06/06/2026
Love this! So very true.
Sometimes I think we've forgotten what a normal horse looks like.
Not a perfect horse.
A normal horse.
Because a horse can't (and shouldn't have to be!) be perfectly calm every day.
Sometimes they're fresh.
Sometimes they're spooky.
Sometimes they're grumpy.
Sometimes they're lazy.
Sometimes they're carrying a little more condition than we'd like at the end of spring.
Sometimes they're looking a little rough at the end of winter.
Sometimes they get a mud fever scab.
Sometimes they lose a bit of topline.
Sometimes they have a few bumps, scratches and imperfections.
Because they're horses. They're not robots or motorbikes, but living, breathing, thinking, feeling, sentient beings.
And yet increasingly, every little imperfection seems to need a diagnosis, a supplement, a treatment, a therapy, a protocol or a product.
A horse that's fresh needs a calming supplement.
A horse that's overweight needs a metabolic product.
A horse that's underworked but full of energy becomes a horse with a behavioural problem.
A horse that's shedding oddly needs a new supplement to help with coat health.
Now before anyone gets upset, I'm not saying genuine health issues don't exist.
Of course they do. Lots of them. Because horses.
Good horse ownership absolutely does mean paying attention. We should notice when things change. We should investigate things that don't seem right.
But we shouldn't constantly be searching for problems that may not actually exist.
Somewhere along the way, I think we've started losing sight of what normal actually looks like.
We've become so accustomed to advertisements, before-and-after photos, miracle transformations and perfect looking horses, behaving perfectly on social media that we've started treating normal horse behaviours and normal horse fluctuations as though they're defects.
Horses just cannot exist in a perfectly managed, perfectly balanced, perfectly predictable state every day of the year.
Horses are alive and breathing, just like us.
Some days we wake up feeling fantastic.
Some days we're tired because we slept badly.
Some days we're stressed.
Some days we're hormonal.
Some days we eat too much.
Some days we eat too little.
Some days we're full of beans.
Some days we'd happily spend the entire day on the couch.
None of us look, feel or perform exactly the same every day of the year.
Why would we expect our horses to?
They're living creatures that respond to seasons, weather, workload, age, hormones, pasture conditions, social dynamics and a thousand other variables.
That's life.
The irony is that in our quest to optimise every little thing, we create stress where none previously existed.
We start chasing tiny imperfections that aren't actually problems. We spend money solving things that never needed solving.
We've become convinced that every quirk has a cause and every cause needs a solution.
Sometimes there is an issue. But sometimes the horse is simply being a horse.
And sometimes the thing that needs adjusting isn't the horse. It's our expectations.
