Paula Curtis (00:42)
Today we're here with Amanda Wilson, who has a gift for working with so-called difficult horses and covering the physical and emotional layers behind behavioral challenges. Her holistic approach combines bodywork, veterinary insights, and deep understanding of equine psychology. Her work is both powerful and practical, and we're really excited to have her sharing it both on the fair and here with us today. Welcome, Amanda. Hey, thank you so much for having me.
got it. Thanks for being part of Art of the Horsemen and being with us. We really appreciate it. we sure do. I'd love to hear about your journey and how different disciplines and approaches have influenced how you're working with horses here today. Okay. Well, I'm a part of what is known as the Wilson Sisters, three sisters that started off from pretty humble beginnings. We didn't have a lot of money growing up.
And as a result, we got a lot of problem ponies and sort of rescue cases and whatnot. And my older sister, Vicky, was very talented with all of that. And I struggled immensely. I was very nervous rider. And for the most part, she helped me a lot in the beginning stages. And I had a really good run in show jumping. I competed up to a pony and horse Grand Prix with great success. And then we got involved in training wild horses about
13 years ago. And that was my first sort of introduction to working with that sort of horse before. And it brought up some major holes in my horsemanship training and my understanding of the psychology of the horse. And so for the last decade, I've gone on a journey to improve my horsemanship. I've also studied human and animal psychology. That is self study, reading a huge amount of books and sort of career.
crafting my own method that has completely changed my life and the way I work with horses. And then in recent years, after going through a lot of struggles with some of my own personal showjumpers, I've completely gone down the path of trying to understand horses with behavioral issues and combining that with my human psychology work. And the results and the insights I've had have been profound. How cool that you're able to combine both because
There are so many similarities between ourselves and our horses and our nervous systems and the way our brains work, but there's also quite a few differences. I'd love to hear you speak on the differences between humans and horses. Well, I guess I'll start with the similarities and then that kind of helps make the differences make a little more sense. But in terms of survival responses, humans and horses are very similar.
When we lose control, when we experience pain or we run out of tools and resources to protect ourselves, our body switches into a survival response to try to protect ourselves against the perceived threat. Typically we'll go into a fight or flight. Horses are naturally flight animals. They try to get away from the threat. Humans can also be flight creatures. But when we...
aren't able to get away, we can't escape or something is in our territory or in the horse's territory will flip into a fight response. And if those two responses can keep us safe, that's great. We've got control back, we can carry on our lives. But if the fight and flight doesn't protect us, our brain will switch involuntarily into the freeze response. And basically, that's where the body and the brain start to shut down, preparing for injury or death. The brain has lost hope that it's going to be able to get away or overcome the perceived threat. And in that
freeze response is when trauma memory is downloaded into the brain. And if that trauma memory isn't worked through and released, then it can be stored there for the rest of that human or that horse's life. And then later on, if something reminds us of that initial experience, the emotions attached to that experience can switch back on. And it can trick us into thinking that that experience is happening all over again, which we refer to as emotional triggering. So for example, if a horse is in a floating accident,
or bad sort of floating experience and it can't run and it can't fight, it may switch down or shut down into that freeze to protect itself. And then if that isn't worked through and the tension isn't released through what I call trigger work, then later on you might be trying to get your horse into the stable because it's raining and the horse sees the narrow opening in the doorway and says, no, that associates that narrow space with the float and now it's become triggered.
So we have the same sort of responses in humans. If we have a bad experience in our past, when something later on reminds us of that bad experience, those initial emotions can switch back on and we can become anxious or have that sort of survival response kick in. And it's very much the same with horses. And then we've got a fourth fear response, which we call fawning.
And fauna is people pleasing and conflict avoidance behaviors. It's where fight, flight and freeze hasn't kept us safe or hasn't kept the animals safe. And with horses, you can tell very clearly if a horse is a fauna by nature because they're highly anxious and they over anticipate body language. And you can also see that in humans. If you see a fauna, they're highly anxious and they're constantly thinking, have I done something wrong? They overthink things.
