Pain memory

A common story I hear is that a horse had a behavioural issue, we took the horse to the vet to investigate, found something, treated, the behaviour didn’t change, but its just pain memory now. The horse can’t be in pain because we treated the thing we found, so we just need to show them it doesn’t hurt.

I find this extremely unlikely in most cases. What is more likely is the treatment didn’t get rid of the pain, there is more to it that hasn’t been found and/or we have only treated a symptom and haven’t addressed the primary cause. So the horse is still in pain.

There are a couple of common scenarios I want to talk about to give you some food for thought.

Stomach ulcers are extremely common and I think extremely misunderstood. They’re one of the first things people are told to look for when they’re having behavioural issues. You often see horses unhappy about being saddled, they treat the ulcers, and the behaviour continues. But we’re told the horse just has to get on with it now, ignore the behaviour and they’ll learn it no longer hurts. But what if it does still hurt? Why are we deciding to ignore their communication?

To me if the horse was no longer uncomfortable, this behaviour would disappear fairly quickly using training that builds new, positive associations with the task. Even if you did nothing except continuing to saddle the horse and ignore the behaviour I would expect it to lessen over time as they realise it no longer hurts them. Instead sometimes we’re months down the line and the behaviour is the same.

Maybe the ulcers were the least interesting thing about that horse but they’re just the first thing we looked for and found. Ulcers don’t just randomly occur, they are often secondary to stress and ongoing pain elsewhere in the body. Even if we did clear up the ulcers and the horse is having an emotional reaction, the answer isn’t to trash on through their boundaries and continue to tack up and ride them while they shout at you not to.

Another common one is the kissing spine/not quite kissing spine diagnosis, the amount of horses I see that have had some treatment and been cleared by the vet as pain-free and ready for ridden work, only to find they have extremely inadequate muscling over their back, sometimes even with a saddle shaped dip. This is a really obvious, simple one to see, and yet we are encouraging clients to crack on and ride these horses and are seemingly baffled by their continued lack of co-operation. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done 6 weeks of long reining over raised poles religiously, if the horse isn’t developing that muscle over their back then it isn’t working and we need to go back to the drawing board. Postural rehab only works if the horse is able to recruit the right muscles, otherwise we’re just strengthening compensatory patterns which probably contributed to this in the first place.

I just cannot see the logic in a horse having to go through an extremely high-stress training situation in order to “learn” they are no longer in pain. It seems to me that what is actually happening in those cases where the behaviour seems to improve is that the horse is learning nobody listens no matter what they do and they’ll keep being hassled until they comply, so they eventually give up and comply.

When we’re finding arthritis in horses that are only 4/5/6 years old, maybe we should pause and wonder why this occurred and how we could better support the horse going forward, rather than just medicating the joints and cracking on as we were.

If I had a pound for every time a client has been told by a professional their horse isn’t in pain and just needs a firmer rider/is lazy/taking the mickey/trying it on/just weak, and it turns out their horse is in fact in pain on further investigation, I’d knock a good chunk off this month’s hay bill.

I am not saying every horse is in terrible pain and we need to spend £1000s at the vets or should just put them all in the field and never touch them again, but the current system needs to change. We need to be looking at the horse’s living environment and emotional health. Then we need to be really thinking about whether that horse’s body is in a place to take a rider without it being detrimental. You can absolutely transform a horse with the appropriate approach from the ground, even horses with complex issues.

Training should never look like a battle and I cannot understand why we are watching these horses struggle with training only to be shocked further down the line when we find pathology. “Nobody could’ve known.” The horse was telling you. 🐴