What to do when your horse has separation anxiety

Is it impossible for you to get your horse out of the field, away from his friends?

Or does your horse almost have a panic attack when he is the last horse inside the stable and everyone is gone?

Do you have trouble getting your horse away from other horses when you’re training, hacking out or on a competition?

Then your horse might be suffering from separation anxiety.

And that isn’t very strange.

Horses are herd animals. The herd makes them feel confident and gives your horse protection.

Because the more eyes and ears that are scanning the environment, the bigger chance to spot danger and to survive.

So horses rely on their herd mates to protect them from any harm.

And being separated from them, especially when they don’t know the environment or the situation they’re in, can be pretty scary for your horse.

In the video below, I had just met Electric Pleasure: a mare with a lot of issues, and one of them was separation anxiety.

I explained to the audience what the cause of separation anxiety is and why horses have issues with this.

However, most horses we work with don’t have anything to fear when they’re alone.

Simply because they don’t live in the wild anymore and there aren’t any predators that are going to harm him.

But how do you explain to your horse that he is going to be fine on his own?

How do you build that confidence?

As long as your horse has four legs and is breathing, you can teach him how to be relaxed when he is away from other horses.

But you have to teach him this concept first. Practice the exercises and let him learn what he needs to know, before taking him away from his friends again.

You have to prepare him for the exam by first teaching him the answers.

So whenever I start working with a horse that lacks confidence or doesn’t know how to manage himself, I begin with the groundwork patterns.

The patterns also teach your horse how he can control his own physical state, instead of relying on the thing he learned from nature: flight or flight.

You start with the exercise that I call the ‘starting point’.

This will get your horse’s attention and creates a conversation between you and him.

Basically, you’re giving energy towards the space between you and your horse.

This tells your horse that he shouldn’t be there, because there is something dangerous in that space.

It gets your horse’s attention and he’s thinking: ‘Hey, this person knows something. Maybe he has more to tell me!’

In the clip below I show you how the exercise is done.

Once you’ve gained some worth, you can teach your horse how he can become relaxed in his body.

And what happens physically, happens mentally.

For example, if you’re nervous or tense, you take a few deep breaths and try to relax your muscles.

Once your body feels less tense, you also become less tense mentally.

With horses it works the same.

And you want your horse to relax when he is away from the other horses.

So it’s important to teach your horse the groundwork pattern.

Because it teaches your horse what he needs to do in his body to feel relaxed. And when he gets tense, he can always rely on that pattern.

So when he’s introduced to something new that he doesn’t know yet, he doesn’t have to get tense or search for his confidence with the other horses.

In this demo I gave during the DressagePro Masterclass, I explain the first steps of the groundwork pattern and the importance of it.