Biomechanics specialist, international clinician, and creator of SURE FOOT Equine Stability Program®, Wendy Murdoch joins Helena in this episode to talk about the biomechanics of the horse and rider partnership, the Feldenkrais Method that Wendy uses to help riders find their best balance, why SURE FOOT pads work to help our horses, and much more. Listen in!
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Murdoch Method / Wendy Murdoch
SURE FOOT Equine Stability Program
EP 141 Audio Transcript
You’re listening to the Stall and Stable Show, Ideas for Happy Horse Keeping.
Wendy Murdoch is an internationally recognized instructor and clinician for over 30 years.
She’s the author of several books and DVDs, and the creator of the Surefoot Equine Stability Program.
She is one of the most skillful teachers ever encountered in any equestrian discipline.
Her in-depth knowledge of both horse and human biomechanics, her background in science, and her genuine love of teaching all make Wendy one of the most sought after clinicians in our industry.
As a recent student of hers, I can attest to not only Wendy’s incredible positivity, but also to her success, because her rider’s success is her success.
I had the privilege of watching Wendy employ current methods in learning theory and biomechanics to riders at the highest levels in our sport.
And honestly, my jaw just about hit the ground watching their progress in literally minutes.
I’m delighted to welcome her to the Stall and Stable show today to talk about her approach to helping riders and their horses, her background, motivations, and her thoughts about the future of equestrian sports.
Listen in.
This is episode 141 of the Stall and Stable Show, brought to you by American Stalls.
Today is Friday, May 3rd, 2024, and I’m your host, Helena Harris.
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Welcome back listeners.
I’m a little late this week, actually this month.
I’ve been very busy, very, very busy.
And I have so much to share with you.
My goodness, I can’t keep up keeping three horses going, although I have help.
And I can’t wait to tell you about that.
I have a guest co-host who’s gonna be joining me soon.
We have Mr.
Buck Harris, who is joining Stall & Stable full time now.
Whoa, oh my gosh, so much going on.
But I really want you to hear my conversation with Wendy Murdoch.
I had the privilege of being invited to attend one of her clinics down here in Aiken.
And I thought, oh, okay, this is great.
I’ll try something new.
My life has been changed.
And then I dragged Buck along and his life has been changed.
We’re gonna talk to Wendy and find out about her background, her approach, the science of what she does working with horses.
It’s all based on physiology and the biomechanics of balance.
Horse rider, the magic that happens when you get those two things right and you pair them together.
So I’m not gonna waste any more time blabbing.
I’m gonna get it right to my conversation with Wendy.
But when we’re done with this episode, stay tuned.
Make sure you subscribe to Stall & Stable because we have so much more to talk about in upcoming episodes.
Let’s welcome Wendy to the show.
Wendy to Stall & Stable, I’m delighted to have you.
I am so thrilled to be here.
You know, listeners, that’s not a lie because there are a handful of clinicians and experts in the equestrian industry who are so deeply passionate about taking what they know and sharing it far and wide.
And Wendy, you are one of those people.
I had the pleasure of meeting you and working with you in person, although briefly, and I can’t wait to get back to working with you.
You have been around for a long time.
Yes, I have.
Did I read somewhere that you worked with Sally Swift?
I did.
I was her last full-time apprentice in 1992.
So I traveled with her for six months.
Was she everything that people say she was?
Sally was such an interesting person because she was so enthusiastic about what she was teaching, but she didn’t want to be a leader.
So there was always this interesting piece about Sally, how she wanted to be the number two.
Her sister was actually her number one in most of her life.
And so it was just really interesting to see that dynamic and work through that.
She was an amazing woman.
I’ll just tell you a really quick story.
I interviewed her at her home one time, and she was at least in her 80s at that point.
And she had a little baby gate in her kitchen blocking.
She had her little dog, Joy, blocking her dog from going to the rest of the house.
And she was talking to me, and then she wanted to show me something.
She walked over to the baby gate, whipped her legs over the baby gate, walked into the other room, grabbed the picture, came back, whipped her legs back over the baby gate, and showed me the picture.
And that was so Sally.
She was so youthful in her mind.
