How to Spot Discomfort in Your Horse
When I am trying to understand a horse, I come back to one idea: a horse is always a horse. They have no brain for deception. Every behaviour and every reaction comes from somewhere true, and it can be traced. Horses are the ultimate truth tellers, if we know how to hear them.
And no horse performs at its best while the equipment is hurting it.
Even an easy job should be painless
A trail ride asks very little of a horse, and it should still be free of pain. Knowing the signs is what lets you work out what is and is not working.
I managed a horse that started tossing his head going downhill. He became head shy, then reluctant to have a headstall put on at all. I tried perhaps six different bits and hackamores on him before we found the actual cause: a tumour in his eye socket that had grown down into the nerves. When the eye and the tumour came out, the head tossing and the shyness stopped.
I had another that refused to walk forward under a saddle. That one took countless sessions of saddles and pad combinations before he was comfortable enough to do his job.
The job of anyone responsible for a horse is closer to detective work than anything else. Observe the behaviour, find the cause, change something, watch what happens.
Cause and effect
Horses announce pain loudly — bucking, rearing, biting, tail swishing — or quietly: asymmetrical ears, a furrowed upper eyelid, teeth grinding, tight lips. Sometimes it is only a change in the pattern, and the change itself is the message.
With tack it is cause and effect. A saddle that hurts produces a pain response. A saddle that fits horse and rider produces a horse willing to go forward. And once you have found the fit, remember it may not hold: a horse’s back changes across its career. Saddles are expensive to change and they do the most damage when they are wrong, so saddle-related behaviour is not something to wave off.
Bits are cheaper to change. Signs of bit discomfort: gaping, biting the mouthpiece, putting the tongue out or over it, avoiding the bridle. Once you can picture how a bit works in the mouth and set that against what the horse is doing, you can narrow down what will not suit it. I keep an open mind and try as many as I can. In doubt, I default to a simple hackamore or a double jointed snaffle and work from there.
The small signals
Discomfort is often subtler than a buck or a bite. Sometimes all a horse can manage is a tight mouth or a wrinkled eye. Training your eye to catch the small things is most of the work — knowing horses broadly is the beginning, and knowing one horse in detail is a lifelong pursuit.
Being willing to question a piece of tack that has “always worked for the horse” does not make you less of a horseman. In my opinion it makes you a better one. You do not have to be a skilled rider or trainer to recognise pain in a horse. You have to be willing to listen.