It’s never too late to start over.

By Li Robbins

A couple of years ago I bought a so-called “pasture puff,” a seven-year-old mare who’d lived most of her life hanging out with sheep and cows. Seven isn’t that old, but Pippin hadn’t had much handling let alone riding — she’d only been saddled a month or so before I got her. Not surprisingly, when she arrived at her new home, a boarding farm with sixty-some horses, she was anxious. Walking her from field to barn became a game of chicken, as she whirled, veering into me, and at the barn door the drama continued — other horses clopped in and out as she steadfastly refused to enter.

It wasn’t that we didn’t make any progress. Over time “chicken” was downgraded to mere race-walking, and shoving-the-human-sideways was hinted at more than acted on. Still, for many months Pippin exhibited what trainer Stacy Westfall has deemed “culture shock.” Westfall, in a podcast episode called Retraining Older Horses vs Starting with a Clean Slate, points out that a horse of any age may experience culture shock, but if it’s a younger horse people are more likely to be sympathetic — the “ah, poor baby” response. With an older horse, challenging behaviours may be less tolerated — the “um, you’re really big” response. When it comes to starting a fully grown horse, people tend to have an unconscious bias, a feeling that the horse “should” know better.

Even so, Westfall believes one of the biggest factors affecting training isn’t age, but temperament. She tells a story about three young horses who grew up together and all arrive for training at the same time with “about the same level of nervous.” Despite this, they progress at different rates, something she chalks up to their individual temperaments. As a result, she suggests that instead of worrying about whether your older horse will be difficult to train, try to put that question out of your mind since it may inadvertently cause you to create behaviours you don’t want. Westfall believes that it’s better to approach the older horse simply with curiosity, framing your training sessions with, “I’m just here to learn about who you are today and what we are dealing with today.”

Related: Is This Hard for My Horse?

During my first year with Pippin, the horse she was each day seemed like a revolving door of sweet, spicy, calm, tense, opinionated, accepting — I never knew which horse would show up. Still, I was determined to muddle through, at least until two incidents shook my faith. The first was a flat-out rocket-ship bolt caused by something that seemed minor to me, but terrifying to her. At some point the saddle went sideways — and so did I. The second incident happened not long after, when she began to stumble and lean and lurch. Our vet’s diagnosis: a concussion from an unwitnessed accident in the field. The prognosis: uncertain. 

In the days that followed, Pippin was shockingly disoriented, her head tilted to one side and she walked like she’d had one too many. At first, all we could do was hand graze, which gave me plenty of time for mulling instead of muddling. Should she recover — and I had to believe she would — the “holes” in her training somehow needed to be filled. Trainer Mark Rashid writes in his book, Finding the Missed Path: The Art of Restarting Horses, that “Horses are a lot like people in that when there are gaps in understanding (particularly when it comes to the most basic of foundational concepts), confusion, and thus frustration, worry, and even anger are sure to follow.” Pre-bolt and pre-concussion there had certainly been confusion, frustration, and worry; post-bolt it seemed unlikely I would magically resolve our issues, even with the help of a knowledgeable friend. I had to face it. I wasn’t up to teaching my old(ish) horse new tricks; we needed professional help. So, when she got the all-clear for riding, instead of saddling up we began to work with a trainer.

“Horses are a lot like people in that when there are gaps in understanding (particularly when it comes to the most basic of foundational concepts), confusion, and thus frustration, worry, and even anger are sure to follow.” — Mark Rashid Photo: Crissi McDonald

Related: Horses that Refuse Due to Confusion

It was fortunate there was a skilled trainer at Pippin’s farm who knew both of us well. Those in remote locations may not have this luxury — one reason online training programs have become so popular. Regardless, whether choosing an in-person trainer or an online program, it’s important to choose carefully, something that Robyn Schiller, COO of Warwick Schiller’s Attuned Horsemanship, writes about in her blog Along for the Ride. She suggests asking yourself some direct questions, a few of which are paraphrased and condensed below:

• How have the horses that the trainer has worked with turned out? Has the trainer proven they “walk the talk?”
• Does the trainer communicate in a way that fits your learning style? 
• Given your skill level, is the trainer’s process something you’ll be able to incorporate into working with your horse?