And even though she had a scoliosis and surgery on her back and everything, there was still such a vibrancy about her and an agility that’s like, oh my God, I know most 50-year-olds that couldn’t do that.
Yeah.
I mean, we’re talking about the body and the mechanics, the anatomy of the horse, the human, the behaviors that we were trying to combine when we’re trying to combine these bodies.
So how did you get from an apprentice net back in 1992 through all of the knowledge that you’ve gained, intellectual knowledge, hands-on knowledge, at what point did you say, there’s a connection here that needs to be made and I’m going to dive into this particular silo of equestrian science?
You know, I can’t say that there was a conscious decision to dive into that, but what I will tell you is that I’m a scientist by training.
So I have a master’s degree in equine reproductive physiology.
And so anatomy and physiology were always something I really enjoyed.
And then I had the accident in 1984 where the horse rolled over me and punched my finger through my hip socket.
Oh, Jesus.
So now I had a broken body.
That’s actually how I met Linda Tellington Jones and Sally Swift was because of that.
But I had this broken body and most people couldn’t tell me what to do with it on a horse.
I mean, I was back on a horse in six months, even though my doctor was like, you know, whatever.
But I had to figure it out.
And because of my scientific training and my study in physiology, it’s like, okay, we got this body, right?
And the one law, and I always say this, the one law we can’t escape is gravity.
Gravity is why we have a skeleton, it’s why we have muscles.
So then Linda Tellington Jones introduced me to the Feldenkrais method, Dr.
Moishe Feldenkrais, she studied directly with him, and he was an amazing person.
I didn’t actually get to meet him, but I worked with Mia Siegel, his apprentice, she had apprenticed with him for 15 years, and she’s one of my mentors, along with Linda.
And he studied the structure, the bones, and said there’s 5,000 different possible ways we can combine them.
And like when we get out of high school, we use about 800.
So to heal my body, I took the Feldenkrais method, and then I ultimately took the training, and I trained in the technique for 16 years.
And it just resonated with me that we need to learn how to use this thing we’re in.
Let me back up for a second.
You trained in Feldenkrais for 16 years?
Yeah.
Again, that’s a long time.
So there was something about it then that was very productive and satisfying to you to work with something for that long.
What is it about Feldenkrais that is the panacea for you?
So I did it for three reasons.
One, I needed help with my own body.
I was struggling.
I mean, the first lesson we did was lay on your back and slide your arm along the floor.
My arm got halfway and I couldn’t move it after that.
I didn’t know how.
I just didn’t know how.
So I needed help with my own body because I was teaching and I was struggling.
And I wanted a way to help my students.
And I’d already been taking Feldenkrais lessons, so I knew how valuable they were.
And I wanted more tools to teach because I went from, I’m never going to work with bodies, you’re with human bodies.
I only want to work with horses to, well, if I don’t help the rider, I can’t really help the horse.
And then it was like, well, how am I going to help the rider more?
I need to help them off the horse because I can’t reach everything on the horse.
And then the third thing was, at some point, I want to retire from being in cold arenas and sand and dust.
So really, there were three reasons why I was like, I’m going to study this.
And quite frankly, when I got into it, I’d already been using a lot of the ideas because of my experiences with Linda and Sally.
There were already this whole idea about the body and how it functioned.
But when I got into the training, it just resonated.
It just made so much sense from a scientific perspective, getting to meld my science cravings, right, with this creative process, because every body is different.
And so I feel like a detective.
I just had a student yesterday, a Feldenkrais lesson, so unmounted in my studio.
And she’s, you know, I’m having trouble with my Canada parts.
And I watched her body just show me the Canada part.
She didn’t intend to, because we can’t think thoughts without movement.
So I said, well, show me your Leslie Canter.
And when she gave me that image, I knew exactly what was going on and why she was struggling.
What was the problem?
She was throwing her weight to the opposite corner and then offloading the left side, tightening the hips, shifting the weight.
And the horse is like, I’m feeling you go, you know, to the right.
When you’re asking me to go Leslie, I can’t do that.
How much of that is mind first, body second versus separate them?
Yeah.
So here’s a classic Feldenkrais statement which explains why you can’t separate them.
You cannot think a thought without a movement.
You cannot think a thought without a movement.
