It’s important to have a great trainer to learn the fundamentals of good horsemanship and riding, and also a good support team (farrier, veterinarian, et cetera) for a horse’s physical wellness. But what about a horse’s emotional wellness or spiritual connection?

Horses are great feelers. As sentient beings, they have emotions like we do, and feel love, joy, gratitude, and connection with each other and with us. They can also feel anger, frustration, fear, and sadness based on current life circumstances or past traumatic events.

As prey animals, we know they easily move between sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) states.

Clearing Stuck Emotions

As a trained animal communicator, I find it’s very helpful to be a part of a horse parent’s support team when it comes to enhancing their horse’s emotional fitness. We often focus on just the physical nature of the horse, and yet there is a great mind-body connection that also needs to be addressed.

I’ve found in many sessions that behavioral issues are linked to emotions that need to be acknowledged and released. I’m grateful for my training in various emotional clearing techniques that greatly benefit horses (and humans, too!) when they are used in communication and healing sessions.

Horses can have stuck emotions such as “lack of control” or “frustration,” and can be more governed by fear and past traumas rather than feeling grounded and connected to current reality.

When I first adopted my horse, she was guarded and had stuck emotions around abandonment that I helped her to clear, and then our bond grew through trust.

All animals, like humans, can also have heart walls. This is something Bradley Nelson, D.C., discovered in his Emotion Code work. These can prevent horses from receiving and experiencing the good that is here for them now. Sometimes horses also need to release emotions they still have from old barns and owners where they used to live and weren’t happy, so I’ve helped them release the past and start with a clean slate.

In addition, horses are often seen as incredible spiritual beings because they spend a lot of time in a meditative state and can be very still and loving. Many people feel safe crying around them and feel that they evoke awe and wonder.

A Voice and a Choice

These spiritual components are another part of good animal communication, and we can delve into what our horses truly want to be doing in their lives and with their humans. Some want to be great athletes and enjoy physical exercise and competition with their humans; some want to be teachers and healers in equine-assisted therapy or coaching; and others would prefer to be companions without specific work.

We can learn their unique preferences and purposes when we learn to speak with them. It helps them to feel understood, honored, and content when they are allowed to have a voice and a choice.

Many times, horses want to know our expectations for them in our riding relationships. They want to know if and when they will be moved or transported, and if a herd member will be coming or leaving.

They want to express their thoughts about the other members of their support team, such as their vet, farrier, trainer and rider. They also want us to know what bothers them and how they are feeling. All of that information can help their emotional fitness once we are able to understand them better and meet their needs.

What many horses love to communicate is their heart’s desires for their life (their “purpose work”) and how they want to help their humans. They want their humans to know how much they are loved and often want to share how they see their humans. They can have great guidance for how their humans can heal and improve all their relationships.

When animals can get messages across, it makes both their lives and ours easier. They can ask for what they need and want for themselves and for us as well. We don’t need to guess or become frustrated; we can learn how to be helpful to them.

Time after time, I have witnessed a horse’s relationship with his human grow stronger immediately after a session because he finally feels like he was able to fully express himself.

Try It Yourself

In addition to hiring a great animal communicator to be a part of your support team for your horse, you can also learn how to become one yourself. Whether you want to become a professional or you just want to use the skills personally, there are many benefits to animal communication.

At the core, it comes down to a horse feeling seen, heard, valued, and appreciated. Here are some of my top tips and tools to begin horse communication.

1. Permission: Ask your horse if you have permission to chat. I’ve found they always want to talk, as long as it’s a good time and they are in a restful state and not in the middle of playing with friends or taking a lesson, et cetera.

2. Space: Create a specific time and place where it’s quiet and you can bring a journal and really focus on listening and practicing.

3. Intention: Set an intention to connect from your heart space to theirs. You can even put one hand on your heart and the other on your horse’s heart and breathe for a minute. Feel how much you love your horse, then set an intention to receive information from him. Start with simple questions, such as, “How are you feeling today?” and “What are you enjoying today?”

4. Surrender: Let go of attachment to an outcome by staying curious and having fun. Keep it light, simple, and flowing. Assume you already know this skill and can do it! Stay open to how you might receive information, as we are all a bit different with our intuitive skills.

For instance, I am more clairaudient, so I hear what the horses say. If you feel and sense a lot, you may be more clairsentient, and if you see pictures or images, then you may be more clairvoyant.

