Is My Horse in Pain...or Just Being Difficult?
IS MY HORSE IN PAIN...
OR JUST BEING DIFFICULT?
Before you correct the behaviour, ask why it started.
Sometimes the behaviour is the question - not the answer.
Is My Horse in Pain... or Is He Just Being Difficult?
If you have owned horses for any length of time, I am pretty sure you have stood there at some point looking at your horse and thought, "Oh for crying out loud, would you just behave?" I know I have. We love them dearly, but horses have a wonderful way of keeping us humble. One day they are saints, and the next day they apparently have never seen a mounting block, a puddle, a tarp, another horse, or their own shadow before in their lives.
Now, horses can absolutely learn behaviours. They are smart, and if they discover that a certain response gets them out of work or changes what the human is asking, they may very well try it again. If backing away makes you quit asking, if throwing the shoulder gets you to abandon the exercise, or if one spectacular little buck ends the ride, there is a pretty good chance the horse has noticed that. They are not stupid, and sometimes we accidentally teach them exactly how to avoid the thing we were trying to teach in the first place.
But this is where I want you to be careful, because sometimes the horse is not saying, "I don't want to." Sometimes the horse is saying, "I cannot do that comfortably." Those are two very different situations, and if we treat them the same way, we can get ourselves into a real mess.
Did my horse suddenly become difficult, or did something become difficult for my horse?
Before You Correct the Behaviour, Ask Why It Started
This is one of the biggest things I have learned over all the years I have worked with horses. I do not just want to know what the horse is doing; I want to know why the horse suddenly needs to do it.
Let's say your horse starts bucking into the canter. Maybe he is being cheeky, and maybe he discovered that one well-timed buck makes you stop asking. That absolutely happens. But what if this horse has cantered quietly for years and suddenly every time you ask for the right lead, he pins his ears, swishes his tail, rushes, cross-canters, throws his head up, or throws in a buck? Now I am interested, because something changed.
Yes, maybe the saddle is bothering him. Maybe the rider is collapsing through one side or asking in a way that makes the transition harder. Maybe the horse has lost strength or has learned that a little rodeo performance gets him out of the exercise. All of those things are possible, but we also need to look much farther back in the horse.
There may be a very real problem or source of pain through the lumbar spine, lumbosacral region, sacroiliac area, pelvis, or hind limb. Maybe that hind limb cannot come underneath the body comfortably. Maybe there is something happening through the stifle or hock, or maybe the problem is all the way down in the foot. A sore foot, poor hoof balance, or simply protecting one side changes how that entire limb is loaded, and the compensation can travel right up through the hindquarter and spine.
Now think about what we ask during a canter transition. The horse has to organize the hindquarters, coordinate the pelvis and spine, shift balance, and use the hind limbs differently. If one piece of that chain is uncomfortable, weak, or not moving well, the horse is going to find another way to get the job done. Maybe he rushes. Maybe he hollows the back. Maybe he picks up the wrong lead. Maybe he bucks. Then we stand there saying, "For crying out loud, you KNOW how to canter." Yes, he may know how. The better question is whether his body can comfortably do what you are asking today.
That is why I do not want to punish the response before I understand where it is coming from. If a horse that has always performed a movement suddenly starts struggling with it, especially if it is consistently worse on one side, I want to look at the body before I decide we have a training problem.
What Changed?
This is probably one of my favourite questions to ask, and I cannot tell you how often the first answer I hear is, "Nothing." Then we start talking. Well, the horse moved paddocks. His buddy left. The saddle was adjusted. He has been a little short behind. We changed hay. He had three weeks off. The farrier changed something. He has been harder to catch lately. But apparently nothing changed. Right.
This is why history matters so much. When did the behaviour start? Was it sudden, or did it creep in slowly? Does it happen only under saddle, or can you see something from the ground too? Does it show up on one rein, in one gait, or during one specific movement? Does the horse become worse as the session goes on, or does he settle as he warms up? Those little details can completely change where I start looking.
Pain Does Not Always Look Like Pain
When people hear the word pain, they often picture something dramatic: a horse standing on three legs, obvious colic, or something that is clearly wrong. Of course that is pain, but pain can also be much quieter and much easier to miss.
