Join Noëlle each week, as she embarks on a journey to explore the vast and diverse world of horses, delving into the many sub-communities and cultures that shape our shared passion.
This podcast is about more than just riding styles or training techniques; it's about celebrating the deep connection between humans and horses, and understanding the common threads that tie us together.
Whether you're a seasoned rider or just starting out, you'll find inspiration, knowledge, and a sense of belonging in every episode.
Subscribe or follow, wherever you get your podcasts with episodes dropping weekly.
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Données mises à jour le 07/10/2026
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When the Bridle Comes Off, the Truth Comes Out | A Letter to Lady (Unbridled)
Saison 2 · Épisode 40
mardi 6 octobre 2026 • Durée 15:56
I wrote my mare a letter the day she came to me. Out in the field with her, with G grazing nearby, I read it to her out loud for the first time. It is the most honest thing I have said about horsemanship in fourteen years.
Fourteen years I spent interviewing the horse world's best — the trainers and riders everyone turns to for answers. Then Lady arrived, more wild than tame, and I stepped in front of the camera to say the one thing the interviewer's chair never let me say: I don't know.
That admission is where Unbridled begins.
This is the solo letter underneath the whole series — the private writing that became the reason I made it. Lady came to me more questioning than compliant, unwilling to perform a smaller version of herself for anyone's comfort. Loving her made it impossible to stay safely behind the microphone. She asked me harder questions than any guest ever had. Not "can you make me do this," but "how can you meet me if you will not meet yourself?"
Somewhere in there my horsemanship began to change, and so did I. I call it rewilding — taking the bridle off my horse and the invisible one off myself at once. Fit in. Obey. Be manageable. Do not become too much. Lady answers every one of those instructions by simply being who she is.
When the bridle comes off, the truth comes out. Without the equipment and the familiar measures of success, what remains? Two bodies. Two nervous systems. Two living beings trying to understand each other across the line between species.
This letter is about worthiness — and how Lady taught me it was never a thing I earn by knowing enough. It lives in the willingness to listen, to repair, to begin again.
If you have ever loved a horse who would not let you hide, this one is for you.
Unbridled is a six-part series following me and my horses across North America, asking whether partnership can go somewhere freer than control. Lady is the reason it exists.
▶️ Watch Unbridled — Catch the SEASON PREMIERE on Youtube MONDAY, OCTOBER 19 AT 4PM ET
and binge the whole season! at NF+ https://noellefloyd.com/pages/noelle-floyd-unbridled
In This Episode:
Why she almost didn't make Unbridled — the fear that fourteen years of interviews still left her unworthy of her own horse.
The gap between a horse obeying you and a horse choosing you, and why only one survives the bridle coming off.
What Lady asks that no technique can answer: how can you meet me if you will not meet yourself?
Rewilding horsemanship — taking the restraints off the horse and off yourself in the same motion.
Why "I don't know" became the beginning of her authority instead of the end of it.
The promises she wrote to a horse she had dreamed about before they ever met.
Chapters:
0:00 — Out in the field with Lady (and G)
1:00 — Why she writes letters to her horses
2:31 — "Dear Lady" — the letter begins
3:52 — The mare unlike any she'd met
5:10 — When the bridle comes off, the truth comes out
8:00 — Rewilding her horsemanship, rewilding herself
9:00 — The Fool, the threshold, the heroine's journey
11:37 — What Unbridled actually became
13:02 — "You did not come here to heal me"
14:50 — Worthiness, and the horsewoman she's becoming
Interested in more from Noëlle?
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
The Horse Husband: How Evan Went From Terrified to the Barn Every Day ] No Stupid Questions with Evan the Groom
mardi 29 septembre 2026 • Durée 55:46
The same patience it takes to earn a horse's trust is the patience Evan the Groom brings to teaching the rest of us. He came to horses the way most people never do — from the outside, with no background, terrified of the biggest one in the barn — and turned that beginner's-eye view into an education. Today he does the horse grooming and horse care in his wife's dressage business, and the horse world knows him as the viral comedian who makes the barn make sense to people who have never touched a horse.
