We recently connected with Emily Kieson and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

I first started riding horses when I was ten and later, at about 14 years old, I started riding regularly. Later, in my 20s, I became a fulltime instructor and trainer, following the mantras, principles, and techniques of Olympic dressage riders, renowned competitors in Western Pleasure, and every natural horsemanship trainer I could find. Sometime during this journey, I started asking questions about horses and the interactions between horses and humans that resulted in our current riding paradigms. Every instructor and clinician had a different answer, often contradicting one another. My frustration and desire for clarity took me down a path to explore the science of equine behavioral psychology and provided enlightening insights into the relationship between horses and humans. It also shed light on how current practices did not align with the science of horse and human psychology. At the time I could not find anyone who saw the patterns I was finding and the industry as a whole was still stuck on training and behavioral shaping, even if it had shifted away from natural horsemanship and onto learning theory. But in the last five years, the entire field, influenced no doubt by equine welfare issues at the Olympics, high level dressage, and horse racing, has made huge turns to look at the welfare of horses according to the horse perspective. It’s a great time to explore new approaches in this field!

Emily, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

As I mentioned before, my path to my career began with the need to find out more information about how horses understood humans and finding a void of knowledge in equine behavioral psychology. It was during my time as a horse trainer and riding instructor that a social worker friend of mine told me I should consider looking into equine-assisted services. I hadn’t heard much about equine-assisted mental health services so I thought that maybe they might have more answers regarding the nuances of the horse-human relationship. I took my first training in an equine-assisted services (EAS) model in 2011 and quickly realized that their knowledge of the horse-human interaction had originated from the equitation field. This was discouraging, but I had hope that other models might have more insight. So I continued to take trainings in EAS and it became very clear that many, if not most, of the models in EAS at the time were based on principles of equitation or traditional or natural horsemanship. This, of course, was frustrating for me so I concluded that if anyone knew the nuances of horses and humans, it would be in science. So I enrolled in the MSc program at the University of Edinburgh for Equine Science. I was excited to see there was a lot of research around horse-human interactions, but was still discouraged at the lack of research in the relationships between ourselves and horses. This meant that the research I had so desperately tried to find had yet to be done. This meant that I went back to school again, this time to do a PhD to do the research I thought was needed.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I hadn’t really stopped to consider career options once I finished my degree, I was only focused on conducting the research I new was needed in the field. Thankfully, during my time as a PhD candidate, I met a woman who ran a nonprofit organization in Sweden that was interested in my work. I partnered with her and worked as Research Director while building new educational modules in Scandinavia. Shortly after I graduated, that organization shifted its focus and I needed to find a home for my work. In addition to finding associate faculty positions at a few universities to develop courses and teach online, I founded Equine International so that my colleagues and I could have a home for our research. My work at the Swedish nonprofit had provided me with networking opportunities in Europe and those contacts served me well as I built the new US-based nonprofit. Since then, we’ve partnered with organizations all over Europe, the US, Canada, and Mongolia and are building even more with partners in Africa with hopes of linking to South America in the near future. While many of us still maintain parttime work, we have gotten grants for doing research and building education and are currently partnered with different equine facilities in both the US and Europe to develop better research-based EAS programs that are tailored to different populations and cultures and which embody the concepts of One Welfare and mutual well-being of both horses and humans.
A big part of our research is looking at who horses are without people and, in order to do that, we need to look at horses living in natural conditions where they are free to choose the lives they lead within free-living breeding groups on huge territories. Since this research is not well funded, my colleagues and I run trips where we take people to learn about free-living horses and better understand how these horses can provide greater insights into the welfare of our own domestic equines. This provides my team an I opportunities to collect video data on the behavior of these horses in order to build a greater understanding of equine social lives and how they make and maintain social bonds. The goal is to map out these behaviors (in ethograms) so that we can better understand how these play out in the domestic world and when and if they occur within the human-horse relationship to give us insights into the quality of these connections. Of course, much of this is also used to help build and improve EAS, too.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

A story that shares my resilience…I think this is an important question to ask anyone who feels they are in a “good” position in their career. No career is a straight path, especially those that engage in new discussions or perspectives or hope to build new understanding in existing fields. For me, I felt very alone in my pursuits. For years (yes, years) I thought I was the only one who saw the misalignment between how we were taught to handle horses and what we were really hoping for with regards to connection and relationships with our equine partners. Anytime I brought it up with others in the horse world, I was met with dismissal and, in some cases, disgust. It was very lonely and very hard for a long time. At one point during graduate school, I was living alone in the middle of rural Oklahoma in a renovated school house where the ceiling leaked every time it rained and, if it rained hard enough, a stream would run from my front door through the living room, almost to the back door. I had a collection of pots and pans to catch the water and a stack of old towels to soak up the river. At the same time, I was asked to dedicate a lot of time to research for which I had little interest in order to fulfill the requirements of the university. I was falling into deeper debt since the university stipend barely paid for gas and groceries and all of my spare time was spent growing my own food, baking my own bread, bartering for eggs and meat (which I had to butcher myself), and convincing myself every day that it would somehow be worth it. I gave up more than once and many times could not see the end result of my work, but I had come too far and there was no way back. I had little social support and was working four parttime jobs in addition to graduate school to make ends meet. It was hard. To be honest, if it was easier and I had a soft place to land, I might not have finished. I had no choice but to continue, cultivate connections where I could find them, and cherish the budding relationships that eventually grew into the amazing connections and collaborations I have now. It was a lot of hope and faith, but it was painful, I’m not going to lie. In hindsight I can call it resilience. At the time it was necessity and survival and a lot of hope.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

I would say that, in any field, success has as much to do with connections as it does with training. But not just any connection or networking, I’m talking about the kinds of connections based on mutual passion, compassion, a desire to build a better future beyond your work, and an honest drive to help others succeed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.equineintl.org
• Facebook: Equine International Research Institute
• Other: https://www.learningwild.net

Image Credits

Photo Credits go to Jean Sinclair, Bonny Mealand, and myself