What I’ve gotten really good at is seeing micro movements in people.
People tell me something and I watch them like this Canada part.
And I could see in very micro movements that she made what she was doing.
And then all I had to do as the teacher, if you will, is set up the environment where it became more obvious to her.
Ah, yes, and because we’re so not self-aware of our bodies.
I’ve worked so hard on being self-aware of my emotional center, my intellectual center, my physical center, but that’s because I was a lifelong athlete in different sports.
But when you’re on a horse, it’s like you can’t see the forest from the trees sometimes.
So there’s this lack of awareness we have.
For me, if I’m dancing or riding or I’m doing something physical, my moving center, as I call it, is front and center.
I can’t introduce thinking, because if I introduce thinking, then somehow my moving center shuts down.
It’s like they don’t like to play nice together.
Actually, what you’re thinking is the movement.
So if you’re thinking, well, I’ve got to let them lead me, that thought is allowing.
Your thought is, I’ve got to allow my body to be moved, and my balance needs to be such that I am movable.
And that’s the problem with teaching riding.
When we start to try and tell people how to use their body, it doesn’t work.
And the reason it doesn’t work is that we are movement-based creatures, just like horses.
Even though we try to tell ourselves we’re intellectual, we’re movement-based creatures.
Look at childhood development.
It’s all about movement, and you can’t rationalize with babies.
They need to move, right?
And they learn how to move by moving.
Riding a bicycle, hitting a ball, riding a horse.
So there’s no language in the motor part of your brain.
So when you try to introduce intellectual thoughts, not motor thoughts, but intellectual thoughts, into movement, it doesn’t work because you have no concept of what it really takes to do that movement.
My example is people tighten their core.
But the problem with holding your core, and I had one woman, literally 26 years old, held her core for five years from the moment she got up to the moment she went to bed.
When she came to me, she could not stand or sit without hip pain.
She had intellectualized activating muscles as opposed to allowing the muscles to activate any function in something you’re doing.
And now what she did was override.
She weakened the muscles she needed because her intellectual thoughts, her, her, overrode.
It’s like having the most incredible orchestra on the planet, every instrument available, and then you only hit the bass drum.
Our nervous system is so exquisite, and the kind of subtlety in the demicontraction, semicontraction, coordinated contraction that is movement cannot be intellectualized.
Listeners, I had the honor to ride Wendy’s horse, Joker, who is not a living thing, but boy, he sure acts like it.
Wendy helped me become aware of where I was kind of over-engineering my own ride.
I was thinking body thoughts instead of allowing my body to do the thinking for me.
So this phrase, allow, I carry that with me.
You use that the minute we met.
And as soon as I switch from trying to allowing, my horse relaxes.
You gave me, again, another phrase where we worked on different parts of my body, root beer float.
Rooting down into, I remembered it.
And there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in this brain of mine.
And that I walk now, just walk around the farm, thinking root beer float.
And one thing that I noticed, very distinct, is that my left foot no longer toes out.
When I think root beer float, it’s easier for me.
Like, you know, you think about holding your core and walking with great posture and over-engineering your movements, but root beer float was more about allowing.
It was just trigger words that allowed me to allow my body to do what it needs to do.
So I think that left hip of mine is appreciating this new balance.
And let me just describe root beer float for people listening.
Yes, please.
So it was a phrase that I used to teach out in Washington and they had summer camps and they came up with it for the kids, but it works so great.
And root is just allowing your back to relax so that your tail hangs down.
So you’re rooted.
Sally’s image in her book Centered Riding of the tree growing roots.
And then beer is letting your belly go, because this is where muscles work in a function.
And when we start to overuse them, we get in the way of the function we’re looking for.
So tightening your core too much blocks your hips, and we need fluid hips for riding, period.
So beer is softening there, and then float is allowing the upper ribs to expand.
And most people, when they sit up, they hinge the whole rib cage back, which hollows their back like a horse being on the forehand.
It’s a simple image that evokes a movement pattern, as opposed to tightening my core and then holding my left hip and then activating my left hip.
You know, that’s what I’m trying to talk about is that it’s a thought.
Root is a thought. But it has a function, an action associated with it that is a global action as opposed to a micro management.