This is a No Stupid Questions episode, and it is one of my favorites we have done. Evan explains horses the way he once needed them explained to him — no jargon, no ego, just plain answers to the things beginners are too embarrassed to ask out loud.
He was an engineer turning algae into protein. Then marketing. Then the pandemic took his job, his wife Ashley needed help at the barn, and he picked up a camera. The videos were meant to make his own family laugh — people who knew nothing about horses. Instead they built a following, and somewhere in there Evan became something he never trained to be: an educator.
We get into the skill he rates above all others and hears discussed least — observation, watching for the thing that is off today — and how six years of it on the ground is only now showing up in the saddle. His advice for every "horse husband" and non-horse partner out there: just support that. Why he would rather make a video so ridiculous you remember it than one only horse people understand, and how a loogie teaches you the word "hock." The groom's real job when no one is watching: being the horse's constant. And the mare who taught him the most — a year to earn her trust, and then, he says, she gives you everything.
There is also a talking pony named Piper, a children's book about a lost little bird, and — as of last week — his first ride off the lunge line.
If someone in your life doesn't understand the horse thing — or if you're the one at the rail — send them this.
Evan is a groom, content creator, and horse-care specialist in Southern California, where he works alongside his wife, dressage trainer Ashley Donant. He built his following making horses funny and reachable for people who have never touched one.
How Steffen Peters Trains a Horse: Self-Carriage, Groundwork & a New Stallion (Part 2)
Saison 2 · Épisode 38
lundi 21 septembre 2026 • Durée 53:42
A horse has two choices. Learn to accept the bit, or fight it for the rest of its life.
That's Steffen Peters, and this is the half where his hands are on the reins. If you heard Part 1, you met the man — six Olympics, the dark place, the way back. This one is the horse training — the groundwork up through Grand Prix. Forty years of it, distilled into the way he starts a five-year-old and the way he brought a brand-new stallion into the ring after two weeks together.
Here's the thing that runs through all of it: he doesn't push a horse into the bridle. Ever. He thinks ninety-five percent of horses are ridden with too much contact, and he'll tell you why "more hind legs, more into the hand" was never the answer for him. What he wants is suppleness, self-carriage, lightness — a soft rein you can see, and a horse that carries itself instead of leaning on your hand.
We get into where that starts, and it is earlier than you would think. The groundwork — on a lead rope, in a halter — the horse that stops when you stop without a pull on the rope. He calls it cooperation, not submission, and he means the difference exactly. From there it's the walk work most riders rush past, the half halt that becomes a reflex, the spur as a reminder and never a crutch, and the three aids he says are the only tools you really have.
There's the new stallion — fourteen, extremely smart, the horse that trained his rider to say "don't quit." There's Totilas, and what it takes to watch someone beat you and mean it when you call it good. And there's the compliment two vets paid him without knowing he could hear: at Steffen's barn, they can't make any money — because of the walk breaks, and what they save.
If Part 1 was how he learned to manage himself, this is how he manages the conversation with the horse. Same man. Now the method.
Steffen Peters is a German-born American dressage rider, a six-time Olympian and multiple Olympic medalist, and one of the most decorated dressage athletes in United States history. He returned to competition this year, opening his season aboard a new stallion with wins across the Prix St. Georges, the Intermediaire I, and the Grand Prix.
0:00 Riding Becomes Training 01:39 Flow State With New Stallion 02:19 Suppleness Over Hind Legs 04:37 Stop the Nagging Leg 05:52 Feel Over Looks 08:16 How Much Contact 11:57 Western Lightness Lessons 13:45 Warmup Is Training 17:30 Mindful Aids and Tools 20:38 Reliable Tests and Nerves 22:32 Refining Pressure Release 25:05 Walk Work and Discipline 27:12 Quiet Coaching Shift 27:54 Trainer Judge Clinics 29:06 From Thinking To Reflex 31:02 Flow State In Competition 34:09 Building Presence On Ground 37:46 Mindfulness In Daily Life 41:04 Rapid Fire Questions 47:59 New Stallion Partnership 50:26 Walk Breaks And Longevity
What this Dressage Rider Learned From a Cowboy - Kasey Perry-Glass
Saison 2 · Épisode 34
mercredi 26 août 2026 • Durée 01:21:37
You get the thing you chased for five years.