So that's the sort of similarities and I could go into that all day. There's so much science and incredible stuff behind that. But I guess the difference is with a horse, they don't have the ability to recall memory and to sort of use logic and consciousness in their experiences. more, they develop associations, but they can't just randomly go through their brain and reflect on what happened six days ago and think about what a lovely day it was, you know? So we've got a little bit of different programming.
because with humans, we've got such a large prefrontal cortex. would you say that horses store their memories oftentimes in their body more so because of the smaller, you know, prefrontal cortex, not being what it is in a human? I think they store, it can be a mixture of body and brain. think your neural pathways, I'm not too sure how many neural pathways horses have, but humans have something like 86 million.
And that stores a lot of information and lot of emotion. There's scientific proof now that something called a glial cell, which attaches to your neurons, is capable of storing emotion, which is just chemicals. And I think that's very similar for the horse, regardless of whether it's where it's stored in what particular part of the brain. I also think our body remembers, there's some amazing books. One that I read as part of my study called...
the body keeps the score. And those sort of books I find fascinating. I think it's very much the case for horses. When I talk about trauma, it's just unprocessed stress. And we've got three causes of stress in our lives. We've got emotional stress, which is what I'm talking about in terms of triggering and traumatic past experiences. We've got physical stress, which is pain-related issues in horses or sort of discomfort in some form or another. And we've also got chemical stress, which is toxicity.
too much of something, deficiency, not enough of something, and grass issues and whatnot. So when we're dealing with horses, not only are we dealing with the training aspects of figuring out if they've got emotional triggers to work through, which a lot of horses do if they've had confusing training or bad experiences, but we're also dealing with a huge array of physical issues they can have and chemical issues. very interesting. What do you think is one of the most overlooked
aspects that people have in the care of their horse and just everyday sort of interactions that can cause stress for the horse and therefore that stress will show up in a variety of ways during their training. Probably what I find, there's so many things, but probably one of the main things that I find is there isn't a clear right and wrong answer that we give the horses. A lot of people are very quiet when they work with horses.
The horse does the right thing. They may get a tiny release of pressure or they might get a tiny little pat. If they do the wrong thing, they increase the pressure. I look at it like I'm playing charades with the horse and every movement I make means something to them depending on my body language. And I liken it to the metaphor of like if I was abducted by a French person and they were trying to make me perform an obstacle course and they didn't speak the whole way through.
and they didn't tell me when I was going the right way and they weren't making it very clear except for smacking me sometimes when I went the wrong way. I would get very confused and start to panic because I don't have a clear sort of guideline on where to go and what to do. So with me, I'm very huge on vocal praise and when they do the right thing, not only do I go, oh my gosh, well done, but I get in there and I rub their neck and I scratch them. I give them a loose rein, I walk them for sort of 20 to 30 seconds.
And the horse goes, God, okay, I've got it. So every time they hear that vocal praise, they're like, cool, this means this. And my horses learn very, very quickly with that. And it's something I try to instill is if you watch the horse's face, when you really go in and you rub on them and you say, my gosh, and you project that real excitement to them, they go, thank goodness. Because we're just technically two creatures who speak different languages. We expect them to understand our language.
but we don't make it very clear to them when they're doing sort of the right thing. And something that was life-changing for me is I went and watched Robin Wilkshire, who trains the Budweiser commercial horses. We were in America 10 years ago and we got there the first day he was training a Clydesdale to kick a soccer ball because for the commercial he needed one to kick the soccer ball, one to guard the goal. And he said, come and watch this first session. He had a two or three year old Clydesdale and
He walked in, there was a ball in the middle and he stood on the far end of the yard and just quietly started to crack some stop whips. And the horse didn't know what on earth was happening. And it looked around and as it looked around it caught sight of the ball. And as soon as it saw the ball, the guy stopped cracking the stop whips and was like, good, good. And the horse was a little bit, okay, I'm not sure what this means, but okay. He did that a few more times. The horse very quickly learned that when it looked at the ball.
