"I found parts of me in Didi and he found parts of him in me. Even though our trail was full of struggles." (Source: Pixabay)

By Lucia Svoradová

Ms. Svoradová won second place in the A category in the LEAF Academy Essay Competition. She chose the topic "My best friend." She studies at the Gymnázium Boženy Slančíkovej Timravy grammar school in Lučenec, central Slovakia.


When I say that my relationship with my best friend is unusual, I mean it. My best friend doesn´t go to school. Everything that he learns is my responsibility. He doesn´t speak my language which makes communication challenging. My best friend has the mind of a 3-year old and the strength of at least 2 grown men. Before we met he was told that his opinion on things doesn´t matter and he should obey anyone and everyone he meets. That he can either agree on taking the role of mute doormat or be punished both physically and emotionally. Yet almost everyone we met normalized his experience since he was starving for love and respect, not for food. At that point, people don´t call it horse abuse. They call it training. They call it horsemanship. They call it tough love. I want to speak for my Didi today because he doesn´t have his own voice. None of the horses I know do.

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For as long as I can remember I always wanted my own horse and I had high expectations of it. I went to my first riding school when I was 7 and it stuck with me ever since. I loved horses maybe even more than anything else and I still do. But I was always presented with love for horses as being tough and built on hierarchy and respect. Respect that didn’t go both ways. The idea was rooted in me and I was convinced that horses are meant to be ridden with force and treated as beasts otherwise they´ll be dangerous. I kept this belief system for a long time. After all, I never came across any different approaches to horse training. Everyone around me, high-ranked horse riders, trainers, and peers followed what our ancestors did for thousands of years. It wasn´t until my parents decided to buy me Didi that I started doing some deeper research on my own. Didi was brought to me to be a “horse-teacher”. This is what we equestrians call a mature, experienced horse that can pass knowledge to its rider. This plan, however, didn´t go as expected. The more I learned about force-free training the more I saw how poor his mental health was. He was only ever admired for his exotic appearance brought from Spain, never for his personality which he later stopped showing. He fell into learned hopelessness, which is a state of mind where horses stop trying to meet their needs because they know they´ll be rejected and punished. I decided to take him, a full-grown horse, and start over. Unteach him the toxic habits of shutting down and show him how to voice his needs. At that point, our dedicated roles reversed. I became his teacher.

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However, it wasn´t easy at all. Even though I was patient and I spent every evening researching force-free training methods I still didn´t have any experience or support system to rely on. Especially the support system was important in our early days. But back then no one trusted our process. And to be fair I now don´t blame them. Since my top priority back then was to get him out of learned helplessness and that was by showing him the option to say no. Which in their belief system horses aren‘t supposed to have. I showed him that when he says no to me, to work, to petting, he won´t be punished as before. So naturally, once he learned to say no he applied it to everything. It was a frustrating but necessary phase to go through. Now I know that every force-free trainer went through this phase when changing their methods. But I didn´t know that back then. Neither did the people around me and they all lost hope in Didi. So just like that, I was losing hope in myself, and the training methods but most importantly I was losing hope in Didi too. I don´t recall why I didn´t stop force-free training. It may be because somewhere deep inside of me, I still believed in my friendship with Didi. So I continued and it began to appear that we slowly gained trust in each other and our bond strengthened.

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But it wasn´t just my lack of trust in myself that kept us from faster growth. People were cruel. They were just as uneducated as I had been when I held a whip in my fist ready to assert my fragile dominance. They saw one side of Didi´s journey and assumed that that was the whole picture. They had the same mindset as I once had and that is the part of the whole situation that hurts the most.

That I would´ve agreed with them if it hadn´t been for finding research in training with positive reinforcement. I´d agree that Didi belongs in a slaughterhouse and that he´s worthless just because he dares to reject their command. It sounds unbelievable now that I write it down. That someone would say such a thing to a living being even though that is the reality of the equestrian industry right now. Force-free training is still incredibly rare in the world. But I and Didi are building a community of gentle trainers and slowly but surely we´re walking toward a better future for horses. It took months to get where we are right now and our journey is still far from the end.

From all the benefits I gained through the past year, I want to mention one specifically. Along with helping Didi with standing up for himself, meeting his needs, and saying no to uncomfortable situations, I also learned the same things myself. I found parts of me in Didi and he found parts of him in me. Even though our trail was full of struggles. Even though we are from two completely different worlds and our meeting was more or less accidental, we are meant for each other, and that for me is the true definition of a best friend.

The English Essay Competition is organised by LEAF Academy, an international boarding high school in Bratislava. The competition is open to all Slovak students from primary and secondary schools who are passionate about writing in the English language.

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