And the ride is the worst one you've ever put down.
Kasey Perry-Glass reached the Olympic Games on the horse she bought to take her there — Doublé — and came home into a depression that blindsided her. This is the conversation under the medal photo. What it costs to want something that badly, and what she found on the far side of it.
She married a cowboy. Dana Glass starts colts and takes in the horses other people gave up on — the rearers, the buckers, the bolters, carrying baggage nobody unpacked. Two worlds under one roof: her classical dressage, his groundwork. What one taught the other is most of this hour.
We get into the perfectionism that dressage rewards and then punishes — a score out of 100 that stays out of reach, a sport where the best mark is a C or a D on a good day. Why she stopped posting to social media. The line Martin Black uses, let them cook, and why ending a ride a little early beats grinding it into the ground. Pain versus behavior, and the checklist she taught Dana: clear the ulcers, the hindgut, the teeth, before anyone calls it attitude.
Then the mental game she learned the hard way. Finding her number with Annette Paterakis — the exact pitch of nerves and calm that lets her ride her best. The work with Dr. Jenny Susser. Blacking out in the saddle, ten minutes gone, grinding the same movement. Boundaries. Getting told she was "too nice" for this sport, and what she kept anyway.
Behind the vertical, point of balance, throughness without a single draw rein — she explains the dressage the way she explained it to Dana, the sport he first met through her.
This one is for anyone who has wanted something so badly it made them small, and found their way back to the size they actually are.
Kasey Perry-Glass is a US Olympic dressage rider — team bronze at Rio 2016 (America's first Olympic dressage medal since 2004) and team silver at the 2018 World Equestrian Games — who competes as Kasey Perry. Her longtime partner was the Grand Prix gelding Doublé (Goerklintgaards Dublet), now retired; she currently campaigns Heartbeat W.P. She and her husband, cowboy and colt-starter Dana Glass, run Two Worlds Equestrian, joining Western horsemanship and Grand Prix dressage under one program.
In This Episode You'll Learn Chapters:
The Move Most People Get Backwards With a Cow — and What It Teaches About Horse Training | Martin Black (Pt. 2)
Saison 2 · Épisode 33
lundi 17 août 2026 • Durée 01:06:39
You think the cow is the hard part.
She isn't. You are.
You get ahead of her to turn her, and she beats you to the herd every time. You spur, you pull, the horse's head comes up, and now nobody is watching the cow at all.
Martin Black has read millions of head of cattle, and the horse training lesson underneath all of it is the one almost everybody gets backwards. To cut one cow out, you leave her alone and stir the herd around her. To turn her, you turn away — not toward. The horse rates the cow the way a foal learns to rate its mother in the first thirty minutes of life. It's already in there. Our job is to stay out of the road so the horse can use it.
This is Part 2 of my week with Martin on his ranch in the Great Basin. Part 1 is the ranch, the horses, and reading the moment — start there.
We work the balance point and the flight zone, and why a cow reads your horse's head like a horn and your horse's hip like something softer. Why getting in front of a cow to block her only sends her faster. What Tom Dorrance told Martin decades ago about turning tail, and how that one idea makes a green horse handier by the day. Gene Lewis, his mother's cousin, and jumpers that rate a fence with nobody telling them where to put their feet.
Then the part that reshaped how I keep my own horses. Turnout over stalls. Bare feet when the ground allows. A crick to cross and rocks to pick through, because a horse who has to sort out the terrain grows savvy, and a horse who never has to stays a passenger.
Martin runs horses as a business, not a companion animal, and says his vet bills will stand against anyone's. Colic almost unheard of. Feet the ground keeps honest. It made me ask what I was really protecting when I bubble-wrapped mine.
The horse training here is subtraction, not addition. Cows think more like horses than you'd guess, and empathy runs under all of it.
Martin Black is a lifelong Great Basin horseman and stockman from a multi-generation ranching family, working in the vaquero tradition and the lineage of Tom Dorrance. He spent ten years starting young horses at Calumet Farm in Lexington and now teaches horsemanship and stockmanship through clinics and a ranch school.