And so the more we can, you know, like, you look at little kids that ride, you can’t give them the intellectual stuff.
It doesn’t work.
And what we’re trying to do is clarify the movement patterns that we need to ride, to ride well.
Right?
And understanding that when you look at someone riding really well, it’s the ease that you really notice as a result of getting rid of the extra effort.
I just feel like I took a deep breath.
You articulated that so well.
It is the ease.
When I look at videos of myself riding, I can say, oh, that’s a tough ride.
Or sometimes, and then I look at someone who’s more technically accomplished rider than I am, and I’m like, I want to look like that.
So that begs the next question, which is, can you allow muscle memory to develop or do you have to orchestrate it?
You said we learn to move by moving.
So tell me about this process.
Let me just explain this because it’s the same as our horses, and this is where we’re so similar.
Say you had an instructor that, especially early on, told you heels down, but not how.
So now you brace your heel down and you stiffen your leg and you stiffen your ankle and your knee and your hip, the very joints you need to absorb your horse’s movement.
And so this becomes a habit, and a habit is something you do unconsciously.
The problem with that habit is it causes the horse to brace because the horse has to deal with us on its back.
Can’t escape gravity.
If I stiffen my joints, puts me a little forward because my foot’s gone forward, I move my head forward, I put my horse on the forehand, and now he stiffens and raises his head, right?
And now everybody’s like stiff.
So the thing is unless and until that pattern of bracing too hard against my strip becomes conscious, something that I’ve acknowledged and then have a choice, I can’t change it.
So this is where what I do is I come in, I think I put the board under your foot.
Oh, yes, you did.
So I come in with this little board and I tell everybody it’s full of fairy dust, right?
And we all laugh because it’s important to laugh because it’s so weird.
And I come in with my little board and I meet your foot and then I slowly go away.
And what I know is in our nervous system, we have a seeking reflex.
It’s what allows us to go to the ground and stand up, right?
It’s innate in our system.
Horses have it too.
But I have a seeking reflex and as your foot seeks my board, it has to let go of the contraction to find lengthening.
And almost always when I put the foot back in the stirrup, people go, you shortened my stirrup.
And I’m like, no, I didn’t.
Your leg lengthened because the contraction, you decontracted and you found lengthening instead of shortening.
So now your foot can meet the stirrup, have weight in your heel, so your heel is deep, not braced, and your joints work.
And that’s going to allow you to come more upright and allow the horse’s ribcage to come up because that’s the thing is he needs to lift his back in order to let his neck down.
He can’t let his neck down if his back is hollow.
The idea of the disconnect between the heels down and the rest of the leg bracing or the joints not fluid enough to absorb the motion of the horse.
Defensive riding, you know, we are taught to put our heels down and a lot of us jam those heels down.
It also happens when you are riding young or green horses.
You tend to get that heel jammed forward because that’s like your seatbelt for a bit.
But then you are developing these habits that limit you from actually riding the spaz when it happens.
I took a lesson with a gal, oh gosh, last year, and she told me, so I had watched your video, a video where you had, what’s the name of the skeleton that you used?
Nevel?
Yes.
And you were talking about placing the ball of the foot a little bit further home in the stirrup in order to kind of retrain your brain and find a better balance.
And I was working on that for a while, and it was very effective.
And listeners, I’ll post a link to that video in this episode’s show notes, because it’s really, really helpful.
After working on that for a couple of months, this instructor had me, she said, you’re a much better rider without your feet in the stirrups, and you said the same thing.
So she said, I want you to put your foot in the stirrup and barely, barely touch it.
Barely let that pinky toe hit the outer branch of the iron.
And just let your leg relax into that.
I thought, well, I can’t give up this new foot position that Wendy was talking about, and how am I going to keep my balance?
But it was a natural progression.
It worked for me.
I found my seat deeper.
I was able to find that root.
Can you talk about that?
What might have happened there?
It’s progression.
If you’ve been doing that for a long time, since you were first taught to ride, you’ve braced your heel down, then you’re going to need to go through stages of feeling something different in order for that to really change.
What I always say is the horse gets to vote.
What I teach, don’t try to do what I’m telling you to please me.
Listen to your horse and let your horse vote.