Pain can look like a horse that suddenly becomes girthy, starts pinning the ears when you brush one area, begins refusing one lead, becomes reactive, hollows the back, stops wanting to go forward, or suddenly develops an attitude big enough to require its own postal code.
Before we decide the horse is simply being bad, I want us to ask whether the body has changed. Pain affects the nervous system, and the nervous system's first job is survival. If something has hurt repeatedly, the horse can begin anticipating the discomfort before the painful part even happens. A horse that has experienced pain during saddling may begin reacting when the saddle comes toward him. A horse that has repeatedly hurt during a canter transition may become anxious while you are still setting up for the transition.
That does not mean the horse is plotting against you, although there are days when they certainly make a convincing case. It means the nervous system learned that a certain event predicted discomfort, and the body is preparing for it.
But Sometimes It Really Is Learned Behaviour
Now, before everybody reads this and decides every pinned ear requires a veterinary convention in the barn aisle, horses absolutely do learn behaviour too. Sometimes the veterinarian has checked the horse, the saddle is appropriate, the feet are good, the body is comfortable, and what we are left with is a horse that discovered a certain response worked.
Pain and learned behaviour can also exist together. A behaviour may have started because something hurt, then the physical problem was addressed, but the behaviour remained because the horse had learned the pattern. That is where these situations can get confusing, because sometimes we have to deal with both the original physical issue and the behaviour that developed around it. This is why I do not like black-and-white answers. "He is in pain" and "he is just being difficult" are not always two separate boxes. Sometimes they overlap.
The Pattern Is Usually Telling You More Than the Behaviour
Anybody can see the buck. Everybody notices when the horse throws his head in the air or refuses to go forward. What I am more interested in is what happens before that behaviour and whether the same thing keeps showing up in other places.
Maybe the horse struggles with the right lead, but when you start watching more closely you also notice that he does not want to stand square. He is constantly resting the same hind leg. When he backs up, one hind foot drags more than the other. On a circle, one shoulder falls in. When you pick up one hind foot for the farrier, he is uncomfortable holding the opposite leg. Now we are starting to build a story, and that is very different from simply saying, "He bucks into the canter."
If a horse is consistently worse on one side, I pay attention. Maybe the horse has always been a little weaker one way, because none of us are perfectly symmetrical and horses are no different. But if a horse suddenly becomes much more difficult on one rein, struggles to bend one way, picks up one lead but not the other, or starts drifting through one shoulder, that makes me curious. Why that side? What changed?
Could there be discomfort lower down in the limb, perhaps through the foot, hock, or stifle? Could the pelvis be shifting to avoid loading something? Could the sacrum, sacroiliac region, or lumbar area be part of the picture? I am not saying every crooked horse has an SI problem or every missed lead means the stifle is sore. Please do not turn one article into a new diagnosis for every horse in the barn. I am saying that a consistent one-sided change is worth investigating.
Compensation Can Travel a Long Way
Sometimes when I start explaining compensation, people look at me like I have just taken them on a tour through half the horse's body, so let's make this really simple. Remember when that horse stepped on your foot last summer?
For the next few days your foot hurt like heck, so without even thinking about it, you started walking differently. Maybe you put more weight onto the other leg. Maybe you rolled onto the outside of the sore foot. Maybe you shortened your stride or limped around the barn like you were ninety years old. Your body did that automatically because your nervous system was trying to protect the painful area.
Then the foot finally stopped hurting. Wonderful. But what happened a few days later? Maybe your opposite hip started hurting. Maybe your low back got tight. Maybe your knee started bothering you or one side of your neck and shoulder felt like somebody had tied it in a knot. For several days you had changed how you were loading your entire body, so other structures had to pick up the slack.
Now let's step this up a notch. Imagine that while you were still compensating, I walked up, threw a 150-pound rider on your back and said, "Okay, now I want you to carry this extra weight, stay perfectly straight, bend through your body, do circles, transitions, and maybe throw in some lateral work while you're at it." How do you think that is going to go?
Probably not very well. You may be able to get the job done for a while, because bodies are incredibly good at finding another way to move, but somebody somewhere is going to start complaining. That is exactly what can happen with the horse.