In This Episode You'll Learn
Why You Should Stop Patting Your Horse | Martin Black on Western Horse Training
Saison 2 · Épisode 32
lundi 10 août 2026 • Durée 01:00:46
We pat our horses to tell them they did well.
Martin Black says the horse would rather we kept our hands to ourselves.
He has spent a life inside western horse training — starting close to five hundred colts a year on the same Great Basin country his family has ranched since the 1860s, seventy miles from his nearest neighbor, the road over the mountain closed all winter. And what he showed me this week is that the pat is for us. The reward the horse is after is chemical: the flood of serotonin and dopamine that arrives when pressure lifts and the body comes home to rest. Martin calls it the cocktail. Rouse the horse, bring him down, and he licks his lips — he got his drink, and he will go to that edge with you again because he knows you will take him to the bar after.
This is western horse training as one of its living masters practices it, and almost none of it looks like technique.
Martin reads a colt the way the rest of us read a single sentence — ten things at once. He calls it peripheral thinking. The predator in us locks onto the prey: the outcome, the lead change, the plan for the day. Martin holds the objective and lets the plan bend to whatever the horse hands him. The seed that wants to grow today gets watered today. The one that is not ready waits.
We talk about the hours. I could shadow him in Idaho for years and still not own his timing, because feel does not transfer. You earn it one horse at a time, and no clinic sells it.
We talk about why he trains his cattle the way his family has since the 1860s — the rodear, the old vaquero work that crossed from Spain and reached Texas two centuries late — and why a dressage horse belongs on a cow as much as any ranch gelding does.
And we go into the cowboy neuroscience of it: sympathetic arousal, homeostasis, pressure and its relief as one thing rather than two. Dr. Steve Peters pulled Martin out of a lineup for this. Martin calls himself a bartender. He once waited forty-five minutes on a traumatized cutting mare, feeling her heartbeat through the saddle horn, until she finally licked her lips and found her way home.
In This Episode You'll Learn Chapters
Monty Roberts, Alexandra Kurland, and the Future of Horse Training
Saison 2 · Épisode 32
mardi 4 août 2026 • Durée 18:26
When I was eleven, my mom handed me The Man Who Listens to Horses.
Last week, the man who wrote it died.
Within days, the horse world also lost Alexandra Kurland — the woman who spent decades convincing us that a clicker and a handful of food belonged in serious horse training.
This is a solo episode. An essay, read aloud, on two pioneers who stood in opposite corners of horse training and still moved the same conversation forward. On join up, and what it asks of a flight animal sent around a round pen. On positive reinforcement, and why handing a horse food never automatically creates consent. On the disputed parts of Monty's story, and why we can hold gratitude and discernment at the same time.
And underneath it all, the question I keep circling: why do we need our teachers to be heroes?
We put trainers on pedestals. The flaws appear — they always do — and reverence flips to contempt overnight. Either way, the person is never allowed to be human. And pedestals are useless to horses. A pedestal has never once made a horse feel safer, calmer, or less confused about what we are asking.
I believe we are living through the biggest shift in the human-horse relationship since machines took horses out of our fields and our wars. The question used to be: can the horse do it? The question becoming ours is: what does it cost the horse to do it? Did the horse understand, or did it simply stop resisting? Does the absence of conflict mean the horse feels safe?
One day, we will be the outdated ones. The next generation will see pressure we could not recognize and pain we rationalized. I hope so. If they never outgrow us, we failed to help them see farther.
Monty Roberts and Alexandra Kurland do not need us to decide which one was right. They need us to carry the torch. And the torch is not join up. The torch is not the clicker. The torch is the responsibility to keep listening.
Thank you, Monty. Thank you, Alexandra. This one is for the lineage — and for my mom, who put that book in my hands.
Your Saddle Fits a Horse That No Longer Exists — Letitia Glenn on Horse Care
Saison 2 · Épisode 31
mercredi 22 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:16:25
You measure with your hand while he stands there.
Then he takes a step, and the horse you measured is gone.
Saddle fit is horse care. I rode my whole life before anyone said that to me plainly.