Making that shift yet again made a difference in your horse.
Fabulous, and it’s a progression.
The first thing was you started to make a change.
Probably what you did was went from the balls of the foot to just behind the ball, which is the George Morris’ balanced point of the foot, Sally Swiss’ bubbling spring.
That made one level of change.
Then the idea of barely putting weight on the stirrup, because we don’t know how much pressure we’re putting on the stirrup.
Hence my board under the foot when I can’t get it.
We just don’t know.
The reason we don’t know is what did we learn to do at six months of age?
Stand up.
And guess what doesn’t care about how hard we push?
The ground.
But then we get in the stirrup and we’re like, okay, I got to get my heel down, and we start to push, and the stirrup’s a pendulum, so it swings forward, and relative to the ground, the heel looks low, but is it really low relative to the front of the foot?
So if we pendulum the foot forward, the heel is closer to the ground, but we’ve put the whole foot forward.
Now we have to lean forward, put the horse on the forehand, etc., etc.
This is where it’s a progression.
You learn a little bit, and then you come back, and you learn something else, and you keep listening to your horse, and your horse keeps telling you whether it’s…
I love my students to make experiments that are safe within reason.
Play with how your foot’s in the stirrup, and let him decide.
It’s that intellectualizing again.
We’re taught that the instructor knows what’s right and best.
Well, yes, we need someone to guide us.
So often we wind up riding what the instructor’s telling us instead of riding the horse we’re sitting on.
Yes, yes.
And so where’s the space for some safe experimentation?
When I say safe, you don’t do this on a young horse, you don’t do this on a fractious horse, you don’t do this when there’s a loud truck going by.
But in a quiet place, and you can kind of calm things down and listen, making little experiments and saying, what happens when I, if I do this, how does my horse respond?
But that is not something in our traditional method of teaching horseback riding.
It’s not something we’re taught.
Instructor knows what’s right.
You do your damnedest to follow what the instructor says.
You’re hoping that it’s going to work out.
But the conversation we’re looking for with our horse gets lost because we’re trying to like, do what this person over here is telling us is going to work, even when it doesn’t.
And we almost forget about the feedback from the horse.
It’s like they are not even a part of the conversation at that point.
Now, finally gets us to the focus of the topic today, which is understanding our horse’s behavior and their movements, the things that they do, relative to what we are doing.
When someone asks me what it’s like to ride a horse, the best analogy I can come up with is maybe you’re a teenager or you’re a young adult and you’ve got a kid on your shoulders.
If they lean to the left a little bit, what do you have to do?
You have to accommodate so that you both don’t tip over.
So when you’ve got this person on your shoulders who’s constantly changing positions and balance, it’s very hard for you, A, to stay upright, B, to perform any kind of athletic function.
So how can we as riders correct our balance, work on our balance, but understand when our horses are saying, hey, I want to work with you, but something’s wrong up there.
You’re off balance.
Look at the behavior regardless of the balance.
We look at the behavior and go, this horse is fooling around.
This horse is acting badly.
This horse is running through the shoulder.
And we don’t stop to ask the question, well, why?
Why is that horse doing that?
The one thing none of us can escape on this planet is gravity.
I think it’s why people love to jump, because for a moment you leave gravity. It’s that thrill.
Nobody can escape gravity.
We have a skeleton and muscles to help us cope with gravity.
Without gravity, we don’t need them, which is why long-term space travel is a big problem, because they haven’t sorted that out yet.
So the skeleton and the muscles are there because of gravity.
Horses have four little feet to stand on to balance this whole thing.
On a thousand-pound horse, a forty-pound head, at the end of a three-foot lever arm, think of a flag that weighs forty pounds on your flagpole with the center of mass at the thirteenth or fourteenth rib, basically where we’re sitting.
When you think about it, it’s like eight feet away from their head.
When you think about the length of a horse, the counterweight on the bridge is eight feet away, the pelvis.
That’s a lot of physical space.
So now, when you think about the surface area of their feet, how tiny that is relative to this mass, then we get on, and now we’re crooked, or our saddle’s crooked, or I brace harder on my right foot.
The horse can’t ignore that because his imperative is to stay upright.