5. Receive: Keep your body posture open and stay in your heart space. Breathe. Don’t overthink. Smile if you find yourself in your head. Go back to how much you love your horse. And allow your imagination to lead. Just write down whatever comes forward.

6. Gratitude: Thank yourself for trying and being willing to experiment. Thank your horse and share why this practice matters to you. Set another time with your horse for consistency and to improve over time.

How to Clear and Ground

In addition to communication, healing work is also important to offer horses. Equines are often at their safest, for themselves and others, when they feel grounded to their space and land. They feel their best when they are in their own energy signature and not carrying stuck energy.

Clearing: One of my favorite ways to help a horse is to clear his energy field by gently clapping around his body. First test the clap to make sure he doesn’t startle, then move around his body with the intention that stuck energy will leave. Watch to see how your horse likes this and if he is receiving (for example yawning, blinking, nodding, getting sleepy). I have a video demonstrating this on my YouTube channel.

Grounding: You can also put your hands around a horse’s hoof by the coronary band and gently press and imagine your horse connecting more fully to the ground below. Ask for healthy Earth energy to come up into your horse as well. Do this on each of the four hooves. This is great to add to a hoof picking routine or to do before you ride.

Enjoy these new experiences with him and you’ll grow your human-horse-heart connection. Your horse will thank you!

This article about using animal communication for a deeper connection with your horse appeared in the October 2024 issue of Horse Illustrated magazine. Click here to subscribe!

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“Remember, a horse doesn’t speak English.” 

The professor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) was instructing students. The class is designed to teach how horses’ non-verbal communication can improve the doctor-patient relationship. Both horse and patient respond similarly to a quiet, focused, peaceful approach.

Studying how a horse responds to the manner, tone, touch, and eye contact of a human helps future doctors become sensitized to what contributes to rapport. The approach to the patient can improve their willingness to provide information, confidence in the doctor, patient satisfaction, and even their health outcome. 

All of those factors are important for patient-centered care.

Barnyard to Bedside

The course connecting the medical student to the horse for non-verbal skills was originally called “From Barnyard to Bedside Manner,” and began with Allan Hamilton, M.D., at the University of Arizona in 2000.

The inspiration struck during a medical round. Hamilton, a horse trainer, neurosurgeon, and professor at the University of Arizona had medical residents following him at the hospital when they rushed into a patient’s room following a series of stressful emergency conditions that had put them behind schedule.

The patient bolted out of her chair and shrieked. The atmosphere calmed with a smile from students and a handshake.

“But what if this had been a horse in a stall and we had stormed in without warning, like we had just done with this poor woman?” says Hamilton. “That horse would probably have kicked someone.”

Adaptations of this training have also been used at Stanford University and other healthcare colleges in the United States.

Hamilton considered what a horse needs when you’re approaching him to gain confidence and reduce fear; this is similar to what the patient needs. A human may be polite, but a horse will show you exactly how you affect his environmental sphere.

Beverley Kane, M.D., program director for Stanford University, expanded the Barnyard course foundation into training called “Medicine and Horsemanship,” an equine-assisted course for doctor-patient relationship. Its dual purpose is teaching a physician how to approach and communicate with a patient while also preserving the medical student’s well-being, since the stress of medical education with its long hours, urgent demands, and time pressures can affect patient care and the physician-patient relationship.

Part of the training is to set aside concerns and distractions before approaching the patient, the same state of mind needed to work with a horse.

Hands-On Horses

Maria Katsamanis, Psy.D., is a horse trainer, psychologist, scientist, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at RWJMS. She suggested a program similar to Hamilton’s to the department.

Rutgers formed a credit elective version of the Barnyard course in 2011, called “Horses for Healers: Improving Bedside Manners.” A new dimension was added, integrating psychiatry so medical students could hone their non-verbal skills, including gestures, touch, empathy, tone, attitude, and eye contact.

The two-week experiential course takes place at Spring Reins of Hope & Growth, an equine-assisted therapy program in Three Bridges, N.J. The lecture (didactic) section was eventually removed from the two-week course and more in-person equine education was added, a change based on student course evaluations requesting more hands-on time with the horses. 

Katsamanis collected data to measure non-verbal skill for medical education both before and after instructive exercise in the course.

On the value of non-verbal communication, she says, “Without it, understanding is like an iceberg floating on water. You only see the surface of it; you are only getting 10 percent of the information.”

Taking a Pause

A course exercise called “Meet Your Patient” is based on meeting your patient where they are.

