Wild Horse Mountain Farms

11/24/2025

We Are All Making S**t Up (MSU)

Does this guy look like an expert to you? Probably not. But that is the trouble with horse ideas. The dodgy ones rarely look dodgy. Most of the time they look perfectly sensible, even evolved and enlightened, until you try them and end up emotionally bruised, financially lighter, and with a horse who now considers you a walking safety hazard.

Humans are natural MSU machines. Making s**t up is practically our native language. And in the horse world it really should be a new Olympic equestrian sport. Scroll your social media feed and you will find a buffet of theories, spiritual downloads, opinions, and neuroscience flavoured fairy dust. Some of it is thoughtful. Much of it is an express ticket to Crazy Town. And while I can spot the nonsense quickly, it is much harder for people without my practical experience and background in science and research.

So here are a few red flags that your latest horse guru, speaking with great authority, might be serving you MSU of the unhelpful variety.

1️⃣ Complicated jargon delivered with smug authority.
If someone explains horses using words you would expect to find in an incomprehensible academic word salad, they are not enlightened. They are compensating. The more you understand horses, the simpler everything becomes, not the harder.

2️⃣Anyone who claims everyone else is cruel.
People with real experience become less judgemental over time, not more. If someone positions themselves as the sole kind, ethical being in a world of violent egotists, that says far more about them than about everyone else.

3️⃣Advice so vague it feels mystical yet contradictory enough to make you doubt your sanity.
If you cannot learn it, apply it, or repeat it, it is not a method. It is just MSU. And MSU does not load floats, stop rushing, or fix spooking.

4️⃣An expert who cannot handle questions.
If someone crumbles or claims persecution the moment you ask for clarity, it is not because you are closed minded. It is because their idea collapses under the slightest tap.

5️⃣Anything that humanises horses.
Horses are not humans. They are also not bats, penguins, or therapists. They do not have impostor syndrome or people pleasing tendencies. Viewing horses through a human lens makes your interpretations worse, not wiser.

A huge part of my job is extracting bad MSU from people’s minds so they stop feeling guilty, stop feeling confused, and stop unintentionally frying their horses in chronic stress.

We are all making s**t up to some degree. The art is learning to tell the evidence based helpful s**t from the harmful s**t. And yes, that is now an official category in my teaching, thanks to my client Simone who introduced me to the acronym and gave me a new way to call out nonsense.

This is Collectable Advice Entry 85 of 365 in my challenge. Share this with your friends so you can look each other dead in the eye and say “MSU” before calmly walking away from dodgy advice😆. Hit share or save and gift your circle a handy little acronym for those moments when someone starts believing their own BS😎.

11/23/2025

Stop Babysitting Everyone’s Feelings (Including Your Horse’s)

Do you spend your life scanning people’s faces like supermarket barcode scanner, checking for signs of disappointment, irritation, or emotional turbulence you might have accidentally caused? If so, welcome to emotional monitoring. It’s exhausting, unproductive, and about as effective as trying to stop a storm by shouting at the clouds.

When you take responsibility for someone else’s feelings, two predictable disasters follow. You either contort yourself into a people pleasing pretzel and resent everyone. Or you hand over your emotional power to anyone with a sigh or raised eyebrow and feel controlled and resentful anyway. Either way stress wins.

The antidote is almost offensively simple. Let people feel their feelings. Terrifying, I know, but here’s the kicker. You don’t control their emotional weather. You can be saintly enough to make Mother Teresa look abrasive and they’ll still roll their eyes the moment you turn around. So act with kindness, hold your integrity, speak honestly, and let people experience whatever bubbles up for them. Your job is to manage your own behaviour and emotions, not perform emotional CPR on fully grown adults.

And horses? Same pattern, but with more dramatic consequences because they won’t politely wait until you turn around. They’ll meltdown right in front of you. Taking responsibility for a horse’s emotions looks like avoiding anything that might worry them, analysing every tiny twitch, micromanaging their stress, or obsessing over whether they love you and believe your connection is spiritually significant. All this does is make you inconsistent and teaches the horse to be fragile instead of confident.

A horse learns to canter confidently by cantering. A horse becomes resilient in new environments by experiencing new environments. A horse learns to navigate pressure by meeting a little bit of it, not by having every emotional wobble rescued.

Healthy rules of engagement in life and horsemanship come from letting emotions happen instead of trying to bubble wrap them out of existence. Own your feelings. Let others own theirs. That is where clarity shows up, confidence grows, and real partnership finally has space to exist.

This is Collectable Advice Entry 84 of 365 in my little challenge that may or may not have taken a brief holiday😆. I am dedicated and brave about sharing ideas that actually line up with reality instead of whatever fantasy world social media tries to sell you. Hit save, HIT SHARE, but please resist the urge to copy and paste. It is not cool.

11/22/2025

This plant has more power than you think, and it grows everywhere... 👇💬👀

11/22/2025

In light of the current EHV-1 outbreak, the AAEP and the Equine Disease Communication Center (EDCC) have organized a horse owner education webinar to bring you the most up to date information on this issue.

Next Tuesday, join specialists Lewis R. “Bud” Dinges (Texas Animal Health Commission Executive Director and Texas State Veterinarian), Dr. Krista Estell (AAEP/EDCC) and Dr. Katie Flynn (USEF) for an informative discussion about what EHV-1 is, how to recognize it, and most importantly, how to prevent its spread.

This webinar is FREE, but registration is required. Register here: https://events.zoom.us/ev/AnIoJrASj0vuX7Q_K87mKEjg5bxeMAkqp7fpSoOgVtVm_Zgo1g5m~AiiV7ZQ3bbmlEW2iSkeRTSAfMCYf2QhFMoprr7WRbM_MsiJRcBGT1oLj0Q

*PLEASE NOTE: the attendee limit for this session is capped at 1,000. However, all who register will be emailed a link to an on-demand recording that will become available 24 hours after the live session ends.

11/21/2025

A question that was asked in this weekend’s lessons in Eugene was how can you tell when your horse is giving you a conditioned response or not (and why does it matter)? A conditioned response does not require much thought or feel from the horse, and is often performed out of a state of appeasement within the horse. What this means is that the horse is only performing the task the way it has been taught to do in order to stay out of trouble, or to please the handler, which actually makes it more of a reaction than a response. The moment you try to reach deeper you will find a sense of unease or anxiety. These horses are often the ones we label as overachievers, in-your-pocket, pleasers, but anxious.

Think about working with your horse like having a conversation. When you have a conversation with another human, you have an expectation of mutual respect, but not an expectation for them to give you a specific answer to a specific question (seems a bit controlling, doesn’t it?). Part of the beauty of conversation is being able to be curious and giving the other individual the opportunity to respond authentically and meaningfully, allowing YOU to get to know them better for who they are.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who only answers open ended questions with one word answers? “Tell me about how that experience was for you?” … response: “good.”

“Ok, what does good mean to you?”

“I don’t know.”

Get where I’m going with this?

It is a state of self preservation from which the answer they think they should give is coming from, and the moment you start going deeper, they get uncomfortable.

That’s because they are not truly comfortable feeling into the experience at all, or maybe have been taught or shown that expressing themselves authentically ends with trouble.

Until they are in a situation where that anxiety just boils over and they become over reactive….

So, how can we tell when a horse is responding with thought and feel and when they are reacting with conditioned responses?

Change it up and see what happens. Get out of the “choreography” of what you are doing and *feel* into what your are doing and asking, like an improvisational dance with mutual respect for one another. If your horse feels back, you’ll know. If you find tension… you’ll know.

11/21/2025