the pressure was released, there was a massive projection of reward. And within 20 minutes, that horse was starting to pour at that bull. We came back two days later, that horse was kicking the bull around the round yard. It was so relaxed in its body, its demeanor was so incredible because he made very clear between pressure means I'm asking you a question, if I haven't released pressure, you're not moving in the right direction, but he doesn't get angry, he never once went towards them, he just quietly waited. The second the horse,
move towards the behavior he was looking for, the reward was so obvious. And so, yeah, that's something I really try to instill in the people I work with is make it clear. They've done a good job, project, rub, scratch, give them time to then process. And if that human isn't present and in the moment and watching and observing the horse and what the horse is about to do, maybe three steps ahead, because we get better at that, at guessing what or understanding what our horses are about to do. But if he didn't understand that,
He might discourage a try or a thought towards the ball. And then the horse, the horse isn't going to go there. So what would you recommend for people that are sort of starting out with horses that haven't had a chance to observe and learn horses, but then they get their first horse and they want to ride it. What would you recommend? Where should those folks start with, with their horsemanship? I think understanding the body language and
Being able to read what the horse is saying is super important because obviously the horse is chatting to us the whole time. If on the odd occasion maybe they stopped chatting because they've been pushed into a freeze or a sort of dissociative state but the horse's body language is always telling us something and if we're not taught how to read that then we can miss a lot of subtleties and you know back in the day we would say the horse bucks me off out of the blue or it bit me out of the blue or it kicked me out of the blue just randomly happened.
And my middle sister Kelly is a photographer who works hugely with wild horses around the world and she started a book where she needed to travel the world and photograph these horses in these different regions. And what she was figuring out is in the beginning she would photograph and then the horses would randomly bolt and she'd be like, whoops, I don't know what caused it, but they just took off. But after observing them for a while, she was able to pick up subtleties in their body language, often several minutes before they bolted.
a lot of us often miss when we're working with our horses. The thing I would say is learn what a stressed horse looks like versus a relaxed horse. And I teach my clients the first sign of stress I look for in a horse is the height of the head. If I'm working with them on their backs and their head lifts a centimeter, or even more obviously, that's a sign something's about to go wrong. As soon as a horse lifts its head, they're starting to go into that survival response. The head comes up, the back muscles tighten. Then you're going to see...
of the ears, eyes and muzzle. You're also going to see a change in their breathing. When a horse goes into a strong survival response, the airways will close. The body is starting to shut down, preparing for injury of death or it's thinking about potentially running or fighting. So you see this stressed animal taking very shallow breaths through the nostrils and through the diaphragm. And so if that's a sign of stress in the horse, the sign of relaxation is one, dropping their neck head, dropping the height of the head.
Two, softening the ears, eyes and the muzzle. So if the ears really copped in a direction, the ear quietly comes back and softens, et cetera. And three is changing how they breathe, going from those short, shallow breaths to deep, lovely breaths through their nostrils and their diaphragm. So I'm always looking out for those subtleties. If that horse's head's come up, I know the horse has become stressed or I know it's become triggered. So I won't add more pressure.
I will just quietly wait on the outside of that or the edge of that moment where they've been pushed outside the comfort zone. And I'll wait on them until they can find a change in their demeanor and find relaxation. So where they can switch from their survival brain back into their thinking brain. If you push them too far into the survival brain, they often can't recover. So that's where you've got to pick up on the subtleties. Not waiting until it's bolted, but picking up on that moment that it freezes its front feet, its head comes up.
and it starts to hold its breath and now it's thinking of bolting. So in that moment while it's thinking it, I can quietly keep the same level of pressure, assuming I haven't accidentally added too much, and I'll wait with that same question until they can go, then I take the pressure back. From my understanding is wherever we release pressure is where we condition the behavior. So if the horse is running and rushing and we release behavior, they learn rushing is the best way to keep themselves safe.
If they pin their ears at me and I hop back, they learn fighting is the best way to keep themselves safe. If I punish the fight and flight and the horse shuts down and starts to tolerate and I give it a release of pressure, it learns freezing is the best way to keep itself safe. But if I punish the freeze and the horse people pleases and fawns, it now learns fawning is the best way to keep itself safe. So a lot of behaviors in horses have been conditioned based on their pressure and release and not necessarily good.
reading of the horse's psychological state. My job as a trainer is to make fight, flight, freeze and fawn uncomfortable and to make thinking and relaxing comfortable. So I don't spook the horse and have it jump in the air and jump back and go, oops, bad. I spooked the horse by accident. I quietly keep the same level of stimuli until it can find relaxation. Then I hop back. If I hop back on the first case, the horse learns that jumping violently gets a sense of release.
