Have you ever wondered what the level of Weaning Trauma in horses would be?

When you think about the issues that very many horses have with things like separation anxiety, barn sourness, being herd bound etc, it makes me wonder how much of that stems from the way that they were weaned.

Since probably a majority of us don’t breed our own horses or have control over the weaning process, that makes things tricky!

I’m sure that lots of horses aren’t weaned very well. They might be taken away from their mother too early, or maybe the process was just too fast for them. Since time is money, for a lot of people ‘faster is better’.

And of course, we have to take into account the individuals involved. Maybe a particular mare prefers her foals to be gone, or to stay longer. Maybe the foal itself, with it’s genetics, breeding, or hereditary dispositions, needs the process to go slower or just differently.

In other words, there’s certainly no ‘one size fits all’. The weaning process needs to be well planned, and tailored to the personalities of the mare and foal concerned.

Having said all that, I was curious to find out what the level of weaning trauma in horses is.

I started with a quick survey on my Facebook page. I made an energetic connection via the photos and names shared with me, then used my strong healing pendulum to ask a yes / no question – does this horse have weaning trauma?

A quick note about using a pendulum: In order to do a easy survey for a decent number of people or horses, dowsing for a Yes or No is the quickest way to do it.  However, that gives a very ‘top level’ answer – we don’t necessarily know what % of weaning trauma actually equals a yes or a no, or how much each horse is affected.

In that first round, I tested 58 horses. Only 22% were a No.

ie weaning trauma in horses affects more than 3/4 of them (of the ones I tested anyway).

For the 13 / 58 that tested ‘no’ in the survey, I followed up by checking exactly how much they were affected. For this I again use my pendulum, but this time checking on a percentage chart.

The No’s actually ranged from 5%, to 25% affected by weaning trauma.

It makes more sense that a No (ie it’s not affecting them too much) could be from 0-25% affected, and a yes might actually be anywhere from 26-100%.

Since then I’ve been checking more horses via my newsletter subscribers and in my FB Group (including letting them know to what extent their horses are actually affected).

To date, I’ve tested a total of 83 horses, and the % split has maintained.

For weaning trauma in horses,

• 25% test as having no weaning trauma,
• 75% test as having some level of weaning trauma.

Yikes.

Since I work primarily with energy, I decided to see if I could clear this weaning trauma in horses. I’ve done it for my own horse (she tested as 75% affected) and she certainly seemed softer afterwards. It’s something that I’ll be including in my Animal Communication & Healing sessions from now on.

If you’d like me to do a free check to see how much your horse is affected by weaning trauma, just email me at trisha@trishawren.com, with their photo and name!

Keep connecting with your horses,

Trisha x

About Trisha

Trisha Wren has been an equine professional for most of her adult life.  She rode, competed, and taught Western Riding for 15 years in Scotland, then horse and rider bio-mechanics in New Zealand and Australia for 10 years.  She’s been a full time horse and animal communicator since April 2016. Find out more about Trisha here and sign up for her self paced Animal Communication course here.