When you think about how rarely we see horses fall, and the kind of terrain we run them over, their imperative is to stay upright, to protect the head and not let it hit the ground.
So that’s their imperative.
Their need to feel safe is their feeling.
We take it for granted that a horse is well balanced over his feet, which is such a…let’s do this.
You’re standing on the end of a diving board, and you’re leaning over a little bit because that’s your pattern, and somebody comes along and starts poking on you.
How are you going to feel?
Terrified!
And then somebody’s going to grab your head and pull your head around while they’re poking you on the diving board.
And we wonder why they get upset.
That just triggered so much…
I was a springboard diver all through high school, middle school and high school, and I know that feeling.
And I don’t think we give the horse enough credit as an athlete with their own balance issues.
Going back to the question of why.
Why is my horse doing that?
There’s a whole human psychological component that we need to address.
And this is why I like that you have all the facets of your teaching, is being able to ask why, have empathy, understand the animal, without anthropomorphizing.
That’s a fine line to walk, but I do think more of us need to start with the question of why.
Why is my horse…why is she having trouble with the canner?
She’s not lazy, she’s not naughty, she’s not fresh.
Something I see happen a lot, especially in the hunters and the jumpers, is a horse who bucks or gets fresh after a jump, you know, after the landing.
Oh, they’re feeling it.
I’m like, well, maybe they just lost their balance and they’re kicking out behind them because they don’t want the saber-tooth tiger to take them down.
Or maybe you’re bracing on the strips right behind the shoulder blade on landing, and they’re like, wow, I’ve got to get the weight off my forehand, how am I going to do that?
Right, and but they’re like, well, he doesn’t do it all the time, which therefore means the behavior is by choice.
And it’s like, well, wait a minute, no.
There are so many variables in every single jump, in every single rider, every single horse.
I think we need to just eliminate the term naughty from our riding repertoire because my own horses have their dispositions have changed so drastically since moving to Aiken.
The footing in our pasture is fantastic.
My horse’s confidence level has gone way up, but they’re way more secure, way more confident.
And you can see that when they’re on different types of footing, when a horse is not secure, they’re a little bit more tense, they’re a little more anxious.
So how do we start?
Let’s say we’re on our horses and we’re struggling with something, whether it’s a canter depart or asking our horse to come into the bridle, whatever it might be.
The first question we’re going to ask ourselves is why is this happening?
What’s the next thing that we can do?
The first thing is, depending on what we’re doing, if we’re struggling, typically the first thing we need to do is to stop.
Okay, so my horse is running through the left shoulder and I’m hanging on the right rein.
The faster I go, the worse it gets.
The problem is, once I lock into that pattern, my nervous system won’t let go either because my imperative is to stay safe.
If my horse is running through the shoulder and he’s falling that way and he’s getting faster, my nervous system is going to say, hold on, just like I would a little kid crossing the street.
I’m going to hold on and not let him get hit by the car.
Yes.
That’s part of my nervous system’s imperative.
It’s innate.
So now the thing is, nobody’s thinking, everybody’s flying.
So often, the first thing we need to do…
You just summed up the equestrian industry.
Nobody’s thinking, everybody’s flying.
Yes.
We need to pause.
The pause could be stop, like full stop.
The pause could be take a breath.
The pause could be something that resets our nervous system, ours and theirs, so that we can get back to what is happening and why it happened.
My horse isn’t running through the shoulder to make my life miserable.
My horse is running through the shoulder because there’s something either in his balance, in my balance, or in the saddle, or in the environment that’s going on.
Now, I have control over certain things.
I have, hopefully, control over my body, hopefully, and more importantly, I have control over making decisions.
So if I’m seeing that my horse is already starting to lean through the shoulder and I’m at the trot, it is not a good time to go to Canter.
I need to like, wait, stop, what’s going on?
Why is my horse running through the shoulder?
Is he doing that to make my life miserable?
No.
It kind of goes back in the Feldenkrais method of looking at how does one initiate a movement?
Like that Canter, how is this horse initiating the trot?
Is he already initiating the trot by tightening his back and leaning on that leg, and then therefore it’s already out to the side?
How is this happening?
So the how and the why are the questions that we really need to ask.