So the horse then uses that behavior as a coping mechanism down the track. I want my horses under pressure or under stress to go into a little bit of a survival response because they're overwhelmed and to think their way out of it and to regulate their emotional system because I want horses that are relaxed and happy and able to think when you're in survival. Same with humans. You cannot access your tools and resources. You are only...
sort of capable of going into that fight for a pre-spawn. You said a lot of really great things there. It's, I always think about any, you we could think reward, letting horse settle or find relief or rest, or even people that feed treats. It's like what mental and emotional state are they in at that point that you, that you let them settle or that you give that treat. And because you're going to get more of
of that. And sometimes people are just so much looking at the body and they're, you know, releasing the body, but where's the mind and the emotions, the horse's life at that point? Yeah. So I teach my people, I reward relaxation over technique. When you get relaxation, the technique will follow. Most people reward technique and not relaxation. So if you're asking for a side pass,
and the horse does it correctly but it's holding its breath and it's tense and they're like, good job. That horse becomes tense for the rest of its life. My horse might do a side pass but it may lag slightly through the hind quarter but it's super relaxed and I'll go in and I'll be like, you didn't get it perfect technically but you were so relaxed and for that reason I'm going to be like, yes, well done. Then the horse goes, okay, so I'm meant to move in that direction so they're able to think about it. Next time I add a little bit more of a forehand yield they move across.
Now I have a horse that's moving towards the technical outcome, loose and relaxed. And that's, I think people miss those signs of tension and are so worried about it being perfect technically. And I don't think it can be good technically if there's tension in the body. I love how you're talking about getting the thinking horse or the mindful horse. And if it's not perfect, they're at least in a state of mind to think and to understand. And we could always ask later and do it again.
So I think that's what really well said. Thank you. When working with horses back in the day, I didn't have any understanding of horse behavior. I didn't understand the psychology of the animal. What I've learned over the last few years has been life-changing. But I look at the horse when they present, let's say I go out and I'm asking for a leg yield and the horse is still quite green and it presents with 15 out of 100%.
My job as a trainer for how I train my horses is I say anything above 15 that you can give me today I'm going to take. I want two to three improved answers. So if we start at 15 % today and we finish at 25%, we've both won. And tomorrow we might get to 30 % and in a week we might get to 80 % and suddenly in three weeks we've mastered the skill because I'm focusing on relaxation and just quietly shaping the behavior.
But if I go out and say, must give me a perfect leg yield today and I keep hassling the horse and it keeps trying and I keep asking more and more, I may get a, well one I'm probably gonna fry the brain a little bit, but I may get them to leg yield by the end of it, but now they resent me, I've won but the horse has lost. So when the horse returns for its next session, it's gonna be tense and it's gonna resent me a little bit. Everything I say is shape the behavior. It doesn't have to be 100 % today, we're just moving in that direction. And if the horse can't come out,
and show you an improvement, there's something going wrong. Either something majorly going wrong in the training with very confusing aids or too high expectations, or the horse is under some form of stress and therefore cannot think its way through the situation. And I had a great example of, I'm very good at picking up trigger work in the horses and teaching them and breaking things down smaller and smaller to make it more understandable for them. But...
I've had several horses over the last few months where I just was not making improvements. Some days they would be great, other days would go back 20 steps. Couldn't figure out what was wrong because they were fantastic through their bodies. I'd done all the emotional trigger work. I thought I'd done all the chemical work as well and then discovered that they have all had major magnesium deficiencies. And magnesium is essential to the nervous system and their ability to process and regulate emotions.
I've had them on magnesium now for three weeks. My horses are completely different to work with. They retain information. They come back every day to getting better. So if they're not getting better, it's learning to step back and say, well, if they're not improving, something's causing them stress. that's fantastic. And I love all of the things you're saying because you're taking into account the whole horse and you went from, you know, really the person observing.
and watching horses like your sister did and noticing how they communicate. So this is a great tool for beginner horse owners. Then you're taking into account the emotions during the entire training process, which again, for somebody that's newer to horses, if they can keep their horse thinking and not be emotional, it's so much easier to work with your horse when they're like that. People get in over their head because they get the horse emotional.
And now it makes them emotional and it just is this downward spiral. So you're taking into all of these pieces, but then you're looking at the entire environment. What is the diet? And picking up on a magnesium deficiency is so interesting because it all depends on where you're at. know, certain areas that the hail be deficient in selenium, let's say, or there's just, it just depends. And did you do blood work to test for that or?
