Mi•cro•man•age•ment |ˌmīkrōˈmanijmənt|
Excessive control or attention on details. Control [of] a person or a situation by paying extreme attention to small details.
There are times I am faced with a horse that has a good owner that really cares for their horse and will spare no expense regarding its care. But despite all the attention, the horse seems to swing from one crisis to the next.
I occasionally see horses that never quite reach their potential. The owner spares no effort, but despite promising results in the beginning, the horse never seems to move past that plateau.
These owners, despite their care, effort and sacrifice, never achieve a truly healthy horse. Why not?
As a hoof care provider focusing on the horse as a whole, I’ve taken note of this phenomena for years, and observed some powerful correlations.
As I got to know the owners better, I was able to see the ways in which their research and thought process lead them to make the choices they made.
Let’s take a look at three key areas where I see horse owners micromanaging their horses care: Supplements, “Crisis” decision-making, and The Human Factor. In micromanaging these areas, our helping efforts can become detrimental to the horse’s health.
But first, let’s go back to basics. When I was a student in the Equine Sciences Academy, our first required class was “Critical Thinking”. We had to learn a new way of thinking, to determine the authenticity, accuracy and worth of information. I learned that we can make bad decisions, even with good information and the best intentions.
Supplements
The shear volume of advice about horse care, multiplied by the internet and social media can overwhelm and confuse horse owners. Well meaning and educated experts offer conflicting advice. There is so much to wade through and weigh out. In an effort to get their horses healthy, caring owners amass a supply of nutritional supplements, herbs, feeds, treats, remedies, medicines, blankets and bling that would rival a small tack store! They attend clinics, presentations, join chat groups and get so many recommendations that the list of care for the horse can become unnecessarily overwhelming.
My goal is to help owners become better educated about the perspective of the horse, and to help them make informed decisions. I have a lot of respect for someone who makes an informed decision even if it’s one that I may not totally agree with. Often my perspective from the outside looking in helps them to see how their horse is responding (or not) to what they are doing. How much of our efforts are because we feel the need to do something? Because it gives us comfort? All my clients have heard me say, “less is best, and less is actually more”.
Your horse may be a little stiff and you search for a joint supplement. Supplements abound, and so does the clever marketing behind them, from the advertisements in the magazines that show up in your mailbox to the ads that pop up when you are online. You make a choice based on the marketing information, the packaging and maybe some positive testimonials. You may also be strongly encouraged by your horses Health Care Providers, friends and other horse owners.
Let’s say you were drawn to a Devils Claw product, one advertising Glucosamine and MSM – ingredients you’ve read or heard about as helping with stiff joints. These are the beneficial ingredients you were drawn to, but more often than not, there is very little of that ingredient in the product or what is there is of poor quality. And there are probably a whole lot of other ingredients you don’t want: like grain by products, sweeteners, preservatives and some ingredients you have never heard of and have no idea what they are or do. The waste products (by products), are disclosed in small print, or buried within the catchall label, “other ingredients”. These “other ingredients” are often duplicated with each supplement you buy, compounding the amount of unknowns that you are feeding your horse.
It's the quality of the food/supplement that counts – not the quality of the marketing used to sell it. According to petfoodindustry.com “Companies that incorporate packaging design at the core, perform nearly 200% better than those that don’t focus on design”. The biggest players in the industry make huge profits selling poor quality food/supplements through manipulation that wins over the hearts and minds of… owners.
Dr. Karen Becker DVM
I have a client who came to this reality when her horse became painful in her hind gut which resulted in laminitis, and the horse had no access to grass. She found that alfalfa was a major ingredient in several supplements. Upon ceasing these supplements, the horse became better. Sometimes an owner does not realize they are micromanaging the diet until we go over it by putting everything on the table.
I have sat in many a chair with all the tubs and bags in front of me with a new client as we read through all the labels of all the products they felt their horse needed to be healthy. People think that if a little is good, then more should be better, but nothing can be further from the truth.
