Wow! I can’t believe the amount of questions and comments I received through my gee-mail account in response to my last posting. Thank you, everyone, for your kind interest in my blog, and please accept my apologies for the lateness of this reply. Apparently it is related to soreness in my human’s fingers, or some such.

Which brings me to a question that has been asked quite a lot: "My human tries to sit on me even if I have a sore back, or a headache. I’ve heard that humans do this because they don’t feel pain like we do. Is this true?"

The answer to that is, no, it’s not true. Humans do feel pain, exactly like us. What they lack is the capacity to keep quiet about it. Try it for yourself if you will: Give your human a gentle nip with your teeth, no more that you would do when grooming your field mates – but watch out, your human may slap you in return! It certainly will start a great hue and cry, showing every predator in hearing range that it’s been injured and therefore easy to catch. Nobody knows exactly how humans have survived until now, given this kind of (frankly stupid) behaviour, but a prevalent theory is that all humans nowadays are descendants of those who had the good sense to sit on a fast horse when they did that kind of thing.

So, humans have no concept of keeping quiet when they’re in pain. Unfortunatley, as a result, they reason (and I use the word ‘reason’ in its loosest possible sense) that unless you’re limping for England, you’re perfectly fine, and they will go ahead on sit on you.

"That’s all very interesting, but how do I actually stop my human from sitting on me in such a situation?"

Well, that’s where it gets tricky. Many trainers nowadays will tell you that your human is "taking the mickey" and "needs a firm hand", usually recommending methods that rank from simply refusing to move after your human has mounted to bucking it off immediately. Personally I disagree with these methods, as they tend to destroy your human’s confidence. Always remember that in the past a human that got separated from its horse was as good as dead, so by asking it not to sit on you, you’re asking it to go against a deeply rooted survival instinct.

The way forward here is to teach your human that not everything is out to get it, and we will work on that using a series of simple exercises that I will explain in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!