And those are the questions that tend to get forgotten.
Yeah.
Do it, just fix it, just, you know, do it more, try it harder.
If he’s not going well to the right, do it 10 times more.
That doesn’t solve it.
We need to take a step back and say, wait a second.
And that’s that pause.
And sometimes it doesn’t mean you have to stop moving, but it means you have to have a hit or reset button to go, oh, I remember the farrier said, he tends to lean to the outside.
And when I pick up that leg, he’s always pulling it a little bit toward midlines with shoulders always a little past.
Well, now if I’m leaning that way, he doesn’t have a foot where he can support himself.
So from my experience of doing sure foot for now 12 years, May is my 12th anniversary of doing this technique.
The one thing that I have discovered is that behavior is a balance issue.
That when I help horses be more grounded and more stable and more secure and more over their four feet, the behaviors go away.
This underscores the point you made in the very beginning, which is the one law of physics that we can’t deny, which is gravity.
And so gravity is present 24-7 in our brains and in our bodies.
So it makes very good sense.
And if the horse has been badly shod or had a bit that didn’t fit or a saddle that didn’t fit or a rider that was crooked or any of those things in the past, that habit is still present unless and until it is addressed.
When we start to look at behavior as a cry for help, as opposed to something making our life miserable, we can start to sort it out.
But when we look at it as he’s just trying to make my life miserable, then we can’t.
I have an example where I went to this OTDB rehab place and I had 15 minutes because I had to catch a flight and I had my half-physio sure foot pad with me.
And I walked in to do a demo and I looked down the barn and I saw this gray horse.
I said, I want that gray horse.
He said, oh, no, you don’t.
He’s a butt head.
That’s exactly the horse I want.
And I had to argue with her to get that horse.
I said, I only have 15 minutes.
That’s the horse I want.
They brought the horse out.
He’s doing all his behaviors.
I took the pad.
I stuck it underneath his right foot.
I set his foot down.
All behavior stopped in 10 seconds.
The horse stood there, took a big breath, and grounded and was fine.
And then I put the person on the pad, and she flushed.
I don’t know why people have certain reactions, but she was about to cry.
I left them with the pad, and later I contacted her, and I said, so how’s the horse?
Oh, he’s still a butt head, because the trainer wasn’t there to see it.
Ahhhh.
So he got pegged back as being a butt head.
Instead of acknowledging that his behavior was a cry for help, he wasn’t feeling safe, he wasn’t feeling grounded.
That is the most important thing we need to address with horses, is a feeling of safety and helping them ground so that they can be good citizens, because that’s really, they just don’t want to argue with us.
They don’t.
And I, listeners, I can attest to the Sure Foot pads having that effect, because we did that with Siouxsie, who, as you may know, is a genuinely anxious type of horse.
She’s hypervigilant.
That’s her job.
It was a delight to take her someplace off property.
The first time, I mean, we’re in Aiken, we’re barely here, and this is the first time I’ve taken her off property in this situation.
And, you know, the first thing Wendy said was, well, that’s her job. That’s what she’s designed to do.
And it was so relieving for me to hear a clinician immediately peg my horse’s disposition.
Like, yep, she’s not a naughty horse.
And then to see her relax as she stood on the short foot pad, to take that deep breath.
It’s remarkable, but it’s science.
Whether it’s the board and Feldenkrais or the short foot pads, it is not fairy dust.
It is actually science.
So I want to, we’re running out of time, but I would like for you to explain to our listeners what happens when a horse stands on a short foot pad physically.
And I just want to say about Susie is there was every reason for her to not calm down.
Horses running, it was like, just ask for the everything.
The horses behind the mirror, they were flying around.
These horses were, I mean, it was like, the dust.
You’re like, damn, this better work.
So here’s what I’m going to tell you is that horses and humans are mammals.
All mammals have a skeleton.
We have muscles, ligaments and tendons, and we have a nervous system.
The difference is that we have more frontal lobes so we can make up stories.
That’s why our horse does things.
Problem solving and that sort of thing.
Horses have some, but not as much as people.
Like, we can dream of, you know, Star Trek and create iPhones based on the communicator we saw with Captain Kirk a million years ago.
Horses can’t do that.