I met Letitia Glenn, founder of Contour Saddlery™, at Road to the Horse. She had seen footage of me riding, and the first thing she thought—which she then said to my face, out loud—was that I did not know what I did not know about saddles. She was right. I brought her to Florida on the hottest day of that summer, rode in one of her saddles, and felt my mare Lady's scapula move with a freedom it never had on the whole road trip.
Letitia came to horses at 47, with a two-year-old Paso Fino stallion named Echo, and has spent the last quarter century asking one question: Why do so many saddles fit a standing horse, yet interfere with the horse once it begins to move?
She found part of the answer backpacking. Fifty-five pounds, eight miles, the Rocky Mountains. Picture the corner of a book pressed into your spine. You will contort away from it. Horses do the same. Pressure behind the scapula changes posture, alters movement through the entire body, and creates compensation patterns that no amount of riding can truly fix.
So we explore what she looks for: the upward head nod at the walk on a loose rein, the Four Bs, the belly tickle test, and the hollow behind the scapula that reveals chronic restriction. We also discuss why the interface(the space between the saddle and the moving back) matters just as much as the saddle itself, and how the Contour Saddlery™ Saddle System and the VersaFit™ Saddle Pad System were developed to help accommodate the horse's changing shape in motion by restoring shoulder freedom and improving pressure distribution.
We also get into the part of horse care that never appears on a bill of sale. Saddle fitters are often paid by the brand they recommend. Trainers sometimes receive commissions on the tack their students buy. An expensive saddle isn't proof of a better fit—it may simply reflect a larger marketing budget.
Horse Training and the Nervous System: What's Really Happening in Your Horse's Brain | Dr. Stephen Peters (Pt. 2)
Saison 2 · Épisode 30
mardi 14 juillet 2026 • Durée 50:36
We say we want a willing horse.
Then we climb on, and we start cramming.
And when the horse gets tight, or slow, or stuck, we do the one thing that guarantees it gets worse — we add pressure.
This is Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Stephen Peters, and this time he brought a horse's brain. Cut in half, in his hands, on the table between us. He points to the cingulate. He points to the little kidney-bean pituitary. And he shows me, physically, the difference between a horse who can talk itself back down and a horse who has no way back.
That difference has a name. It's a chemical called GABA.
An empowered horse can produce it — can send the "stand down" signal before the cortisol ever floods the system. A horse in learned helplessness can't reach it. Same event, two completely different animals, and most of what separates them is what we wired in, and the state we wired it in.
We get into the cocktail — dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, oxytocin, serotonin — and why drilling the same exercise seven times flattens every one of them. Why release is not the same thing as relief, and only the horse gets to tell you which one it was. Why recovery, the part everyone skips, is where the learning actually locks in. And why an hour on the clock is a human invention your horse never agreed to.
Then it opens out — touch, exercise, diet, the five domains, allo-grooming, the prairie voles who fall apart in isolation and settle the second the herd rushes back in.
And we close on Charles Darwin. Not the line everyone quotes. The one almost nobody does — the one where he says it's the cooperative communities, the ones that bond and help each other, that represent the highest level of evolution.
Horses have the chemistry for that built in. Dr. Peters' whole argument is simple: let's use it.
Start with Part 1 if you haven't — this picks up right where we left off.
Your Horse Isn't Being Bad — Dr. Stephen Peters on Horse Behavior, the Nervous System & Learned Helplessness Part 1 sponsored by Total Feeds
Saison 2 · Épisode 29
mardi 7 juillet 2026 • Durée 52:35
Every rider has said it. He's being stubborn. She's testing me. He knows better.
Here's the harder, truer thing underneath: the horse isn't being anything. The horse is a nervous system, doing the one job every nervous system has — trying to stay safe.
Dr. Stephen Peters spends this conversation taking me under the behavior, into the brain that produced it. He's a neuropsychologist, co-author of Evidence-Based Horsemanship, and the person I call when I want to actually understand my horses instead of just managing them. This time we sat down as two diagnosed neurodivergent people talking about horse behavior from the inside — which is its own kind of honesty.
He explains why the horse that shoves past you off the trailer isn't defiant. It's running a pathway you built, three good grazes at a time. He calls it myelination, and once you hear how it works, you stop blaming the horse and start watching what you're teaching when you think you're not teaching anything.