At a session, a third-year medical surgery student approached a horse with what is called “false confidence”: braced, not breathing naturally, and with an assertive energy. The horse walked away.

A psychiatry student, who was already well versed in clinical experience, went up to the horse, and the horse started following him. The third-year student observed others having success.

He asked the psychiatry student, “How did you do that?” He learned that he should try it a different way. Horses sense pressure and give feedback, and they can pull back and resist.

Students are encouraged to be introspective, to ask: “Did I really get there faster by pulling or pushing the horse?” They learn how to gently encourage the horse forward.

Part of the method is learning to “take a pause,” a concept Hamilton promoted as a horse trainer. The third-year student mentioned above took two or three minutes with the horse, in a softer approach, explaining to him, “Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to be with you.” The method was the opposite of “We need to get here and do this.”

Not An Intellectual Exercise

The state of mind for gaining trust in the course applies to horse training as well. There is discussion about not approaching the horse—the patient—as an intellectual exercise.

Katsamanis explains that doctors are taught a mindset of “I am supposed to know everything.” Psychological self-disclosure is encouraged in the way doctors are trained.

Witnessing students’ successful solutions to working with horses and asking fellow students, “How did that work?” if they don’t know, is an important teaching tool in both the barnyard and the hospital environment.

Trustworthy Communication

The stress isn’t going to go away, Katsamanis says. But the students learn how to practice methods of reducing pressure. One way is called “adaptive breathing behavior.” Katsamanis instructs students to “breathe like a horse.” She asks them to whuffle, much like a horse when relaxed. 

“Breath is a very important non-verbal biomarker because it’s the one that animals recognize,” says Katsamanis. “The breath, like heart rate (another biomarker), signals to animals about danger or any shifts within the herd. Interestingly, patients at bedside act similarly to prey animals. They are less likely to believe your words. Breath will convey what emotion is truly occurring. Breathing also influences heart rate. Breath is the one variable that all mammals share as a common denominator when it comes to non-verbal communication. We teach students how to be aware of the influence of [breath] and other biomarkers so that what they say truly lines up with their body language. Doing so will help align their communication.” 

In an exercise called “billiards,” a horse enters the arena from his stall, moving freely. The student in the center goes to connect with the horse, approaching slowly, with a gentle voice, as they would need to do for a human patient.

Then he or she guides the horse towards the “pocket,” set up with a pole on the fence on one side and cones on the other side of the makeshift chute. There are groups of students that coordinate for this exercise, illustrating the team effect in a hospital setting. For example, if the receptionist, a nurse, or part of medical staff isn’t helpful, the patient experience and satisfaction with their doctor is further affected.

The exercise is analogous to contending with hospital-patient challenges. If something doesn’t work with a horse (patient) or a horse is nervous, the doctor can try different or less pressuring methods next time.

The Horses

The horses used for the medical program include a Lipizzan, an Appaloosa, a former reining champion Quarter Horse, a Thoroughbred ex-racehorse, and a gray mule. The equines all live in a herd and are only used for emotional therapy work, not riding.

Insights into personal relationships are drawn; for instance, the Quarter Horse may try to resist the direction of the student. The teacher says, “Where else in your life do you get pushed around?” and “You need to set boundaries.” 

Authentic Response

In order to set up this kind of academic training, a college must have a person who is knowledgeable about horses and medical education. A psychology background is also important, and the school needs to have access to a horse herd for therapeutic education.

Experiential training with the horse can provide sensitivity to an animal who is direct in his response and not filtering through a polite manner. Since medical students practice with patients who are actors, they may not get to realize the breadth of necessary non-verbal skills. Future physicians learning from an authentic response discover how to respond both to humans and to the horse. 

This article about horses helping in the training of medical students appeared in the June 2024 issue of Horse Illustrated magazine. Click here to subscribe!

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How the Study Worked

Using hidden speakers, the researchers played recordings of animal sounds and human voices talking gibberish to four species: domestic horses (Equus caballus), Przewalski’s horses (Equus przewalskii), domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domestica), and wild boars (Sus scrofa).

The study tested 12 pairs of domestic horses from 14 different breeds and 12 pairs of domestic pigs of the same breed in Switzerland, along with 12 groups of Przewalski’s horses and 10 groups of wild boars in various wildlife parks throughout France and Switzerland.

To prevent domesticated animals from reacting to specific words they had previously learned, the researchers hired professional voice actors to mimic positive and negative emotions by talking in a nonsensical way.

