A few weeks ago, a friend of mine took his young, promising FEI horse to a big indoor show—their first after a season of success in outdoor competition. The Grand Prix went well. But in the freestyle, his poor horse was overwhelmed by the environment and utterly lost the plot. My friend had to pilot a bomb around, so the score was a bit grim. A Facebook page I follow had posted about it, and with my heart in my throat, I clicked on the comments section.

To my both shock and delight, it wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting—far from it: 

“What a great job he did, handling that unfortunate situation!”

“Bad luck but handled beautifully, and the horse will be better for it next time.”

“Special horse! Just needs time and experience.”

I was floored, because the timbre of conversation on the internet about animal welfare is not usually so compassionate toward the rider. There’s no doubt that all of us—in dressage, in horse sport writ large—have some reckoning to do, but there’s a loud and committed population online that seizes upon every opportunity to tell us that high performance sport is torture, that we’re all out there drugging and wailing upon our poor animals to make them move like the circus, and that true training should be done with nothing more than love and moonbeams, if done at all.

Leaving all that aside, there’s also a population of people who think that, if a horse ever demonstrates behavior that is undesired, it is because of training failing somewhere in his past, that some human didn’t do a good enough job before the moment when the horse spooks or leaps or scoots. These folks have either not spent enough time with horses or have been blessed with a delightful combination of quiet horses and low expectations.

Because anyone who’s spent any time with horses knows that they are, in fact, sentient. They are individuals. One may be curious and engaged, another may be aloof and standoffish. One may, because it was raised by a spooky, flighty mother, be inherently slow to trust. Another may be blithely and benevolently trusting and be perfectly comfortable walking through fire if a human leads it there. 

We strive to improve all by training. Not just capital-d Dressage training; how they lead, how they stand on crossties, how they work with the farrier. These are all connected to how they go under saddle. How a horse works with you from the ground is how they work with you from atop. 

But there is no amount of timing or training or breeding that guarantees that a horse will never, ever err, never mis-interpret, never get caught up in his feelings and react emotionally. While they are obviously long-since domesticated, the horse’s wild ancestors survived long enough to reproduce by being quick to get the heck out of Dodge if there was even the potential of a predator in the woods. This many generations later, there’s still that “flee first, ask questions later” quality in many, many horses.

Then we factor in the breeding of horses for sport, where we ask them to be tremendously agile, tremendously athletic, tremendously sensitive and tremendously, tremendously energetic. The thing that lets them piaffe 15 steps, on the spot, with no stick? It’s the thing that makes them a little edgy about the leaf in the bushes, too. The warmblood is to the average benevolent trail horse as the working-line bred Belgian Malinois is to the average couch hippo Lab cross. Most need to be channeled into work or they’ll eat your couch, and even then they’ll sometimes still think about eating your couch.

So we train them, and we get the training right at home, and then we go away from home, and they learn how to do it there. If you’ve ever taken horses to their first shows, you’ll know that some waltz off the trailer, look around, and say “Ooh, a party for me!”, whereas others develop eyes the size of dinner plates and briefly forget everything they’ve ever been taught. If you’re a smart trainer, you go to nice little local shows, maybe even schooling shows, so that if you have a creature of the plate-eyeball variety, they can take the time they need, maybe not even go down centerline, just experience life until it’s a less exciting affair. And when they get good at going to those, you up the ante to a bigger show, then the one with the night classes, then the one with the bigger audience, and you rinse, repeat until none of those things are exciting.

But horses are all individuals, and sometimes it’s going to take a horse 15 minutes to acclimate to the “big ring,” and sometimes they’re not going to get there over the course of a single weekend. And there’s no way to do it except to do it. You try your best to keep the experience positive, you try your best to develop a strategy to let Dobbin hear the crowd or the freestyle music or whatever, but Dobbin is sentient, and Dobbin is going to sometimes be overwhelmed by the voices of his couch-eating ancestors when stressed, and that’s the ballgame. 

I’m so, so grateful, not just for my friend but really for all of us who develop horses, that the Facebook comments section understood this. I’m so, so grateful for myself that the members of The Elvis Syndicate, which owns my top horse, Cadeau, were equally understanding when Cadeau went to little White Fences 2 a few weeks ago and, for the first time in our relationship, screamed his way through his Intermediaire I debut. Why were we screaming? No idea. Maybe the plants? (White Fences is a spectacularly beautiful show grounds, landscaped spectacularly by its wonderful plant-enthusiast owner, and as a result some of the plants are BIG and BOLD and, therefore, maybe in Cadeau’s brain, carnivorous?). Maybe just knocking the rust off after a break from showing? Maybe he’s fitter now, and, oh boy, I need to think differently about energy management? Or maybe it just wasn’t our day, and he forgot that he trusts me?

The judges were very sympathetic. When I abort-missioned part way through a line of tempis on the first day, fully prepared for the 1 I’d receive as well as the 2% deduction for circling around and starting again, the judge sat back and let me roll. Cadeau and I both left the arena seven minutes smarter than we’d gone in, and sure enough, the second day was better. Mercifully this was a show that no one in global dressage news gave a hoot about, such that there was no risk of evisceration—or not—in a Facebook comments section. 

But as sport is under an increasingly close microscope, I hope we don’t lose sight of the fact that sometimes, in spite of the best care, the best prep, thoughtful training, a tactful approach, and the work all going very well at home, horses are, in fact, horses. They have minds of their own, minds that we’ve bred to be clever enough to learn how to dance with a human based on how and when they’re hugged ‘round the middle. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to learn. We can, I hope, be gracious when they sometimes forget that they trust us.

Lauren Sprieser is a USDF gold, silver and bronze medalist with distinction making horses and riders to FEI from her farm in Marshall, Virginia. She’s currently developing The Elvis Syndicate’s C. Cadeau, Clearwater Farm Partners’ Tjornelys Solution, as well as her own string of young horses, with hopes of one day representing the United States in team competition. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram, and read her book on horse syndication, “Strength In Numbers.”