HORSE, FIRST - with Lockie Phillips

www.emotionalhorsemanship.com

The horse world needed a serious conversation about consent. For generations, horses have been punished for refusing, pushed through fear and pain, and treated as though their experience did not matter. Learning to recognise dissent has been an important correction, but it cannot be the end of our thinking.

A horse’s “no” can mean many things. It may mean pain, fear, confusion, fatigue, physical inability, lack of preparation or simply a preference for the easier option. Those possibilities require very different responses. If every hesitation is treated as a final withdrawal of consent, we may believe we are listening to the horse while avoiding the harder work of understanding them.

In this episode of HORSE, FIRST, Lockie Phillips examines the limits of borrowing human consent language for horse training. He explores the difference between preference and welfare, discomfort and harm, coercion and manageable challenge. He also asks whether compassionate trainers can become so frightened of applying pressure that they leave horses underprepared for the unavoidable demands of life.

Ethical training is not about ignoring refusal, nor is it about making every request disappear when a horse becomes uncertain. It is about allowing the horse’s response to change the conversation while the trainer remains responsible for its direction. Sometimes that means stopping, investigating pain or abandoning the plan. Sometimes it means changing the question, improving the preparation or helping the horse remain with a manageable difficulty long enough to find confidence on the other side.

Agency must mean more than the ability to opt out. It should also include the ability to participate, attempt, recover, influence the process and develop genuine capability.

You cannot consent your way out of training because consent language cannot tell you whether to pause or persist. It cannot determine whether a horse is frightened, confused, uncomfortable or simply meeting an appropriate challenge. Those decisions still require observation, judgement, empathy and skill.

The most important question may not be whether the horse said yes or no. It may be whether the horse was heard, whether the human remained responsible, and whether the conversation left the horse with more capacity than they had before.

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Discover Lockie's Work here:

www.emotionalhorsemanship.com

We come to horses thinking we're going to learn about horses. Then the horse becomes a Trojan horse.

Through the simple, practical business of trying to understand another animal, we can find ourselves questioning much bigger things. How we relate to the land. What we consider intelligent. Where we believe consciousness resides. What illness means. What a body is. What it means to belong to an ecosystem rather than simply live on top of one.

In this episode of Horse First, Lockie Phillips is joined by writer, poet and ecological thinker Sophie Strand for a conversation that wanders far beyond the boundaries of conventional horsemanship.

Sophie writes at the intersection of ecology, mythology, spirituality, storytelling, illness and the more-than-human world. Her work asks us to reconsider the deeply human habit of placing ourselves at the centre of the story.

And horses offer an extraordinary place to begin.

For many of us, the horse is one of the first large, powerful, unmistakably other creatures with whom we attempt to build a genuine relationship. We cannot completely control that encounter. We cannot know exactly what the horse experiences. We have to pay attention to another nervous system, another body, another set of priorities, another way of perceiving the world.

ABOUT SOPHIE STRAND

Sophie Strand is a writer and poet whose work explores ecology, mythology, spirituality, embodiment and the more-than-human world. She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway.

Website:

https://sophiestrand.com/

Make Me Good Soil:

https://sophiestrand.substack.com/

Instagram:

@cosmogyny

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Can horses get too much of a "good" thing?  In our effort to be ethical have we become blind to the stressors we place on a horses capacities when they live in perpetual turn-out?

I wrote a difficult post that went viral online and this podcast I respond to the criticism and chat about the key themes at play in the episode.

Joined by my mate Michelle Knapp, thanks Michelle!

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Explore more with Lockie HERE:
www.emotionalhorsemanship.com

In this episode of Horse First, Lockie Phillips is joined by horsewoman, educator, and movement specialist Jillian Kreinbring for a thoughtful conversation about the evolution of horsemanship.

Together, they explore the importance of discernment in an age of endless information, asking not whether tradition is right or wrong, but how we decide what is worth preserving and what deserves thoughtful revision.

Drawing on classical horsemanship, functional anatomy, modern science, and decades of practical experience, Jillian shares her perspective on the old masters, the lessons that continue to serve horses today, and the practices that may no longer withstand careful scrutiny.

Throughout the conversation, Lockie and Jillian compare their own approaches, highlighting the places where they overlap, where they differ, and why respectful disagreement is one of the healthiest forces driving horsemanship forward.

This is a conversation about curiosity over certainty, discernment over dogma, and the responsibility we all share to keep refining our craft in service of the horse.

Because good horsemanship isn't about preserving the past unchanged.

It's about carrying its wisdom forward with honesty, humility, and the courage to revise.
Discover Jillian here: https://online.jilliankreinbringinspired.com/
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A conversation about confidence, community, thoughtful training, and the next chapter of Emotional Horsemanship. From my first UK clinics to the launch of Homecoming 4.0, this episode explores why sequencing, training plans and purposeful practice are changing the way we develop horses—and ourselves.

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