Trust, Not Triumph: Equine Psychology And The Lasting Champion
Listening To The Horse, Not The Result
The groom leaves. A new rider takes up the reins. A stable moves for the season. To the people running a yard, these are administrative footnotes, logged and forgotten by lunchtime. To the horse in the stall, they can register as something closer to a small earthquake, processed not through reason but through instinct, scent and the felt presence of the humans it has learned, sometimes painfully slowly, to trust. A horse can win on Saturday and still carry, quietly, in solitude, the unresolved weight of a change nobody noticed or managed.
It is this gap between how people experience change and how horses experience it that Dr Sujeet Bhasker SuryaWanshi has spent much of his career trying to fill in. Equine psychology, he argues, is not a modern invention layered onto an ancient sport, but a discipline that has simply been renamed. "Equine psychology has always been in existence since time," he says, noting that ancient societies relied on their own version of the role now popularly known as the horse whisperer. What has changed, in his view, is not the horse's mind but the pressure bearing down on it. "Due to a steep increase in the competitive levels, equine psychology has still been lagging the pace," he says. More assertive methods, in his view, still need to be developed if the profession is to catch up with the strain modern competition now places on a horse's mind.
The Weight Of The Weather
For horses based in the Gulf, that pressure is not only competitive. It is climatic, and the equine psychologist is direct about how serious climate stress should be taken. Heat and humidity, he explains, do far more than make a horse uncomfortable; they reach into its mental state through the body's own chemistry. He describes how thermal shock affects the horse from the inside, affecting its well-being before any outward sign appears, with dehydration and rising body temperature setting off a chain reaction that, left unaddressed, can spiral into wider physical and behavioural problems.
The warning sign owners and trainers are trained to look for, the sudden change in temperament, is in Sujeet's reading often the last chapter of the story rather than the first. "Manifested by sudden change in attitude and behavioural changes, it can just be a symptom and not the beginning of the story," he says, a distinction that reframes how stable staff should be reading a horse's bad day, not as a discipline problem to correct, but as a signal to investigate. He warns that, left unaddressed, that same dehydration and rising body temperature can give way to a wider cycle of stress and secondary conditions or infections — one that compounds the original problem rather than resolving it.
The Bond Behind The Bridle
If climate works on a horse from the outside in, the people around it work from somewhere closer to the centre. Sujeet describes the horse as an animal with an almost supernatural attentiveness to humans in its orbit, an idea he frames in the language of instinct rather than sentiment. "Since ancient times, horses have been one unique entity known to have an active sixth sense," he says. "They are very sensitive concerning their mental well-being, and a slight change in their normal routine practices may affect them big time." That sensitivity extends well beyond words, he adds, to the way every person around a horse carries themselves, since the body language of the staff in its orbit speaks volumes, the horse is always reading.
That sensitivity is most exposed, he suggests, in the relationship between a horse and its groom, typically its most constant human point of contact. A change of groom, in his experience, is rarely neutral. "A positive attitude makes him recover the shock faster, but a negative attitude may result in a long-term behavioural change," he says of how a horse adjusts to a new face in that role. Trainer changes work differently again, filtering through according to the new methodology being introduced, while a switch of rider or saddle lands with an impact that depends on the attitude that newcomer brings. Running beneath all of it is something Sujeet calls the connection, a thread that must remain consistent between the horse and everyone who touches its daily life. "Communication is one of the most important aspects which is overlooked in recent times," he says. "It needs to be addressed more precisely between the entities involved."
Routine As A Form Of Care
It is in the unglamorous mechanics of stable life that Sujeet suggests this connection is either reinforced or quietly worn down. Feed changes, in his account, must never be sudden; introduced carelessly, they ripple outward from digestion into mood and eventually into performance. "Any changes required are gradually introduced over days or weeks," he says, warning that rushing the process risks a knock-on effect that reaches the horse's microflora and its psychological state alike.
Stabling carries a similar weight. Sujeet notes that horses based at home are rarely moved between stalls or footing without good reason. Yet, the demands of a short Gulf racing season mean many travel between venues every week to ten days, a routine that exacts its own toll even when conditions either side are comparable. Stable staff work hard to preserve a sense of neutrality wherever the horse ends up, since the animal has no way of knowing the move is temporary. He is similarly attentive to the human variable in grooming, observing that grooms carry different body language into the stall, and that a horse readily welcomes a positive presence while taking longer to settle around one that is less so. Farrier, too, has changed character in his telling; what was once routine now more frequently requires sedation or restraint, a shift he links to the broader strain of a more competitive environment. His instinct, when something in a horse's behaviour goes wrong, is to resist the urge to correct it outright. "Just before we try to correct any behavioural aspects, we need to understand or find out the experience creating it," he says. "If the horse feels safe, he'd not need much convincing."
Carrying It Well Is Not The Same As Carrying Nothing
That instinct, to look past the visible symptoms toward its quieter cause, extends to the way Sujeet reads a horse's recovery from illness and from travel alike. A horse's response to a condition or infection depends on how disconnected or shut down it becomes during the episode itself, with some animals returning to full confidence quickly and others — particularly those facing musculoskeletal issues, colic, or surgical setbacks — requiring a much longer road back. Bringing a horse back to work, he says, must happen at a measured pace, because the animal may be enduring more than its handlers realise. "The horse at times quietly tolerates without us knowing what he's actually going through," he says.
Transport poses a related but distinct challenge. Sujeet distinguishes between short local movements, which rarely disturb a horse psychologically given the familiarity of the surrounding conditions, and long-haul journeys between continents or hemispheres, which he says carry a far heavier toll, sometimes manifesting as travel sickness in the days that follow. Even so, he resists turning this into a simple story of fragility. "Just because the horses carry it well doesn't mean it's not heavy," he says, a line that doubles as a thesis for his entire approach: that stoicism in a horse is not evidence of an absence of strain, only evidence that the strain is not being shown. That same stoicism, he notes, tends to serve the horse well once the journey is over, since the resilience that carries it through also tends to speed its recovery afterwards.
Listening As The First Discipline
What ties Sujeet's observations together is a conviction that the industry, for all its sophistication, still has work to do in shifting its frame of reference from the rider's intentions to the horse's experience. "There's an old saying: you ride the horse you saddle," he says. "Instead of pushing the horse your way through scarce management, we need to adapt the method to the horse." He is unequivocal that this is not a sentimental add-on to performance, but its precondition. Welfare, he insists, should never be sacrificed to achieve any goal, and the industry's most urgent task, in his assessment, is to truly listen to the horses in their care. Rather than simply complying with and catering to their needs, active, combined participation from the horse's connections and the entities involved is also essential.
The gap the industry most needs to close, in his assessment, is not technical but relational — the ability to share, to listen, to be aware, to be present matters most. Modern performance pressure has, in too many yards, allowed the thread of trust between horse and handler to fray without anyone quite noticing — and equine psychology, as a discipline, has not yet moved fast enough to address it, and to match the pace. His prescription for both problems is the same: spend time with the horse, keep routines consistent, and resist the instinct to correct behaviour before understanding its cause. The practical steps that follow are unglamorous: reward the horse and care for it without condition, treat it as an individual rather than a unit of performance, and build confidence through proximity and easy work rather than relentless pressure. The industry that takes this seriously, he suggests, will not only produce sounder horses but longer careers — and the competitive results that come with them.