Yeah, so the issue with blood work is that there always has to be at least 1 % of magnesium in the bloodstream. So when you do blood work, it will always come back good because if levels are low in the body, the bloodstream will rob the bones and the soft tissue of magnesium. So it can come back and say it's correct levels. We had an issue like, in hindsight, I've had an issue over the last two or three years, but this year has been terrible. We had a lot of red clover on our property, which is quite high in magnesium.
This year, we got rid of a lot of it because it has side effects, which is not so good for the horses. And as a result, we've cut down without realizing a large portion of their magnesium. And so what I did was New Zealand soils are notoriously low for selenium and magnesium anyway. So I just put them on a two week sort of pre-dose. It says, and this is where I got it very wrong. I thought that if they're magnesium deficient, you could give it to them for a week and you'd see a response.
But if they're highly deficient, it can take two to eight weeks for the soft tissue in the bones and the body level to replenish itself. So all of my horses have made a substantial improvement, but two of them are not quite 100%. So I'm not working with them. I'll just keep giving them magnesium over the next little while. There are other ways to test for magnesium deficiencies. I've talked about it on a recent Facebook post. I think it's a red blood cell count or something.
along those lines and then another test that's much more accurate than a magnesium or blood test. I know it's the same for humans as well when there's a magnesium deficiency. I mean, anything from sleep and a calm nervous system, it's so essential for everything, but it takes a long time for you to really bring your levels up. And it's not, I don't know about in horses, but in humans,
What you're taking in is not what is actually getting absorbed. And now with horses, they... So there's so many different types of magnesium. And I'm not familiar with horses and what types of magnesium they're supposed to get. Do you feed like a broad spectrum or is there a specific type? How does that... We are feeding dolomite at the moment. So dolomite is half magnesium, half calcium. In order for the magnesium to be absorbed, the body needs calcium.
So we're feeding it in that form. There's many different sort of forms out there. We've also fed magnesium oxide, which is a quite cheap way to feed. The research I've done talks a lot about calcium. We also do a liquid magnesium. We've got one in New Zealand called oral mag. I do a little bit of research into it, into your particular area, but I've noticed a massive difference just on magnesium oxide, liquid mag and dolomite. An interesting thing actually, before...
We go on to the next thing is I had a lady, I talked to yesterday at one of my horsemanship clinics and I said, you know, has your horse made good improvement on magnesium because it was presenting with highly neurotic behaviors. And she said, we put it on it for a week, but he got worse. And so we took him off it. And I thought, that's interesting because I've just myself hopped onto magnesium because I thought, okay, my nervous system is sometimes a little bit fragile and I definitely don't take enough. And so I've hopped on a consistent
sort of supplementation and after a week I'm exhausted. And I thought, okay, I'll do some research. And the research I've come back with said it's very common when taking something like magnesium that you will go through two or three weeks of a little bit of a dip because magnesium aids the detoxification process. So your kidneys and your liver are starting to work harder. There's many sort of enzyme responses and things happening in the body as the body tries to balance itself that needs more energy.
If some people take it for a week and say, it's getting worse and take it off it, that is actually, unfortunately, a part of the process in some cases where the animal just needs time to rebalance their body. Interesting. Very interesting. My own personal experience, I found that some of the B vitamin complexes along with magnesium as well as vitamin D were unfair skinned and don't get as much vitamin D as I maybe should, as well as, like you said, calcium and then K.
vitamin K2 seem to kind of be like a package that works together and makes a difference. For myself, I've noticed that. Well, if you look at lot of things in humans to horses, where it crosses over, and you think about how many autoimmune conditions humans have and all the rest, and a lot of that comes down to diet. And I don't see why it's any different for horses if they're on a piece of side heavy land or they're on deficient land or...
they're taking too much of something. I was watching a documentary the other day of horses that were getting fluoride poisoning from drinking from waterways that had heavy doses of fluoride. So then you're thinking about not only are you wanting to make sure that any deficiency issues are corrected, but you want to make sure there's not toxicity. that's where you can put them onto zeolite products that detox heavy metals from the body. My sister moved locations, took a very beautiful, quiet horse.
