“NEW HORSE SYNDROME”

"New HORSE Syndrome”

In my last post, I wrote about a new term I have coined called “New Home Syndrome.” The post has gone viral, and I am really glad about that because what horses experience when they move homes is incredibly significant and poorly understood. It sets off a pattern of behaviour due to the psychological and physiological impact of completely changing their environment and routines.

I wish to introduce you to my next term, which I hope is also accepted as widely because it is just as significant and goes hand in hand with “New Home Syndrome.” The term is “New HORSE Syndrome,” and it is to bring recognition, respect, and appreciation to what can happen to many PEOPLE when they get a new horse. I personally got stuck in the vortex of “New HORSE Syndrome” for nearly eight years after I bought a flashy young warmblood. I believe if I had known about “New HORSE Syndrome,” things could have been very different and I would have been better at identify better help and solutions.

I am calling it a syndrome because the psychological turmoil, loss of confidence, and sense of hopelessness that can manifest in an individual connected to the event of getting a new horse are common and predictable. The things that resolve “New HORSE Syndrome” are also predictable.

Let me explain.

When you get familiar with something, you perceive it as predictable and reliable. Your nervous system down-regulates, and you can relax. Familiar things are all part of our comfort zones. Familiar places, people, activities, and tasks are easy to be around, engage with, and navigate. The familiarity of these things makes you feel a sense of certainty and hence security.

Think about a horse you got on with really well. It might not have been perfectly behaved, but you were familiar with them, so you found them predictable.

If you are like me, before I got my warmblood, I was the typical amateur rider. Horses were my hobby, and although I had ridden for most of my life, it was only on a very small number of horses. I was always surrounded by people that helped me out, and the small number of horses I experienced were kind and, as I discovered, forgiving of me.

When my flashy young warmblood was delivered by the trucking company after a four-day trip across Australia, I had no concept of what he was being confronted with. I gave him a single day off before I eagerly jumped on board.

As soon as I got on him, I felt weird. He was taller than the other horse I had been riding and moved differently. His movement was so big and ground-covering. This is significant for our nervous system and proprioception, as the movement of horses we ride regularly gets locked into our proprioceptive circuits. If we don’t ride many horses, as I didn’t back then, feeling a new horse is confronting to our sense of balance in the saddle. Not only this, but I vividly remember him abruptly stopping and turning his head right around as if to eyeball me. It was most likely because I was hanging onto his mouth and giving him go-stop aids at the same time. He would have been completely confused and confronted by how I was communicating with him and how unbalanced I was on his back. It felt like he growled at me; what I probably felt was his tension lift. He then proceeded to spook and shy around the arena because I had just added an alarming and uncomfortable experience to what he was already dealing with. I had never had a horse spook so many times over nothing. It was not fun. After a week of this spooking and shying, my nerves were shot, and I started dreading getting on him. And so began my seven-year battle with “New HORSE Syndrome” as I became obsessed with trying to fix my “sensitive,” unpredictable, and unreliable horse. It took me that long to identify that I was causing him trouble. But when you are stuck in “New HORSE Syndrome” you cannot see this.

What is “New HORSE Syndrome”?

I define “New HORSE Syndrome” as what happens to a person when the way a new horse behaves, responds, and feels is different from what is known or expected. This difference and shattering of expectations creates a sense of distrust and lack of reliability and safety. The rider then becomes overly preoccupied with risk management, emotionally monitoring the horse, and finding solutions to fix them. When efforts to resolve the behaviour or gain a sense of harmony in encounters continue to fail, feelings of guilt, shame, and a sense of hopelessness can be overwhelming.

This can lead to the person experiencing anxiety and a destruction of confidence as a rider; prone to lashing out aggressively towards the horse; riding recklessly in an effort to push through fear; or creating excuses or distractions to avoid riding altogether.

Sometimes the horse might be sold and another new horse acquired, where the same issues will surface. However, other times to resolve the discomfort caused by the conflict between their desire to ride and their fear, they might change their expectations and activities with the horse, opting not to ride it for various reasons. This reframing is a coping mechanism that helps them deal with the perceived failure and alleviates the psychological discomfort of not feeling safe riding their horse.

“New HORSE Syndrome” can be overcome.

It can be solved by helping people understand how to help a horse adjust to a new environment, routines, and rider. By showing people how to introduce themselves to the horse's mind and body through imprinting what I call their signature. Everyone is a different height, weight, and will do things slightly differently. Therefore, the horse has to learn about you and be given time to develop and practice responding to how you handle them and ride. This includes how you sit, hold the reins, use your leg, and communicate direction and transitions. You need to allow your and the horse’s mind and body to adapt and grow proprioceptive circuits to allow the physical connection between horse and rider to feel familiar, for the communication to be familiar, and for the routines to become familiar. All so everyone feels a sense of security and healthy stress regulation can occur. It is important to respect that a sense of trust is built by time and experience, and it needs to be strategically approached.

“New HORSE Syndrome” may be a transient hiccup when the horse and rider can adjust to each other and trust is built. But for others, it can be a long suffering that is mentally, emotionally, and financially devastating. Not to mention all the horse accidents that happen when non-trusting riders make bad choices with non-trusting horses.

If this has struck a cord with you, please ask for some guidance, there are those of us out there that understand this very common yet poorly understood experience of what is really going on

Please hit the SHARE to spread the idea if it resonates with you.

However, please do not copy and paste and plagiarise my work as it happens all the time and it is really not cool.