Helen Rackstraw Equine Touch Practitioner

06/01/2026

18/12/2025

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄
Merry Christmas to all of my wonderful clients and thank you for a fabulous year allowing me to work with your beautiful fur babies. I have truly loved every session as much as the horses have.

I am currently at home recovering from surgery, but hope to see you all in the new year when I'm firing on all cylinders again.

Stay safe over the festivities! 🤍⛄️🤍⛄️

26/11/2025

Always so important to listen to your horse, subtle changes can tell you so much and are much easier to resolve if things are caught early. My clients are excellent at this 😁👌👂👏

🐴🧠 When Behaviour Changes, Don’t Blame the Gut First! Look at the Whole Horse

One of the problems in modern equine care is how quickly gastric issues get blamed for every behavioural change.

Yes, the gut matters.
Yes, diet, forage access, feeding routines, and stress can absolutely contribute to gastric disease.
And yes, gastric discomfort can absolutely influence behaviour.

But here’s the key point we keep missing:

👉 Gastric issues are often the result of something else going wrong, not the root cause.

The two biggest and most commonly overlooked contributors?

1️⃣ Musculoskeletal Pain

Musculoskeletal pain, even subtle, low-grade, or chronic, is one of the most frequently missed problems in horses.

As discussed in one of my old articles

https://www.theequinedocumentalist.com/recognising-pain-in-the-horse/

When a horse is working in pain:
• Cortisol rises
• Eating patterns change
• Resting patterns change
• The nervous system shifts into protection mode
• And the gut is one of the first systems to suffer

Pain doesn’t just change movement, it changes physiology.
Ulcers may then develop secondary to the stress and compromised function caused by the underlying pain.

2️⃣ Psychosocial Stress

Horses are highly social, highly emotional animals. Their environment shapes their physiology.

As discussed in our ethology series

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/bundles/how-can-the-equine-industry-maintain-its-social-licence-to-operate

Psychosocial stresses such as:
• Inconsistent routines
• Social isolation
• Frequent transport
• High-pressure training environments
• Poor turnout opportunities
• Rider inconsistency or conflict
• Unpredictable handling
• Lack of choice or agency
…all elevate stress hormones, suppress the immune system, and destabilise the gut environment.

These stresses can cause or worsen gastric disease.
And yet, these are rarely the first things examined.

⚠️ The Gut Is Vital, But Often Not the Starting Point

Of course, diet and gut health can be primary issues.
Poor forage quality, long fasting periods, high-starch feeds, dehydration, and certain medications can all contribute directly to gastric discomfort.

But more often than we acknowledge, the gut is the victim of a larger, unaddressed problem, not the villain.

🧩 Behaviour rarely has a single cause

A horse may show gastric symptoms…
But that doesn’t mean gastric disease is the origin of the behaviour.

A whole-horse approach means considering:
• Musculoskeletal integrity
• Hoof balance and farriery
• Saddle fit
• Rider influence
• Workload and biomechanics
• Environmental stability
• Herd dynamics
• Stress load
• Diet, forage access, and feeding rhythm
• And finally… gastric health

🌿 The message is simple:

When a horse changes behaviour, look deeper than the stomach.
Recognise that the gut is part of a wider system, influenced by pain, emotion, environment, and biomechanics.

Gastric disease deserves attention.
But we should never allow it to become the easy scapegoat that distracts us from the real underlying welfare issues.

See the whole horse. Follow the root cause. Honour what the behaviour is telling you.

Join Dr Ben Skye’s and I tomorrow for a delve into gastric disease.

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/egus

Recording will be available!

12/11/2025

Great advice, to help ease the pressure on you and your horse over the winter months 👍

For anyone who needs to hear this — there is a lot of change going on at the moment seasonally, don’t feel the need to put the pressure on you and your horse to succeed/ride/“be normal”.

If your horse feels a bit too fresh to ride, just do groundwork. Or go home and try another day.

If it’s raining and you’re not feeling in the right headspace to ride, consider a shorter ride or trying another day when you feel you can be the person your horse needs.

If you’ve been in the school lots and you want to hack so your horse is having variety in their work, great. But if they’re unsettled and will spend most of the hack in negative posture, will it be worth it?

If you’re doing polework and your horse is continually spooking at the scary corner, give time to the corner and its problems… give space and patience and return to the poles after.

I’ve swapped from raised poles in a straight line to more complex flat poles like in the diagram for Meji, giving his brain something to focus on (alongside his core bands).

We have had a very dry Summer, followed by a mild and wet Autumn-Winter transition… a lot of the unsettled, different or slightly “off” behaviour from our horses at the moment can be due to metabolising these changes. It is often that type of “sharp” behaviour that cannot be relieved with exercise, so lunging 100 circles or riding for hours will not likely solve your problem (not that it should do!)

Don’t feel the pressure to get on and ride, this phase will pass & be kind to you and your horse 🤍

EDITED TO ADD: I have had lots of messages about polework designs, I have two polework inspiration manuals on my website that you can download!  https://www.vetphysiophyle.co.uk/shop/p/polework-inspiration-manual-vol-2

29/10/2025

❤️❤️❤️

16/10/2025

Listening is everything 🧡

14/10/2025

14/10/2025

So true 🤎

13/10/2025

Some big releases from Ivy this afternoon, I'm sure she will sleep well tonight 😴 🩷

04/10/2025

Food for thought. Times change, a lot was simpler way back before matchy matchy. I do like to look smart and coordinate colours (not necessarily matchy brands, just what I throw together!) Life was more simple back then, but theres room for conversion, as the horses probably wore shared tack years ago that perhaps didn't fit well and I can't remember ever hearing a horse having any form of bodywork as regular maintenance, only if a horse had an issue and the vet suggested a physio (or back man!). So many people now are thinking more about preventative bodywork as we continue to learn. Education is key and as long as the horses welfare is at the centre of our world, then that's all that matters in our horse world evolution ❤️😊

Not a Lemieux product in sight.

The early 2000s horse world was a very different planet. Ponies stood in yards on plain headcollars and knotted lead ropes, riders turned up in whatever jeans or tracksuit bottoms were clean, matching sets were unheard of unless you count mud stains. There were no “saddle pad drops,” no Instagram ready photoshoots, and zero pressure to coordinate your horse like a boutique catalogue. It was simpler, scruffier, and somehow far more fun.

Those days were filled with hacking for hours, jumping ditches, ba****ck races across fields, and coming home looking like a creature of mud and hair. Designer gear? Optional. Fun? Mandatory. And somehow, that’s exactly what mattered.

Looking back now, I think we’ve lost a bit of that. Somewhere between the saddle pad drops and the endless new “musthaves,” the horse world got a little distracted.

Don’t get me wrong, nice kit has its place, but the real magic is in those scruffy, unbranded, unforgettable days.

Sometimes, a picture like this reminds us, it was never about what we wore, or what the saddle pad looked like. It was about who stood beside us, muddy, scrappy, and utterly unbothered.

The farmer’s daughter aka myself and my cousin plus the queen of the farm, Storm, the Connie aged 4.