to another region and the horse went crazy. Absolutely lost its brain, became dangerous. They couldn't float it. It was trying to go off over the divider. They realized afterwards that it used to be a market garden, so heavily sprayed with pesticides. And so that particular horse's genetic makeup couldn't handle sort of that level of toxicity. As soon as she got back on our old property within two weeks, it's back to normal. So there's so many factors. And then when you look
that's your chemical stress issues, then you go to physical issues and you have things like ulcers, skeletal problems, teeth issues, bad feet, tendon issues. Like there are unfortunately so many boxes we need to tick in order to ensure that the horse is as stress free as possible. That's great. This is such important information. And I think a lot of people will have experimented with their own bodies with different supplements and have found and with
Toxins and have found that it makes a drastic difference and we all know those days where we just are not feeling well and If you're not feeling well day after day after day and now you're adding You know somebody that has expectations into the mix. That's very difficult especially when you can't explain yourself like we can human to human and and so I think I think
All of these points are so important for people to understand and I think they're very often overlooked. Yes. From my work with horses, roughly, I would say if we're looking just at physical issues, I would say 70 % of horses have some physical issue going on in their body. Of that 70%, 20 to 30%, I don't think is fixable in the sense that they shouldn't be getting ridden or certainly shouldn't be getting jumped or expected to.
work hard or anything. But the other part of that 70 % actually can be if they're managed well, can have very good lives. And we do a lot of, as a part of the behavioral stuff that I do, they are coming to me with bucking problems, float loading issues, et cetera. And sometimes it can just be something like ulcers. It can be something like their pole is out, their shoulders are sore, saddle doesn't fit. You tweak that if it goes away.
I had a lady come yesterday to have her horse rechecked. She said it's been, it's behavior has been perfect, but she wanted to make sure it was fine. It was great. But she came six weeks ago to have her horse looked at and it would just smash out the back of the ramp and the float while she was driving. And they had to buy inside the ramp to protect it because it had gone through three lots of ramps. And we did body work on it. It's shoulder and so sore, its ribs were out.
back towards the sacrum, we put all that back in. She drove away from that session six weeks ago and that floats perfectly. So the problem is, and she says it's been perfect all the way up to yesterday when we looked at it. The problem is if we treat everything as a training issue, we end up having to override a survival response and that survival response is there to communicate something's wrong. So you could say, okay, we'll hobble the horse. If it's kicking, let's hobble it.
And so for me, I say, if my horse is not showing improvement within three training sessions, it's not a training problem. And that's where we start to go figuring out where something or what might be causing an issue. all of those horses that you see that are off or lame, what percentage of those horses is human is lame due to humans? Like it's human induced either because of environment and or
could be taxed, or it could be hoof care, or any of those things that we are all responsible for. But what percentage of those lamenesses do you think are human induced? Well, a large portion of issues in horses are actually just paddock accidents. You know, they gallop into a corner, they split the back legs, they roll the wrong way, et cetera. In terms of human induced, I would say the biggest issue that we have is that
It's a lack of maintenance and therefore the human has caused the issue down the track because they're overworked. Let's say they started too young. They're not physically or structurally strong enough to do what we're asking them. The tack doesn't fit, et cetera. A lot of people don't stretch and massage. So let's say they do a hard workout on slightly dodgy ground. The horse gets inflammation around sore areas or tight areas.
If we go in and we work the inflammation out and that lactic acid out and we massage and we stretch them and make sure there's range of movement through every joint in the body, then the horse can recover correctly and we can move on with our lives. But if a horse is on hard ground, put out in the pasture and it's stiff and it's sore, then that lactic acid and the inflammation can become a long-term inflammation response. Now the horse's movement is seized up and now
fast shoo around the area to try to support what has now become an unstable area. Now it loses its movement. Now suddenly as a 12 to 15 year old, it's lost its length of stride. And so we're having to put spurs on it and now, you know, so it just leads to issue after issue. I've got a lovely Pinto gilding I bought when he was eight years old. He was a stud stallion until he was seven. He was gilded. He'd had 10 weeks break in at that stage. We got him and he was cold backed. And we quickly realized that he had a
injury in his near four. Every day we had to stretch that leg out and every day it would clunk back into place. So he had a slight subluxation of the point of the elbow. If I didn't stretch that out, he would be super hunched in his back and didn't want to go forward. He also had shivers in the hind end. We'd massage that before and after every ride. He's 19. He's had a competitive career up to a meter 60 level.