The review of all the product ingredients is often a wake up call. When you don’t consider everything, you risk creating an imbalance in the horse that can be linked to the very problem you hope to treat.
One client was convinced by a feed company representative if she did not feed her horse vitamins that he was not getting any! My response was that just because there’s not a label swaying in the breeze on every blade of grass or tied to each bale of hay, doesn’t mean that there are no vitamins or minerals in them, not to mention other beneficial components.
Horses are herbivores and their main source of food is plant forage in nature. Their entire digestive system is designed to process forage in small amounts most of the day and night. The majority of horses receive sufficient nutrition from grass hay and limited pasture available 24/7, loose granular sea salt (which has many other minerals) or Himalayan salt and water. Seriously, that’s it. Even horses in light work, and yes, I am serious. What are the exceptions? If you live in an area that is deficient in certain minerals or an area that has an abundance of other minerals that cancel out important ones, supplements become necessary.
I generally recommend a forage balancer for the horses in my area that balances against high iron called KIS Trace (keep it simple) which you can find here.
Horses make their own vitamin C, get D from living outside, produce most of their B vitamins from hind gut fermentation, E from grass and hay, etc. Many horses are over-supplemented, and there is as much danger in over-supplementing as there is in not supplementing when it is truly needed.
Crisis Decision Making
Another item that could identify you as a micromanager is how you define a crisis and the choices you make when you deem there is one. I have witnessed, on occasion, what I would consider “over reacting” to very minor issues and/or injuries. For example: I was trimming a horse and when I picked up the hind foot, there was a small surface cut on the heel bulb with some dried blood on it. Because the owner was watching me work and happened to see it, she said,” Oh my, what should I do about that?” I looked up at her and then down again at the cut and said, “nothing”. She said, “really?”. To that I replied, “if I was not here today, you might not have seen it. She has no problem letting me trim her hoof. She is not lame and isn’t bothered by it. And you keep your horse’s environment very clean. There is a very good chance you may have never known it was there. It would have healed on its own.” I personally know people that would have hosed it off, scrubbed it with an antiseptic, wrapped it, kept the horse in, and gave them SMZ’s, just in case. These are just examples and meant to help you find the balance.
Let me tell you a true story of a filly I once owned. I had Dee only a short time. Just over a year. She came here with not much handling and the handling she received was, for the most part, in crisis situations. She sliced her forearm muscle open while still with her dam. Was sedated, stitched, had a drain put in, and none of this went well. When she came to my barn, she did not like that area on her forearm touched, drawn attention to or even looked at without pinning her ears and threatening. She had some good reasons for feeling this way. She needed time with me and my herd. Not long after she arrived, one warm morning she laid down facing the board fencing. As the sun put her to sleep, she stretched out her legs and they went through the 2 lower boards. She panicked, kicked the boards out and scraped all 4 legs and her face. One leg swelled up. I did not want to betray our fledgling relationship by taking her down the path where pain + human= more pain. My intuition told me that I should let nature and the healing powers that she had within her do the job. I observed her daily. Being young and having a good foundational diet, would give her immune system what it needed to heal. Within days of moving with the herd, the scrapes scabbed over, the swelling disappeared, and by the end of 2 weeks the hair was being replaced. There was no crisis, no panicked human, no vet call, no drugs, and in the end not even a trace that the injury even happened. I was confronted with the fact that maybe a lot of the treatments we impose are probably not necessary, but you also have to be experienced and discerning enough to go this route. I think we can all agree that once you panic, your decision making becomes challenged. I’ve been there too.
This approach fostered a respect between Dee and I that paid big dividends in relationship building. Not to mention that I learned a HUGE lesson in how much even a little intervention can sometimes get in the way of nature and the body’s innate healing ability.
Going back to the micromanager of the superficial cuts and scrapes, your reaction sets the energy stage. Your stress becomes the horse’s stress. The daily washing of a cut or scrap with wound care products can actually inflame tissue further and cause it to heal slower, even damage live tissue and increase the chances of leaving a scar. The administration of antibiotics damages the microflora of the gut- the heartbeat of the immune system, slowing the healing process. And just so I am not misquoted- there is a balance. There is a time to seek Veterinary care. For example: a deep wound bleeding profusely or swelling and heat where the horse cannot walk. However, in my observations over the years with the ease at which we can get our hands on products, we sometimes use them to a fault and wind up standing in the way of the natural process of healing from the inside out.
