08/31/2026
The Great Obedience Scandal 🔥
I read and listen to plenty of questionable ideas about horses on social media. The interesting thing about my work is that I also get to see what happens when those ideas leave Instagram or Facebook, travel through a human being and eventually manifest in an actual horse.
There are plenty of ideas I can disagree with and move on from. This one I can't, because I am seeing what happens when caring people become frightened of teaching their horses clearly and consistently. I see the confusion, deteriorating behaviour and frightened humans trying desperately to be kinder while their horses unravel and become increasingly difficult to navigate.
So I am going to counter this one. Again.😎
First, a little background.
Apparently, teaching a horse to reliably respond to us has become morally suspicious. Reliable responding is now framed as obedience. But it gets worse, so bear with me. Obedience might diminish "agency". A horse responding correctly might merely be producing a "conditioned response", while resistance gets a philosophical promotion. The horse has said "No". Celebrate the No. Proof that the authentic horse remains gloriously intact.😎
This is where I ask people who come to work with me a rather ridiculous question.
➡How did you feel driving here today?
Did stopping at the red light make you feel oppressed? 🤨Did driving on the left fill you with simmering injustice? 🧐When you saw a GIVE WAY sign, did you think, I could comply, but how will anyone know I still have agency? 😳Did you occasionally cross onto the wrong side of the road just to reassure yourself that society hadn't conditioned away your authentic driving self?🤯
Oddly, nobody has.🤷♀️
Yet you were spectacularly *obedient*, if that's how we want to frame it, all the way here. You stopped, gave way, stayed in your lane and responded to arbitrary symbols exactly as you had been taught.😱
Good grief. *You've been conditioned.*😱
Except you don't experience it as oppression. You experience it as knowing how to drive. The rules are so well learned that you barely think about them. You understand how to navigate the system, and that competence gives you enormous freedom within it.🤔
That's the point.
Of course horses aren't humans, and I can't tell you exactly what a horse subjectively experiences when it responds to a learned signal. But neither can the person telling you that reliable responding represents some terrible erosion of the horse's agency.🙄
➡That's a human story being placed upon the horse.
What we do know is that horses are extraordinary learners and adapters. When we train them, we are teaching them how to navigate us. Halter pressure means something. Rein and leg signals mean something. Stop, go, wait, follow and load mean something. Teach those things well and the horse no longer has to keep guessing what the bloody road signs mean.
Now imagine the Australian government changing the road rules every few days. Monday, red means stop. Tuesday, stopping represents excessive compliance. Wednesday, you're encouraged to honour your authentic relationship with the intersection. Thursday, the old rules return because someone has just been cleaned up by a B-double.🫣
That isn't freedom. It's an unpredictable world, and it would be bloody stressful.
This is why I object so strongly to narratives that make caring people frightened of clarity and consistency. I have seen where this can end up. Compassionate language doesn't automatically produce compassionate or good consequences. An inconsistent human creates an incredibly confusing world for a horse.😕
And this is where I want to put a spotlight on the narrative itself.🔦
What happens when a training philosophy doesn't reliably produce the responses people need from their horses? You can examine the training, or you can construct a story that makes the unreliable response evidence of something more enlightened.🙄
Cue the semantic smoke machine.
Reliable responding becomes "obedience". Resistance becomes "agency". Refusal becomes a "No". An unintended behaviour becomes an "idea". Training that isn't producing reliable communication can suddenly be given a much more flattering interpretation.
Perhaps we've simply transcended obedience. 🎭
Maybe.
Or perhaps the training isn't very good when it meets reality.😎
That possibility matters, because if every poor outcome can be renamed enlightenment, we have created a philosophy remarkably good at protecting itself and remarkably poor at helping us recognise when horses and humans are struggling.
And no, I don't think that's automatically kinder, gentler or more thoughtful.
When an idea makes caring people feel guilty about providing clarity, while leaving horses trying to navigate an inconsistent human world, it can become cruel despite all the beautiful language surrounding it.
Teach your horse how to navigate you. ❤
Be clear, predictable and consistent. When your horse's response changes, investigate it. Consider pain, fear, confusion, physical difficulty and your own training, and change what you're doing when the evidence tells you to.
But don't let somebody else's narrative convince you that understanding is oppression or resistance is freedom.😎
Horses don't live inside our philosophical stories.
➡They live with the consequences of them.
And this is exactly what my upcoming *Project Reboot Challenge* is about: robust, thoughtful, systematic training that helps horses confidently navigate us, with no semantic smoke machine required. Details in 💬
Collectable Advice 280/365.
Please SHARE this. The best way to dismantle a narrative smokescreen is to help people see how it works. 🎭