We go into the thing so many of us get exactly backwards. You hit a wall, so you add pressure. More leg, more spur, more insistence. And Peters says it plainly: almost always the answer was to let the nervous system reset, not to push harder. Push harder and you don't get through the noise — you become the noise.
Then we get to the part I asked him to slow down on. Learned helplessness. The old experiment neither of us can listen to without flinching, and what it tells us about the quiet, compliant, "well-behaved" horse who has simply learned that nothing he does matters. That's not a trained horse. That's a horse who stopped voting.
And near the end, something bigger opens up. Peters describes the freeze — the shutdown that isn't a choice, the body flooding itself with its own opioids so it can survive what it can't escape. He says the thing I most needed someone with his credentials to say out loud: that response is the nervous system deciding, not the animal, and not the person it happens to. If you've ever been asked why you didn't fight back, this part is for you as much as your horse.
Total Feeds
Our mission to provide quality nutrition to people and animals puts us in contact with all manner of interesting folks. Whether you're interested in our animal feed, or the people involved in the animal industry: you'll find it at Total Feeds!
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
Want to go deeper into the training behind a clean, confident flying change?
In his new NOËLLE FLOYD Masterclass, six-time Olympian Steffen Peters breaks down the entire process—from developing the right canter, balance and response to the aids to introducing the change and troubleshooting tension, anticipation, crookedness and changes that are late behind.
Learn more and watch Training the Flying Change with Steffen Peters: https://noellefloyd.com/pages/flying-changes-with-steffen-peters
Interested in more from Noëlle?
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
What it costs to reach an Olympic Games and ride your worst test there, and the depression Kasey came home to
The perfectionism dressage rewards and then punishes, chasing a score out of 100 in a sport where a great mark is a C
Let them cook: why ending a ride a little early beats grinding a movement into the ground
The pain-versus-behavior checklist Kasey taught Dana — ulcers, hindgut, teeth, before anyone calls it attitude
Finding your number with sports psychologist Annette Paterakis — the exact pitch of nerves and calm that lets you ride your best
Blacking out in the saddle, ten minutes gone on the same movement, and the mental work that pulled her out
Behind the vertical made plain: the poll as the highest point, and why a horse's own point of balance can't be copied and pasted
Throughness without a single draw rein, and how groundwork gave an Olympic rider tools her dressage babies never had
0:00 How Kasey met a cowboy 4:51 What Dana does: colt starting & unpacking a horse's trauma 8:41 Groundwork, the rope halter & being a beginner again 14:34 [ad: Total Feeds] 15:14 The perfectionism dressage rewards and punishes 19:51 Let them cook: ending on a good note 23:17 Pain vs. behavior: what we blame on the horse 29:05 Bringing two worlds together 30:36 Welfare, eliminations & the "blood" rule 33:44 [ad: Noëlle's Substack] 36:07 Judging transparency & educating the viewer 39:21 Behind the vertical, explained 41:44 Point of balance & throughness without draw reins 44:47 Training aids as tools; groundwork informs the saddle 49:34 The Olympics — and the depression after 53:44 Patience in a same-day world 57:22 The mental game: finding your number 1:02:29 Boundaries, thick skin & remaking herself 1:07:19 Tough vs. strong; raising horses and kids 1:12:50 Rapid-fire questions
Episode Sponsor:Connaway & Associates Equine Insurance Services, Inc.
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Made for early mornings in the barn and long days in the saddle. Whether you're hauling feed, chasing daylight on the trail, or loading up for a weekend on the road, YETI coolers and drinkware are built to handle it.
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
If you want to go further with your own horse, NF+ has 70+ masterclasses at noellefloydplus.com or through the app link in the show notes.