Maybe the original problem was the foot. The horse protects that foot and starts loading the opposite limb differently. Now the hock and stifle are not being used quite the same way. The pelvis adapts. The sacroiliac region and lumbar spine have to deal with a different movement pattern, and the muscles through the back start reorganizing around all of it.
The original foot eventually feels better, but that does not mean the entire body automatically hits the reset button the next morning. The nervous system has already learned a different way of moving. The muscles have been practising that compensation with every step, and now that pattern may have become the horse's new normal.
Then we add the rider. We start asking for circles, canter transitions, collection, lateral work, and more difficult riding, and suddenly the horse starts struggling. Maybe one lead disappears. Maybe the horse begins cross-cantering, hollowing the back, rushing, kicking out, or bucking. Maybe the horse starts feeling stiff on one rein or simply becomes unwilling to go forward.
Then we say, "What the heck happened to this horse?" Meanwhile, the horse's body may have been quietly compensating for weeks or months before the behaviour ever became obvious. That is what I mean when I say follow the chain. The place that hurts today is not always the place where the problem started, and just because the original injury appears to have settled down does not mean the compensation disappeared along with it.
Sometimes the Big Behaviour Is the Last Thing to Show Up
The buck, refusal, or big reaction may actually be the last thing to appear, not the first. The horse may have spent months quietly compensating. The stride became a little shorter. The horse started standing differently. One side of the back began losing muscle. The saddle shifted a little. The horse became harder to bend one direction. None of it seemed dramatic enough to worry about, so the horse kept working.
Then one day the compensation no longer works very well, the horse hurts, and suddenly you get the big behaviour. Everybody says, "This came out of nowhere." Sometimes it did. But sometimes we just missed the quieter signs. Horses can be very polite until they are not.
Had Some Time Off? Do Not Just Throw Them on a Lunge Line
Something else I want you to keep in the back of your mind is how quickly the body adapts to what we ask it to do - or do not ask it to do. Exercise stimulates muscle to repair and adapt, but that response does not last forever. If your horse has had time off because you were busy, the weather was horrible, the horse had an injury, or life simply got in the way, do not automatically assume you can pick up exactly where you left off.
The horse may look exactly the same standing in the pasture, but that does not necessarily mean the body is prepared for exactly the same workload it was doing before the break. This is why, when one of my horses has had some time off, I am perfectly happy spending a few days getting the body organized again from the ground before I start expecting harder ridden work.
And please notice I said organized, not exhausted. I do not mean clipping a lunge line onto the horse, standing in the middle, and sending him around in circles for thirty minutes while you check your phone and call that a conditioning program. No. Absolutely not. Thirty minutes of your horse orbiting you like a slightly annoyed satellite is not automatically good groundwork.
I see horses lunged and lunged and lunged, and sometimes all that person is accomplishing is making the horse extremely fit at moving badly in a circle. If the horse is falling onto the forehand, dropping the inside shoulder, swinging the hindquarters out, bracing through the neck, and hollowing the back, what exactly are we strengthening? That compensation. Congratulations, we just made the problem fitter.
A Circle Does Not Automatically Create Correct Movement
Lunging itself is not bad. I use circles too. But mindless lunging is not the same thing as teaching a horse how to use the body correctly. I want you paying attention to where those feet are landing. Where is the shoulder? Where are the hindquarters? Is the horse actually following the shape of the circle through the body, or has the head turned inward while the shoulder falls in and the bum is somewhere out in the next postal code?
Is the horse relaxed through the head and neck, or inverted with the underside of the neck doing all the work? Is the back beginning to participate, or is the horse simply running around hollow? Are the hind feet being picked up and coming underneath the body, or are they trailing behind and drawing little lines through the dirt?
Those things matter because every repetition is practice. The nervous system does not say, "Oh, Shantel wanted that one to be a good repetition, so we won't count the ugly one." It learns what the horse repeatedly does. If you spend thirty minutes allowing the horse to fall onto the forehand, drop the shoulder, and travel crooked, you are not waiting for the horse to magically become balanced somewhere around lap forty-seven. You are practising crooked.
After Time Off, Go Back and Check the Basics
This is why I like going back to very simple groundwork after a horse has had some downtime. I want to see what I have before I put myself on top of it. Can the horse walk straight and relaxed? Can I control the shoulders and hindquarters? Can the horse make a large, balanced circle without falling inward? Can the head and neck begin to soften? Can the horse back while actually lifting the hind feet instead of dragging them through the dirt? Is one side suddenly harder than I remember?