his whole way through and then just in the last two years, he's compensating. Always losing his stride and now he's struggling to a meter 10. So it's all a management thing. You can have horses that skeletally aren't that great, who are managed well and have an incredible life. And you can have horses that are built really well, but are terribly managed and can last five years and then they're retired. And do you have a team?
that you work with with veterinarians and body workers and, or do you feel like if people learn a lot about their horse, can have, still have those people helping their horses, but can they do, you know, a lot of it on their own? I do all my own body work. So I do adjustments, massage, stretching. I think
Owners should be responsible for massaging and stretching. It's something we can all do very safely, whether we're using liniment and a curry comb and just working into areas, whether we're doing deep stretches through the limbs, through the neck. The type of stretches I do is based sort of on Thai, traditional Thai massage. I do that a lot for myself to make sure I'm sound. I go to the chiropractor once or twice a year to get myself checked out.
or any time that something doesn't feel right. About once a fortnight I get traditional Thai massage. I would say I'm very, very sound for a horse rider of my age. And I look after, just treat it like that with the horses. They say a chiropractor or need a chiropractor once or twice a year or if something's gone wrong. But the rest of the time it's just deep massages and deep stretches.
And I think that if a person were to do really good correct stretches four to five times, it's almost equal to a good chiropractic treatment and it can be done safely. You can dump your horse on hard ground, which you ideally shouldn't be doing, but let's say you do. You can go in, you can stretch that area, you can massage everything out and suddenly, and you basically reset the body and let it sort of stay sound long-term. vets, I work a lot with vets as well. Anytime I do massage and stretching and the horse doesn't show a significant improvement within one or two sessions.
We go to the vet. But understanding with body workers, there's a spectrum of body workers. There's a lot of people that do quite soft tissue work that makes the horse feel good for an hour or two. But it needs to be making sure that you're assessing the entire horse with hoof balance, how the rider sits in the saddle, with the type of work that the horse has been asked to do. I look at horses and β I had one this weekend where
The lady's like, you know, this horse, I can't figure out, you know, she stops sometimes, but I'm pretty sure it's because she's stubborn. And I actually just said to her, said, this horse is not stubborn. This horse is not designed to jump. It's structurally not designed to jump. It's giving you everything it has. And if you lower your expectation and you find that medium where the horse is happy to give you at 100%, that's what it's designed to do. And some horse to do it make it a rest for 15 years, which is hard when money is involved.
sometimes a little bit of expectation and ego, Definitely. I think it's good for owners to be doing the massaging and stretching themselves as well because it teaches them to listen to their horses and to understand their horses. And they're going to catch things so much sooner and be able to take care of a potential training problem.
because they know their horse and they go, ooh, that's different. That's not how he normally is. And that's very empowering for a horse owner because everybody wants the best for their horse. So why not? And I think with through stretching, you can get a really good idea of unevenness in the horse. You know, you can stretch the left shoulder forward and you can stretch the right shoulder forward and the left shoulder stretches out immediately and the right shoulder doesn't want to stretch at all. So we say, okay, well, if that's happening,
we've got an issue in the point of the elbow or the shoulder blade or back behind the wither. And so that's when you can say, well, if it's not even let's call a chiropractor or a body worker or an acupuncture worker and address the issue. if, for example, one of the stretches we do is we ask the horse's head to stretch around towards its girth on both sides. Now it's very common that when we go to do the stretch on client horses, the horse will turn all the way on one side, but when you go to turn the other way, it tilts its head.
and lot where the issue that's causing the problem and suddenly the perfect ride. So it's trying to take things away from everything is a training going on the float. Yes, sometimes it's a training issue, but I would say physical issues account for 50 % of problems. Chemical issues account for 25 % of problems and training issues account for 25 % Problem is in thinking training equates for 100%, you're overlooking chemical and physical problems in the horse.