The move almost everyone gets backwards: to hold a single cow, you leave her alone and stir the herd around her
Why getting in front of a cow to block her only sends her faster back to the herd — and what to do the instant she turns
How a cow reads your horse's head like a horn and your horse's hip like something softer, so a leg-yield moves her where a headbutt would spook her
What Tom Dorrance told Martin about turning tail to a cow, and how it makes a green horse rounder and handier by the day
Gene Lewis and colts that rate a fence themselves, with nobody telling them where to put their feet
Why a collected walk finally had a purpose the day Noelle worked cattle on Lady
What ten years starting babies at Calumet and a lifetime in the Great Basin say about turnout, bare feet, and letting a horse sort out rough ground
The barbed-wire story, and what a horse who navigates real terrain has that a bubble-wrapped one lacks
Chapters
0:00 Part 2: cutting a cow by leaving her alone 1:40 Holding cattle without a fence — what it takes 3:40 Sorting without stalking: keeping a cow parasympathetic 5:40 Cows think like horses — Dr. Peters & Temple Grandin 8:30 The old way wasn't the cruel way 10:40 After WWII: how the mechanized age lost the horsemanship 11:20 What a chuck wagon really was (Great Basin history) 14:34 [ad: Total Feeds] 17:49 The balance point & flight zone, explained 21:00 Rating: the foal, the herd, and the safe place 26:40 Headbutt vs. tail-butt: why a leg-yield moves a cow softer 30:40 The move most people get backwards: never turn into the cow 33:43 [ad: Noelle's Substack] 34:47 Predator habits that get in the way 37:30 Tom Dorrance on turning tail 40:50 Gene Lewis: horses that rate the jump themselves 47:00 Managing horses naturally: turnout over stalls 49:00 Barefoot when the ground allows 52:00 Rough terrain makes a savvy horse — the barbed-wire story 55:00 Horses as a business, not a companion animal 59:40 Advice for urban riders: get out of the arena
Episode Sponsor: Total Feeds
Our mission to provide quality nutrition to people and animals puts us in contact with all manner of interesting folks. Whether you're interested in our animal feed, or the people involved in the animal industry: you'll find it at Total Feeds!
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
Part one of two. In part two, Martin takes it to the ground — reading cattle by the million, and moving one cow out of a herd by leaving her alone.
Martin Black is a Great Basin horseman and colt starter who has started close to five hundred colts a year, working the same remote Idaho country his family has ranched since the 1860s. He carries the lineage of Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt into a plainer, harder question: what does the horse in front of you need?
Why the pat you give after a good round is for you, and what the horse is asking for instead.
The cocktail — how serotonin and dopamine turn pressure and its release into the reward the horse remembers.
Peripheral thinking: reading ten things at once, and why the predator in us locks onto only one.
Why Martin holds the objective and lets the horse choose which seed grows today.
The forty-five-minute wait on a traumatized cutting mare, and the heartbeat he felt through the saddle horn.
The hours nobody can hand you — why feel is earned one horse at a time.
51:53 — Can a jumper work a cow? Stockmanship and the rodear
57:29 — Holding the herd without a fence — and what empathy means
Total Feeds
Our mission to provide quality nutrition to people and animals puts us in contact with all manner of interesting folks. Whether you're interested in our animal feed, or the people involved in the animal industry: you'll find it at Total Feeds!
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
Why join up is pressure and release in learning-theory terms — and why naming that honors Monty more than sainthood ever could
The question Alexandra Kurland made possible: how do I create a learning environment where the horse becomes an active participant
What the clicker teaches the human — poor timing, criteria that jump too fast, a missed try; the horse reports every one
Why food on its own creates neither agency nor consent, and what positive reinforcement still demands of the person holding it
Becky Moody at the top of dressage: trained with Carl Hester, embracing clicker work — evolution over allegiance
The pedestal inversion: how reverence flips to contempt when the flaws appear, and why both extremes abandon the horse
The three sentences responsible learning gets to say: this is what you made possible, this is where I believe you were wrong, this is what I will carry forward
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
Lady gave me a scar on my stomach the first year I had her, reaching back for me while I tightened the cinch. I used to call that her temperament.
Now I wonder if she was trying to tell me something.
I wanted the horse world to hear this conversation because Lady had been telling me the same story for years—I just wasn't ready to listen.
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This episode is sponsored by Contour Saddlery™
At Contour Saddlery™, we believe saddle fit should be based on the horse in motion—not standing still.
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Experience the difference a truly horse-first saddle can make. Visit Naturalhorsemansaddles.com to learn more.
Interested in more from Noëlle?
