What to do when your horse fears other horses

Horse shyness. It’s a problem not a lot of people talk about.

However, over the past years, I’ve trained a LOT of horses with this problem.

So even though you don’t hear a lot about it, it’s still quite a common problem.

And it can cause a lot of issues.

Most of the times this occurs when you’re at a competition. Especially in the warming up.

It’s almost impossible to focus on a good performance when you have to watch and dodge all the other horses or, if you didn’t pay attention, do a 180 because your horse did pay attention to the approaching horse.

The good news is, I have a step-by-step approach to solve this problem.

However, to solve this problem, it’s important to first…

The symptom is a horse being afraid of other horses, but what is really causing the problem?

What exactly is causing your horse to feel uncomfortable and wanting to run away from the other horse?

I also briefly talk about that in this short clip from TRT Live in the Netherlands:

Horse shyness has often to do with a horse being afraid of something approaching him or feeling uncomfortable about being in tight spaces.

So you want to find out what exactly triggers the behavior of your horse becoming all tense, spooking and running away from other horses.

And just wait and see what happens.

Bringing in another horse is the last step. I call that the exam.

And you don’t want to bring your horse into an exam unprepared. Then you know he will fail for sure and add another bad experience to his list.

So, you first want to prepare your horse before bringing in another horse. Or before going to that competition again.

But what exactly do I mean with preparing your horse?

What does the preparation look like?

I basically teach a horse to get control over his mental state in three phases.

It’s the foundation of my entire training method. And I do this with every horse that comes in for training.

I basically first teach a horse how to get into a relaxed posture, because a relaxed posture leads to a relaxed mind.

The next step is to teach a horse how to respond to the different ‘elements of pressure’.

This can be the element of touch, sound, movement and approach.

I also briefly talk about it in this short clip:

Like I mentioned before, it’s often not the horse that your horse’s afraid of, instead, it might be the element of something approaching him.

Or your horse feeling his space is being intruded or feeling claustrophobic with a horse one side and the wall of the arena on the other side.

It are these elements you want to tackle in your training. These are the elements that are causing pressure.

I show you how and why I apply these elements of pressure in this following video.

I also show you the next and final step and that’s where you build the bridge between the tools for the elements of pressure and the riding.

Note that this is a video of 23 minutes explaining the three phases, but that I go through everything rather quickly.

To really learn the three phases step-by-step, make sure to check out the online training program (see special offer at the bottom of the page).

So, this is the preparation you do first.

After that, you move on to the steps specifically for horse with fear of other horses. These are the steps where you bring in another horse.

And yeah, I hear you thinking.

You’re wondering if you can’t just skip the preparation and move to these steps straight away, right?

The short answer is no.

And I explain why in this video:

Like I mention in the video, sometimes just doing the preparation already solves the problem.

But if you have a horse that is very sensitive or a horse with a specific scare who has had an incident with a horse, additional steps with another horse are needed.

But you can’t just bring in any horse. I explain what type of horse is helpful in the next clip.

The idea behind the next steps to solve horse shyness, is to practice for the situation of the fear of being in a tight space and how to deal with a horse approaching you.

Whenever you feel your horse is starting to feel uncomfortable, you go back to creating the relaxed and confident posture.

You want to make your horse feel like he’s the chaser instead of being chased by a horse.

Sounds complicated or confusing?

Check out the next clip in which I demonstrate the pattern.