What choices do we make for our horse? The human chooses when the horse can come inside and go out, when it eats or waits for food, whether it is alone or with others, whether it moves freely or is bound in a 10x10 stall, even if it lives in and lays on its own excrement, even eats on it because the owner chose not to clean it up; if it uses its own body systems to stay warm or forced to wear a blanket, whether it’s given drugs, poisons, used when injured. The list goes on. For me, Dee’s recovery was a learning opportunity to see again that a lot of treatments we impose are probably not necessary.
The Human Factor
The last item of micromanagement I will relate is what I call the Human Factor. The Human Factor is the correlation of personality, life management, physical and emotional state that the human expresses that is picked up by the horse and displayed for good or bad. In essence, your horse is a pretty accurate mirror of you and what’s going on in your life. This may seem a little farfetched to some, however your connectedness to your horse has a greater influence than you can imagine. One that spills over into physical health.
A Tale of Two Clients… I had 2 clients, each had their own horse, and the two horses were boarded together in the same field. The horses share the same hay and environment. Client A has a lot of stress and health problems in her life. Her horse goes from crisis to crisis with varying amounts of time in between. He is sick, gets injured, and is often lame.
She is influenced by many people with differing schools of thought, and she doesn’t stay with any program long enough to know what works and what is causing problems. She has spent a small fortune on trying to find out the “what’s” and the “why’s”, and the horse never reaches the potential I know he could as a young horse. I have a litany of correspondence from her. This person is what I call a “super micromanager”.
Client B is a happy-go-lucky individual. She travels and has a fun life. If she has stress, I cannot identify it. Her horse is easy going. I can trim him without being tied or anyone being there. He’s cooperative and rarely has any issues, but the few he’s experienced resolve quickly. I haven’t said much about B, because there is not much to say. All is well.
There have been times that I have asked a client to please not hold the lead rope while I trim their horse. Whatever is going on in your life right now is being telegraphed through the lead rope. Your horse is bearing your burdens and is tense. I ask them to go for a walk or sit in the tack room for a few moments. I’ll hand them a calming essential oil and when they return, they are thankful and everyone is relaxed.
I have had a few cases where no matter what we did with my whole team for a horse, we fell short because of the Human Factor. I am overjoyed when owners come to that crisis of conscience and let go. For the ones who cannot or refuse to recognize it, sometimes I have to let go. I have included some links at the end for some modalities that can help people overcome these thoughts, stress and negativity.
When I evaluate horses for owners, I carefully listen to everything the owners have to say. Your energy and how you handle things is often more important than how your saddle fits your horse or what type of feed you give your horse. I have recommended a couple of techniques that owners can use to break these emotional cycles they have become trapped in. If you are a micromanager, you are trapped, and so is your health and the health of your horse. The body, mind, spirit and natural space connection simply cannot be ignored. Go to the links at the end of this article to find a path out of the trap.
I am not pointing fingers…I once was there. I went from the days where so much of what is available today for instant treatment was non-existent. Now, nearly everything can be purchased quickly and cheaply. So much of what we are spending our hard earned money on is probably not necessary. Re-read the paragraph about the Equine Sciences Academy’s Critical Thinking class. You can even audit the class apart from going through the program. We need to learn more about the natural horse, and really think about how we think concerning the choices we make and who they are really being made for. What do horses need to truly be healthy? You will be surprised to find that in most cases, less is best and less is actually more.
Links:
Callahan Technique: http://www.rogercallahan.com/alternative_medicine.html
Emotional Freedom Technique: http://eft.mercola.com/
EMDR Therapy: http://www.emdr.com/general-information/what-is-emdr.html
I have had personal experience with all 3 of these techniques following a serious car accident.