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
43:31 The Therm-a-Rest pad and the living interface
46:15 Where the shim goes, English and Western
50:41 A birdhouse roof on a beach ball
56:47 The free saddle fit evaluation
1:02:40 A body that changes
1:08:20 Rapid fire
Dr. Stephen Peters is a neuroscientist who directed a clinic for brain health and memory, and co-author of Evidence-Based Horsemanship (with Martin Black). His most recent books are Horse Brain Science and A Horse's Life (with Mark Rashid and Chrissy McDonald), which pairs 19 real case studies with the neurological detective work behind each one.
Our mission to provide quality nutrition to people and animals puts us in contact with all manner of interesting folks. Whether you're interested in our animal feed, or the people involved in the animal industry: you'll find it at Total Feeds!
0:00 Why we get in the way of our own horses 2:00 A horse brain, cut in half: corpus callosum & the cingulate 5:00 The stress circuit — HPA axis, cortisol, and GABA 8:00 Empowered vs. helpless: who can reach the brake 9:06 Wiring confidence vs. wiring fear 11:15 Lady's three stations: rebuilding a horse's love of learning 13:40 The neurochemical cocktail — and why drilling drains it 16:00 Sending the horse away: oxytocin, prediction, and the payoff 18:00 Release is not relief 19:25 A word from Total Feeds 23:00 Recovery, hippocampal replay & why silence matters 27:38 Short sessions, switching horses & the neurodivergent brain 28:57 Spaced vs. massed learning; every nervous system is a snowflake 32:11 The petals on the flower: touch, exercise, diet & the five domains 40:45 Allo-grooming, oxytocin & the prairie voles 44:13 Darwin's Descent of Man: cooperation as the highest evolution 46:43 Dr. Peters' books, Substack & wrap
Interested in more from Noëlle?
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
What you'll hear, underneath all of it, is a kinder and more accurate way to be with a horse. Not softer for its own sake — more correct. Work with the nervous system and you get performance and behavior far past anything pressure buys you. The willing partner everyone wants isn't obedient. He's involved.
Dr. Stephen Peters is a board-certified neuropsychologist and co-author of Evidence-Based Horsemanship with Martin Black. He studies the equine brain and nervous system and is launching a new podcast, The Skeptical Horseman, with Jillian Kreinbring, M.S., dedicated to separating good research from pseudoscience in the horse world.
This is Part 1 of our conversation. In Part 2, Steve puts a real horse brain on the table, cut in half, and shows me exactly what agency does to it.
If someone you ride with keeps calling their horse the problem — send them this one first.
9:42 — Myelination, oligodendrocytes, and paving the horse's highways
11:59 — The trailer example: habit vs. the labels we assign it (defiant, disrespectful)
15:24 — Clever Hans: the horse who was reading, not counting
17:11 — Nervous systems, sympathetic arousal, and why more pressure adds noise
21:03 — Down-regulation, pendulation, and training the nervous system itself
23:30 — [Sponsor: Total Equine by Total Feeds]
26:45 — Dopamine, "special forces" horses, and solution-seeking vs. robotic horses
32:41 — Learned helplessness: the Seligman experiment and what it does to the brain
37:27 — The five domains, agency, and why every creature needs its behavior to matter
38:55 — The freeze response, the periaqueductal gray, and the opioid flood
43:35 — When words fail the nervous system: compliance is not consent, or courage
46:53 — Dissociation, wearable tech, hyperscanning, and Peters' Substack work
50:37 — "We're stopping here": the cliffhanger into Part 2 and the real horse brain
This Episode is Sponsored by:
Total Feeds
Our mission to provide quality nutrition to people and animals puts us in contact with all manner of interesting folks. Whether you're interested in our animal feed, or the people involved in the animal industry: you'll find it at Total Feeds!
Noëlle's writing again — head to her Substack for essays, observations, and the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in an episode. https://noellefloyd.substack.com
Every episode is also on YouTube, where the conversation continues in the comments.
And if you're ready to go deeper, NF+ is where the real work happens — masterclasses, curated content, and a community that takes horses seriously. https://noellefloydplus.com
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The NOËLLE FLOYD Podcast, podcast de NOËLLE FLOYD - Statistiques, épisodes et classements - My Podcast Data