Maybe everything feels wonderful and within a few sessions we are right back into the normal program. Fantastic. But maybe I notice that the right hind is not stepping under quite as freely, the horse is falling through the same shoulder every time, or an old compensation pattern has started sneaking back in. That information is worth far more to me than getting on simply because the calendar says today is a riding day.
I do not care how many circles the horse did. I care how the horse did them. There is a huge difference between exercising a horse and teaching a horse how to use its body.
Watch the Horse Without the Rider
One of the simplest things people forget to do is take the rider away for a minute and just watch the horse. Can the horse walk straight? Can he circle both directions comfortably? Can he back without dragging his feet? Does the head and neck relax, or is the horse braced from the beginning? Does one hind limb step differently? Does one shoulder fall out? Does the horse look completely different on one rein?
If the horse is already struggling from the ground, getting on top is probably not going to magically improve the situation. In many cases it does the opposite, because now we have added the weight, balance, and asymmetry of the rider to the problem.
And yes, sometimes the rider is part of the picture. None of us are perfectly straight. One hip is tighter, one shoulder sits higher, one hand is stronger, and most of us have some old injury or movement pattern of our own. Then we climb on and expect the horse to carry us like we were carved perfectly out of marble. Bless their hearts.
If the horse moves beautifully from the ground and suddenly everything changes under saddle, that is useful information too. It tells us to look at the horse-and-rider combination, not just blame the horse.
Behaviour Is Information
This is probably the biggest thing I want you to take away from this article: I do not want you afraid of behaviour, and I do not want you immediately angry at it. I want you curious about it.
Behaviour is information. Sometimes it tells us the horse is frightened, sometimes confused, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes it tells us the horse has figured out a clever little way of avoiding work. Occasionally, because horses like to keep us on our toes, it is a little bit of all of those things.
The problem with quickly labelling a horse as lazy, stubborn, bad, or difficult is that those words can stop the investigation. Once we decide the horse is simply misbehaving, we tend to start correcting harder. If the horse is actually struggling physically, then we may end up punishing the horse for trying to communicate. That is not where I want us to go.
Before You Call Your Horse Difficult, Ask One More Question
At the end of the day, I am not asking you to second-guess every single thing your horse does or convince yourself there must be some giant medical mystery hiding behind every pinned ear. Sometimes horses are cheeky. Sometimes they learn exactly how to get out of work. Sometimes they are fearful, confused, or simply lacking in training.
But sometimes that behaviour is the horse's way of telling you that something in the body is not working comfortably. That is why I want you to look at the pattern instead of just the behaviour. Look at the feet, the hind limbs, the hocks and stifles, the pelvis, sacrum, and lumbar area. Look at how the horse stands, how he backs, how he moves on a circle, and whether one side is consistently harder than the other. Think about old injuries, time off, saddle fit, rider balance, and whether that horse is physically strong enough to do what you are asking.
Remember that compensation does not disappear just because the original sore spot stopped hurting. Sometimes the body has spent weeks or months learning another way to move, and now we have to help the horse find its way back.
So before you tighten the reins, kick harder, or decide your horse has developed a terrible attitude, ask yourself whether the horse became difficult or whether something became difficult for the horse. That little change in the question can completely change the direction you take.
A Quick Word Before You Head Back to the Barn
Everything in this article is meant to help you become a better observer of your horse. It is not meant to diagnose your horse, replace your veterinarian, or convince you that every behaviour problem has a hidden medical cause.
If your horse suddenly develops significant pain, lameness, weakness, neurological changes, unexplained muscle loss, weight loss, repeated bucking or rearing, a dramatic change in behaviour, or simply gives you that feeling that something is not right, get your veterinarian involved. I am a huge believer in working as a team, and sometimes the smartest thing we can do is stop training for a minute and get more information.
The same thing applies after an injury. Just because the horse looks sound walking across the pasture does not automatically mean that horse is ready to carry a rider, work on small circles, or go straight back into the job he was doing before. Rehabilitation and conditioning should make sense for the injury, the horse, the rider, and the veterinary information you have.
