Teatime with Elsa - Episode 97

Chatting about: When dominance is helpful…

In this episode I talk about when dominance is useful when working with our horses. When horses lack emotional intelligence and maturity, making their own decisions can feel overwhelming. Horses that don’t have the skill set to change focus to help themselves feel better may hyper-fixate and escalate their stress levels. We can use dominance to support horses that find making independent decisions overwhelming to help keep them safe and build a habit of changing focus when they begin to get concerned. We can also use dominance to make the horse change focus to something that will help them feel better, to de-escalate and lower the stress level when they hyper-fixate. I explain how we can use dominance to set the horse up in a way that will help them develop the emotional skills they need for life and will help them be able to learn in freedom safely.

Originally aired on: June 15th, 2021