than contracting the back of the leg and digging with the edge of the boot.

People who lift their heel end up doing it almost constantly, unknowingly. They contract the back of their leg which tightens the hip joint. Plus, the back of the human heel is hard and sharp. So is the bottom edge of a boot. Even a violent kick is probably less hurty.

Okay, so now I’ll address all the haters who are going to say that I’m encouraging riders to KICK horses…
1.) I’m comparing this versus that. A kick is better than a digging heel in the same way that a small piece of pie is healthier than a Big Mac with large fries. But I don’t expect students to have the timing and skill to NEVER have to kick.
2.) if you are kicking with your heel down, you are connecting with a large surface area! Plus the angle is not one where we are at our strongest.
3.) Yeah the word “kick” sounds bad. Kicking a human usually is a serious attack so we associate that word with something extreme. But kicking with the calf/ankle/heel really is not comparable to a roundhouse to a human face.
4.) A bump, bump, bump motion is on/off/on/off unlike a squeeze or dig. You can time it with the aids.
5.) sometimes I have students that are barely doing anything. I will use whatever language needed to get them to proactively DO SOMETHING.

I don’t like spurs. I understand when a tall man who rides smaller Horses uses them, because their foot literally hangs under the horse’s belly, and a long spur makes it that they don’t have to move their foot so far to reach. But 99% of the time I would much rather see someone use a stick. People consciously use the stick. They can time better with it. I start off having riders just tap the shoulder in time with the horses feet, until the horse is moving with the energy they want. A whip can touch or press or tap- it does not need to be an instrument of discipline. And if your horse is scared of a whip, that is something I would absolutely work through as it’s pretty easy to fix!

08/14/2025

“Latent learning”

“…the wisdom of the unconscious.”

At least ten summers ago, I had a lesson with someone whose name is one you’ll never hear and whose presence has not stamped the horse world in any way that shows up on social media or much less be rewarded financially.

I can’t tell you anything about that lesson. I can’t remember what we did or the specifics of what was told to me.

It’s like a clear space where I understood that something happened and yet what happened, I do not know.

The only thing I know is that lesson was transformative. And now, having spent a decade and a half teaching myself, I can tell you perhaps why.

There are teachers and coaches who attempt to bring you round to their way of thinking. The work is heady; it involves a lot of processing and thought.

And then, there are teaches and coaches whose work may not completely make sense in the moment, or perhaps you can’t recall what happened or what you worked on, or you felt yourself to be in the mid-zone between understanding and complete miscomprehension.

And then you leave, and you find that something’s changed.

This is the work that works *on* you. Below the level of conscious thought. Outside the realm of your awareness.

Your cells have changed, how you approach things have changed and you may not ever know why. You weren’t aware of the moment you crossed over.

This happens with our horses; what appears like a mess in the moment can be understanding working on and through them, only for clarity to appear, the answers to the questions known days or even weeks later.

Perhaps we refer to this as latent learning but I don’t think that’s quite right. The learning was always happening; it’s our awareness of it that is latent.

I wonder sometimes if, in our in-love-ness with questioning and analytical thought, that we don’t give enough credit to, enough celebration of, enough allowance for, the wisdom of the unconscious.

The reconfiguration of the energetic body that filters through to the physical.

Where we know that something happened, that we understood something to be true, but we can’t explain quite why.

Learning, after all, is more than a little bit magic.

08/14/2025

I love asking, “are you ready?” before putting on an aid. Would you be ready to sing the national anthem when you’ve just taken a sip of chocolate milk? No! Why not offer the same courtesy to your horse? Are you ready? It’s such a handy question. The response gives a lot of information!! Besides— it’s not “put your bother on” it’s “put your AID on!” The aid is to help the horse!

Planting the seeds for more compromises, less demands...

When you make a request, do you truly listen to how your horse responds... or do you get pushy?

Let's say you've walked around for 10-15 mins and you're ready to trot. Do you ask with your body only, or do you also ask verbally: "Are you ready to trot?"

08/12/2025