They would first play positively charged sounds (two to six sounds, depending on the species and the sound duration), pause for 1 minute, and then play negatively charged ones, or vice versa (in a random order).

Two important measurements of the animals’ reactions were valence (ranging from negative to positive) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited levels).

All sounds were played at the same intensity, ensuring that the differences were only in terms of species, valence, and the order of valence (positive or negative sounds played first).

To determine whether the animals had the ability to distinguish between positive and negative sounds, researchers recorded their behavioral reactions, including ear position and body movement.

How We Speak to Horses

Their results showed that both horse species had a stronger reaction to negative sounds than to positive ones; domestic horses would respond faster, and Przewalski’s horses would spend more time walking and less time standing. Such reactions were the same, regardless of the playbacks produced by their species, closely related species, or humans.

Speaking to Pigs

Pigs, just like domestic and Przewalski’s horses, could tell the difference between positive and negative sounds from their own kind, closely related species, and humans. However, wild boars reacted more to positive and negative pig calls than to human voices or calls from other wild boars.

Although all four species reacted less and were less attentive when human voices were played compared to calls of their species, they still showed some response. This might suggest that horses have some ability to distinguish whether you are talking positively or negatively to them.

The findings here also indicate that the evolutionary history and domestication of animals may have influenced their ability to understand and respond to emotions.

A Similar Study

This study ties well with another one from 2019, which showed that horses associate individual human voices with previous experiences they’ve had with them.

For example, when hearing voices they had positive previous experiences with, horses would react with increased attention and indicate a positive emotional state (hold their ears forward; their left brain hemisphere would get activated).

When they heard voices associated with previous negative experiences, horses would react negatively (hold their ears backward; their right hemisphere would get activated).

Such reactions are the result of the way horse brains work. Using the left eye and left ear activates the right brain hemisphere, which is responsible for processing sounds expressing negative emotions (like sadness or fear). Similarly, horses will use their right eye and activate the left hemisphere to process vocalizations expressing positive emotions (for example, happiness).

This research not only showed that horses can recognize different human voices, but can also remember the valence of past experiences with these voices. So, when they hear a human voice, their reaction is also influenced by the valence (positive or negative) of their prior interactions with that person.

The Takeaways

Both of these studies show that positive interactions with horses create positive expectations and a favorable attitude in animals. In contrast, negative experiences result in negative emotional states, and horses become less willing to interact.

If you approach and speak to animals in a more positive, friendly way, they should react less and become calmer and more relaxed around you.

This, of course, should be everyday practice, but these studies still provide an intriguing insight into the emotional intelligence of horses and gives interesting perspectives on communication between humans and animals that affects their welfare.

This article about how we speak to animals appeared in the May 2024 issue of Horse Illustrated magazine. Click here to subscribe!

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Afraid, Anxious, or Nervous

When a horse is feeling afraid or anxious, the head and neck are typically held high, and the muscles are tensed. The whites of the eyes may be showing, and the horse may be quivering or trembling. The tail may be tucked tightly against the hindquarters. The horse often can’t stand still and may try to bolt. He may also grind his teeth.

Alert or Focused

An alert or focused horse’s body language is reflected in ears pointed in the direction of where the horse is looking (ears may flick back and forth if a lot is happening in his surroundings). The head and neck are held up; there’s a bright, attentive look to the eyes; and the tail may be elevated.

Content or Accepting

This body language shows a basic, happy attitude of the horse. There’s a soft look to the eye (normal blinking, not staring), and the muscles are relaxed overall. A horse will slightly lower his head, the ears may be forward or neutral (not focused in any particular direction), the mouth relaxed, and he may sigh and lick his lips. One hind leg might be cocked in relaxation if the horse is standing still.

Annoyed, Sour, or Stressed

A horse may pin his ears, wring or swish his tail, and have a hard look to his eyes. He may grind his teeth, toss or fling his head, and open his mouth or elevate his head to avoid a rider’s hands or the bit when under saddle. There is usually an overall stiffness to the body.

Relaxed

This horse is completely at ease. The eyes may be partially or totally closed, the head lowered, and muscles relaxed.

Dominance or Aggression

The horse will pin his ears and may curl his upper lip. He may swing his hindquarters toward whomever he’s trying to control and have a hard, staring look to his eye. Everything about the horse’s expression and body language says, “Get out of my way!”

Read more:
◆ How to Speak Horse
◆ A Glossary of Equine Vocalizations
◆ Form a Bond with Your Horse

This article about horse body language originally appeared in the 2011 issue of Horses USA. 

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