Very good. in the horse fair, your first presentation on day one is desensitizing a horse using trigger work. Would you like to explain that and give us a little sneak peek of what we could expect in that video? Yeah. So desensitization has sometimes a bit of a negative connotation to it. I want to change that. There's a difference between desensitizing an animal and flooding an animal. When we look at desensitization work, well, some people will be put off by it, is because in the past,
a trainer has put on so much pressure that they've flooded the animal into a freeze response. And that's what they say, I'm desensitizing it. My form of desensitization is to work or to apply stimuli in a way for the horse to feel overwhelmed. So just on that very edge of pushing outside their comfort zone. And then to stay at that level until the horse can show relaxation and then to hop back and give them space. So with my lovely horse Bertram introducing sort of stimuli like the flags,
You see the obvious difference between him being relaxed with a nice, relaxed headset versus me coming in a little bit closer and suddenly he says, I'm not okay with this. So I don't keep going in further and adding more stimuli. At that stage, that's when he's going to be moving his feet, fighting or freezing or fawning. I just repeat the movement that triggered the horse, nice, slow and predictable so that their brain has time to process it. And I wait for them to go from full survival response to...
And sometimes I will take the tiniest answers. Sometimes it is a tiny soften of the eye or the eyeball rolls ever so slightly towards me or they dip their head a fraction. Especially for a horse that's struggling, I'll take really little answers and then I hop back. Now, after a while, the horse realizes that the quicker it brings its emotional state down, the quicker it gets a sense of control back. So they now control the flag when they're overwhelmed. I don't say, okay, I'm going to hop back because you're over-aussed.
and I'm going to wait for you to show a sign of relaxation and then I'm going to hop back. So I'm teaching the horse to sort of relax down and that's a method that's kind of loosely based off Mustang Maddie's safety. It's where sort of the idea evolved. It's very different from that now, but it's the horse saying I'm triggered or I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed. So I do a safety stop. I wait for relaxation. I draw back. But if the horse shows a stress response and gives me a safety stop, we're into a strong.
And you're absolutely spot on that people mix up desensitization and flooding. And I know why that is, and we know why that is, but people see it presented wrong. And really, desensitizing tech, if you look in a textbook, it comes from systematic desensitization. It's a system. They do it with people. And if you think about desensitizing a person, we wouldn't flood them, right? Because now we're not really.
We're not really getting to the root of the issue. And so thank you very much for sort of clarifying desensitizing a horse and doing it the right way. And of course, keeping the whole horse in mind. So that's brilliant. And then what about your second presentation? It's desensitizing a horse using trigger work too. What are you going to add to that presentation? So I actually have to go back and look through the videos because I filmed them a couple of months ago.
I think I was just building on the first video was introducing the stimuli and then the second video is advancing, going in a little bit deeper, being through a couple more thresholds and get closer to his body and then introducing I think a bigger form of stimuli by adding a bigger flag. So again, it's like a process. He doesn't finish on 100 % but there's an obvious difference from start to finish of...
And so then suddenly over a week, we've got a horse that can be waved with a flag all over who is genuinely relaxed versus a horse that has learned to forget hope. that's, I do trigger work, all the time I go to chuck a saddle blanket on and my horse lifts its head and tightens. I don't just chuck the saddle blanket on and saddle the horse up and go away. I just repeat the movement trigger until there's relaxation. Or if I put the bridle in and the head comes up, I just quietly repeat it until
And every time I work through a trigger, that trigger is gone. So the next time I come and put the saddle blanket on, the trigger isn't eliminated, there's something else. So if you can look at my horses, I can take them up. I can ride to really sort of overwhelming sort of areas through the bush, through ponds and whatnot. And they are here all the time. They're super relaxed. They chat to me with their body language. They're very, very happy in their mind as well as in their bodies. And that's what I really want to
push to horse owners is helping the horse in every aspect to become really happy versions of themselves. that's great. I think that's a great place to end it because that's something everybody should keep in mind with their horses. Absolutely. Where can people find more information about you? Well, I have a website called Amanda Wilson β Training.
WWL training series on there with 20 video series showing how I work with foals through to sort of young top-bred warm bloods. I go through the process of body control work, a huge amount of emotional trigger work, how to soreness and then stretches that they can do through that. So we do a lot of that. do lot of doing starting clinics and handling clinics and whatnot. Cool. That's amazing. That's going to be really...
That is going to be so cool. Have fun with that. We'd love to see it if you end up with video and I'm sure you will. Yeah, that is excellent. Well, thank you so much for giving us your time today. We really, really enjoyed talking to you and thanks a lot for participating in the fair. Your videos add a lot of knowledge that people need to have access to.
