13/08/2026
The nervous system pendulum
For a long time the horse world focused heavily on obedience, submission and getting the horse to do what we wanted and thankfully we have moved forward from much of that and now have a far greater understanding of learning, behaviour, welfare and the nervous system, but I sometimes wonder whether the pendulum is beginning to swing too far in another direction because suddenly everything seems to be explained through nervous system language and simply changing the words we use does not necessarily mean we have changed what we are actually doing.
If we take an old training practice based on creating pressure, fear or discomfort until the horse responds and simply start describing it as increasing sympathetic activation so that the parasympathetic nervous system can take over, have we really moved forward or have we just given an old practice a shiny new vocabulary. If the technique itself has remained largely unchanged then surely we should be questioning whether the science is actually informing the practice or whether scientific language is being used afterwards to justify what we already wanted to do.
The nervous system is not a simple switch where we deliberately push a horse into sympathetic activation, wait for the parasympathetic system to appear and then declare that the horse has reached homeostasis. We cannot ask the horse how that experience felt and behaviours such as licking and chewing, lowering the head, becoming still or moving the feet cannot independently tell us that either. They are observations and they need context, they are not little windows that allow us to see exactly what is happening inside the horse.
This is where I think we have to be particularly careful because a horse becoming quieter after pressure does not automatically tell us that the horse now feels safer. What if that horse has learnt through previous experiences that its attempts to change the situation achieve nothing, what if the lack of resistance we are seeing is compliance rather than relaxation, and if we then move the feet and get the response we were looking for are we improving the horse's emotional state or simply improving the picture that makes us feel the horse is relaxed.
None of this means horses should live in a bubble where they never experience challenge, uncertainty or boundaries because that would be the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction as well. Horses need to learn, explore, problem solve and experience the world and a functioning nervous system is perfectly capable of responding to challenge and recovering from it. There is a huge difference though between supporting a horse through something difficult and deliberately becoming the source of fear or discomfort before presenting ourselves as the source of relief.
I think the middle of the pendulum is where we need to stay. We don't need to return to the old idea that the horse simply has to submit, but equally we don't need to explain every behaviour as dysregulation, every quiet moment as parasympathetic activation or every lick and chew as proof that something has been processed. Sometimes we need to admit that we simply don't know exactly what the horse is experiencing and look at the whole horse, the whole situation and the behaviour over time rather than finding one visible sign that confirms the story we already wanted to tell.
Science should make us question our practices, not simply give us better words with which to defend them. If we are only changing the language to suit the original work then we really do have to ask ourselves, are we actually moving forward?
Remember we are all giving our lived experience of working with horses, we all decide on our own theories but often not much is fact, we can measure, collect data, and all those other things which are often collected on a small scale yet science can never tell us the lived experience the horse is feeling in a situation in that moment in time, its our ability to change the experience for the horse for the better that probably matters most for the horse.
Pic from google