None of the observations we have talked about here - resting one leg, missing a lead, dragging a toe, dropping a shoulder, or becoming reactive - diagnose a specific problem by themselves. They are clues. Clues tell us where to start asking questions; they do not give us permission to start diagnosing every sacrum, stifle, and hock in the barn aisle. Lord knows Facebook already has enough veterinarians who graduated Tuesday afternoon from the University of Google.
Want Some Help Figuring Out Your Horse?
If you have read this article and are now standing in the barn looking at your horse thinking, "Well crap, I can see some of this, but I still don't know where to start," that is exactly where I can help.
I offer Whole-Horse Movement Assessments and private lessons where we look at your horse as an individual instead of handing you a generic exercise program and hoping for the best. We start with the history. I want to know what you are seeing, what you are feeling, what has changed, whether there have been old injuries, what has already been investigated, and what your goals are with the horse. We also talk about you - your riding experience, your handling experience, and what you are comfortable doing - because there are two of you in this partnership.
Then we look at the horse. How does the horse stand? How does the horse walk, circle, and back? Can the horse relax? Where are the feet landing? What are the shoulders doing? What are the hind limbs doing? Does one direction look completely different from the other? What changes when the rider gets on?
Sometimes we can start making simple changes right away. Other times I may say, "Before we go any farther, I want your veterinarian involved." I am perfectly happy with either answer because the goal is not to see how quickly I can get you doing exercises. The goal is to figure out what makes sense for your horse.
Private Session Options
| Session | Time | Price (CAD) |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Whole-Horse Movement Assessment | 60 minutes | $175 |
| Private Follow-Up Lesson | 30 minutes | $95 |
| 3-Lesson Progress Package | 3 x 30 minutes | $255 |
| 4-Lesson Progress Package | 4 x 30 minutes | $330 |
And no, you do not need fifty exercises and a suitcase full of gadgets. Sometimes you need three good exercises, done properly and consistently, and somebody who can tell you whether the horse is actually using the body the way you think it is.
Want to Go Deeper Than Your Own Horse?
Maybe this article has done something else. Maybe you started reading because your horse was bucking or struggling on one lead, and now you have somehow ended up fascinated by biomechanics, compensation patterns, the nervous system, and why one painful foot can eventually change what is happening through the horse's back. Welcome to my world.
If you want to understand your own horses better, I continue to develop shorter horse-owner education through the Canadian Equine Therapy Institute, covering subjects such as movement, nervous-system function, digestion, fascia, nutrition, herbals, and whole-horse health.
If you are the person who wants to go much deeper - maybe you already work with horses, maybe you are a trainer, bodyworker, veterinary professional, or maybe you are simply the horse geek everyone at the barn calls when something does not look right - then you may want to look at my full Equine Remedial Therapy program. That program is not about memorizing a handful of techniques. It is about learning anatomy, physiology, muscles, nerves, organs, fascia, biomechanics, and how those systems connect so you can start thinking instead of applying the same answer to every horse.
Because that really is what I want these articles to do. I want you to stop looking at the buck, the missed lead, the hollow back, or the behavioural problem as an isolated event and start asking what the whole horse is trying to tell you. Sometimes you will discover pain. Sometimes weakness. Sometimes fear. Sometimes compensation. And yes, every once in a while you may discover that your horse really did just figure out a clever little way of getting out of work. They are allowed to keep us humble.
Whatever the answer is, we have a much better chance of helping the horse once we stop guessing and start asking why.
A Few Trusted Resources Behind This Article
• Merck Veterinary Manual - Lameness in Horses. A veterinary overview of lameness, compensatory gait changes, and performance changes.
• Merck Veterinary Manual - Muscle Disorders in Horses. Background on muscle weakness, muscle loss, and medical conditions that need veterinary investigation.
• Gomez Alvarez and colleagues - studies of induced forelimb and hindlimb lameness and their effects on thoracolumbar movement.
• Greve and Dyson - research examining saddle fit, horse asymmetry, and rider factors.
• Equine biomechanics research on circular exercise showing that circle size, speed, and direction alter loading and movement asymmetry.
These resources support the general veterinary and biomechanics principles discussed here. This article is educational and should not be used to diagnose a specific horse.