In some ways, choosing a trainer is not unlike choosing a riding teacher. A blog post called How to Choose Your Teacher by Karen Rohlf, host of the Horse Training in Harmony podcast, underscores the importance of looking for someone who best suits your needs, rather than signing up with a specialist in one discipline or someone known for working with a specific kind of horse. You can find Rohlf’s complete post on her Dressage Naturally blog, but here are a few key points, highly condensed:

• Know what you want to achieve;
• Assess your own skill set dispassionately to clearly understand and communicate what you think you need help with;
• Seek someone who has achieved what you wish you could achieve.

When it comes to the specifics of training older horses, Mark Rashid says that the main difference between starting a young, unschooled horse and restarting an older one with issues, is that the young one is likely to be something of a clean slate. That viewpoint is echoed by Jennifer Williams, founder and president of Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society. In her article Starting the Older Horse she also notes that there’s a “huge difference between an older horse who has never been handled, one who has been handled badly, and one who has been handled well.”

Related: Slow Down and Start a Horse Right

Pippin did not fall neatly into any of those three categories, but her inconsistent handling had created some not very good habits that needed revising. As Rashid points out, “…before any new information can be taught, old and unwanted information first needs to be identified then redirected into the behaviour we do want the horse to know.” The trainer we worked with, Amanda Osland of Ace Equine Therapy, went right back to the basics, working on things like leading, the difference between equine and human space, and dealing with what I called Pippin’s “fear of floppy things.” Sometimes she struggled to understand what was being asked of her, and it wasn’t always easy for me to watch. After the concussion, my focus had been on keeping her as calm and comfortable as possible. Now she was being asked to make an effort, and effort by definition isn’t easy.

When working with an older horse, it’s common for people to expect that the horse should already know better. However, Amanda Osland of Ace Equine Therapy chose to return to the fundamentals with Pippin, focusing on reinforcing foundational concepts and addressing gaps in her training. Photos (above/below): Li Robbins

Ultimately, the training made a huge and positive difference in her behaviour and in our relationship, but it went more slowly than I had imagined, making the case for what Mark Rashid describes as responding to the horse’s “real time needs” as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

In Rashid’s book Horses Never Lie: The Heart of Passive Leadership, he tells a story about a nervous older mare who pulled back when tied, unsurprisingly since she’d been severely punished for doing so. Instead of insisting she be tied, Rashid would just drape her lead rope over the rail and eventually tying was no longer an issue. As Rashid writes, “Sometimes we get so tangled up in trying to find ways to teach our horses to do things or in finding training ‘techniques’ to help us solve our horse’s problems, that we forget to take the most important factor into consideration — the horse.”

Science supports Rashid’s philosophy. In a 2024 webinar for the Horses and Humans Research Foundation called Horse Brain Science 101, neuroscientist and horse-brain researcher Dr. Steve Peters (who has, in fact, collaborated with Rashid) notes that it can take more time to change habits in older horses than younger ones because pathways in the brain are more established. Or, to get “sciencey,” older horses have “heavily myelinated pathways.” It turns out that myelin, the substance wrapping neurons to help information travel more quickly, can be applied to the wrong things.

Related: Broke Horse vs. Schooled Horse

“The older the horse, the more difficult it is,” says Peters. Consequently, he too counsels going slowly and patiently in order to allow new information to consolidate in the horse’s brain — and offering a reward when the horse seems to get it. The reward, he says, may simply be “getting out of their space altogether” in order for the horse’s brain to replay what they’ve just learned.

Warwick Schiller, a trainer whose empathetic, subtle methods have put him in the spotlight (among other things he’s been profiled in a 2024 New York Times feature called He Thought He Knew Horses. Then He Learned to Really Listen) would likely concur. One of Schiller’s videos, with the unwieldy but to-the-point title Nervous System Regulation is the Key to Outstanding Results and Success with Horses, shows Schiller hanging out with a horse whose twitching muzzle indicates tension. Through patient “holding space” for that horse she eventually self-regulates, licking and chewing and yawning. Schiller says starting with this approach — and integrating it into ongoing training — makes everything that follows easier. 

The pace of “action” in the Schiller video is glacial, but that in itself can serve as a useful message for anyone wanting to progress with their horse. For even if you do choose to work with a trainer, unless you have untold riches there will come a point when the sessions conclude. Then it will just be you and your horse again, hopefully with more knowledge but still a work-in-progress. Horse training truly is a journey not a destination or, as Karen Rohlf puts it, “a long game.” Fortunately for us, horses are, for the most part, forgiving. To quote Rohlf, “It’s never too late to start over.”

Related: At the Starting Gate of a New Direction

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More by Li Robbins

Main Photo: Mark Rashid. Photo Credit: Crissi McDonald