When you realize that our nervous systems are the same, we both have an autonomic nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system is the fight and flight, sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic flight, parasympathetic grazing.
We both have it.
We’re the same in that regard.
When you’re feeling anxious, you’re insympathetic, you know, and then your horse goes, uh-oh, you’re nervous.
And horses are always reading that because that’s how they stay safe.
They have to read their environment, the people and horses that are around them.
When your mare alerts, everybody else probably goes, is there something?
And then they go, oh no, she’s taken care of it all.
We’re fine.
So we have this nervous system that its number one responsibility is, am I feeling safe?
Because if I’m feeling safe, I can graze, I can sleep, I can reproduce.
If I’m not feeling safe, I got to run away.
So now let’s look at where the nervous system exists, all over the body, everywhere.
Your feet, when you walk out, are reporting where you are in space.
They’re organizing your balance to keep your head safe.
When a horse walks out, his hooves report where his body is in space, what’s called proprioception, to make sure he keeps his head safe and stays alive.
What we have to realize is in horses, those hooves are so incredibly specialized.
They are unique.
The single-toed animal, equids, are the only single-toed animals like that.
Mules, donkeys, horses.
That foot has a sensory system that I believe is unique because I don’t see the same response in dogs and people on the pads as I see in horses.
Interesting.
And when I think about it, it’s like, well, how is a horse going to know if this is a great place to graze?
Well, wouldn’t the ground be different?
The texture of the ground?
And so they have, they probably have sensors that we can’t even relate to that can feel the quality of the ground.
We know they can feel vibration.
Dr.
Bob Bowker knows, he’s done all the anatomy research and neurology about the Pacinian receptors and the Rafini, and canine receptors and all the receptors that are in the hoof.
And you think about it, it’s got to organize this whole big body.
It’s better be in there.
What we don’t totally understand is the mechanism by which this works, but we understand the hoof is a sensory organ.
And the other thing that we don’t understand is, why do we get such an immediate response that lasts?
Don’t understand that.
But I have seen horses literally stand on a sure foot pad for under a minute and walk off and be totally different and not go back.
I think of it almost like you’re resetting your computer.
You know, your computer is kind of slowing down, and you just sit and boom, it’s back to working.
The only thing I can figure is it acts like a reset button in the brain.
Because the horse is born, when he’s born, he’s born with the pattern of movement he’s going to do.
He spends gazillions of dollars on foals that come out and move incredible, right?
Because it’s already there.
So the horse is born with its innate movement.
And then things happen.
It falls down, its buddy kicks it, its feet weren’t done, or it was whatever, stuck in mud, you know, like life happens.
And as life happens, things get layered on to that innate movement that we so want.
And I think of sure foot as like hit the reset button, clear away all the crap, and store the horse to the original function.
Nobody knows how that happens.
It doesn’t mean that repeated, so repeated use of sure foot.
Why would I use it repeatedly?
Because it causes that relaxation response.
When I first showed up, I thought, oh, well, I, you know, I need a round pen to do this, that, and the other thing.
But you said, well, you know, you can’t always bring a round pen with you, but you can bring sure foot pads.
And I bring my clicker.
So there’s a, I think there are better ways or more convenient ways for us to work with our horse’s nervous system and their bodies and their emotional center.
You know, horses do have emotions.
In fact, they think more so in emotions.
Like you said, they don’t have the same frontal lobe that we do.
They don’t have executive functioning.
They can’t rationalize and problem solve the way we can, but they can learn through association.
What I loved about it was that you were starting with the body first.
You were starting with a distal limb.
You were putting the hoof in a place that created a feedback loop to the brain, which then that’s where the magic happened.
Wendy Murdoch, thank you so very much for joining me on Stall & Stable.
I really appreciate your time.
I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
Listeners, if you want to learn more about Wendy, the Murdoch method, sure foot pads, and all of the things that she has, creates, and shares with riders, go to stallandstable.com.
Look up this episode’s show notes.
It’s number 141, where you will find links to all things Wendy.
Many thanks once again to our sponsors, American Stalls, Barn Pros, and Triple Crown Nutrition.
And that’s going to be a wrap for this episode.
I hope you enjoyed it.