The Happy Athlete

Recently, I’ve been giving a bit of thought to the idea of The Happy Athlete. I don’t doubt that the vast majority of people out there really do want to do the best by their horses – but how much difference can we make to their performance by taking the time to think about what they want out of the arrangement?

I’ll start with a confession – historically I’ve been guilty of saying ‘it’s no big deal, sorry for your luck, you’ll have to learn to cope’ when my horse didn’t like something and changing it was inconvenient, difficult or expensive – or sometimes just plain impossible. If, like me, you’re on a livery yard, and you have limited time and money, there is some stuff which you just can’t change. And that’s ok, but it’s worth being honest with yourself and taking a moment to note that it might be having an effect on your horse.

My current horse is a very sweet, very laid back little TB mare. She’s not had a lot of life experience, in fact she was backed as a rising 4 year old, turned away for a year, then towards the end of her 4th year, she moved to a schooling yard, came into work, and bam, 3 weeks later I bought her. She was looking pretty lean when I bought her, but all of us put that down to the shock of the lifestyle change and the fact that the fields were quite literally under water so she’d had no turnout for about a month, plus it was the middle of winter. It wasn’t a major cause for concern – she’d come from a very well respected local rider/producer, who looks after her horses well and who’d obviously started her extremely well and sympathetically. But three months down the line, and my sweet little horse still wasn’t putting weight on. I was feeding ad lib haylage, and lots of the only thing she’d eat – fibre beet – and nothing was happening. So I booked her in to be scoped for ulcers. Clear – nothing wrong at all.

And then one day I was stood with a friend watching her in the stable, chatting about how concerned I was, and we hit on the fact that she was taking a mouthful of haylage, walking round her stable and then craning over the door. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. Coincidentally (or not, as it turned out!), I also found her filthy in the stable. Like nothing else. I was using 3-4 bales of bedding a week. My friend asked why I didn’t try taking down the closed boarding between her stable and her neighbour’s, and putting up some trellis to see if she would be happier if she could see her friends. Luckily I have two essential things – a very understanding yard owner and a husband who is willing to indulge my various horse related whims which require his construction skills. So that weekend we took down the boards and replaced them with trellis.

I instantly had a horse which no longer destroyed her bed, and even just a couple of days later, she was looking much better condition-wise. If nothing else, this will save me a small fortune in bedding – since we made the change I’ve not had to put more than a bale a week of bedding down. Friends have reported that she is very chilled standing looking down the row and not constantly craning over the door to see what’s going on. I am hoping that all the food I was pumping into her was just being walked and worried off, and that I’ll see a big change in her condition.

I know I’ve tended to think of the idea of The Happy Athlete as relating mainly to how we work our horses. But there is so much more to it than that. Don’t get me wrong – I know it’s hard, and actually probably impossible to find the perfect set up within the joint constraints of time and money – and we all do what we can with what we’ve got.

But if we want them to go out and perform well for us, then we owe it to them to take a little bit of time to find out what the really important things are for them – and to do what we can to make that happen. And if we can’t, then we should at least acknowledge it and be aware that if we really truly can’t arrange things to be optimal for them, then we might just need to accept that what we get back isn’t 100% either – and if we want that to change, we might need to create that situation which makes them happy.