The pros and cons of Rescue Remedy for horses & people

Using Rescue Remedy as a crutch when either we or our horse is scared of something can cause big problems if we use it to suppress the fear. Even so, Rescue Remedy is a valuable part of my first aid kit.

I’ve split this article to talk about humans and horses separately. The dosage I most commonly use for humans is 5 drops every one minute for 3 to 5 doses. If you need more than that it’s cheaper to drink the brandy it’s based on. (Yeah that’s my Aussie sense of humor. ) It’s useful for shock and all kinds of other things, including smoothing over nasty insect bites and minor burns.

What Rescue Remedy is also good for, is to help with a short term overwhelming fear or anxiety while you sort out the fear that triggered the overwhelm and clear up what’s behind it. Did you hear that? Best used for SHORT term fear or anxiety while you sort out the fear that triggered the overwhelm and clear it up.

Getting rid of that horrible scared feeling has to be good hey? So why is SUPPRESSING fear such a bad idea?

I had a first hand experience of using Rescue remedy to suppress fear, when I woke up one morning with my neck stuck to the side unable to turn my head to look straight ahead. It made for a very interesting drive to get help, keeping my eyes to the road without being able to turn my head! OMG the nauseating pain when I tried to turn my head.

As the kinesiologist tested, the muscle problem went straight to a suppression caused by the Rescue Remedy that I’d been taking routinely to ride my horse to the level and speed I needed to be riding at, for the exams I was working so hard for.

This was long before I knew that making myself and my horse feel safe was a much simpler and more effective and gentler way to deal with fear.

Not listening to the guidance of our fear is the cause of horse riding being considered the most dangerous sport in the world, depending on whether you judge that by numbers of accidents or severity of injuries. Every time I write something like this I find myself shaking my head at how sheer freaking NORMAL people think it is to be falling off and getting hurt around horses. I hear them talking all the time about getting injured as if it’s somehow inevitable.

And it’s SUCH crap! And so bloody unnecessary!

The key to being safe and enjoying our horses, is knowing how to use the gentle early warning feeling that isn’t even fear yet and how to use it to get what we and our horse are looking for. When we use our feelings like that, then we hardly ever have to experience the big stuff, the anxiety, the nervousness, the panic attacks, the dread that makes breeding budgies start to look like a better hobby.

Fear is a valuable survival mechanism designed to keep us safe and each time we ignore and bury our fear or anxiety, then it intensifies – it gets bigger next time, until we DO listen to it and take action on it to make ourselves safe – in which case it just disappears. I know I’ve made that sound simple and that’s because it is. Fear has a simple message about needing to feel and be safe and when we’ve understood the message and taken action on it – the message has done it’s job so pfft! the fear just disappears.

The same intensifying happens if we use Rescue Remedy to medicate repeated fear, then the next fear gets more intense – bigger and bigger – until we either listen to it and take action on it to make ourselves safe or until we have that accident we didn’t want to have.

If we’re using Rescue Remedy to help us ignore our survival instincts, then we’re actually risking the physical injury that our fear was trying so hard to tell us about.

The answer is simple – if you’re scared or anxious every time you do a particular thing with your horse – and if you need something like Rescue Remedy to help you cope, then your survival instincts are telling you that you’re not safe.

So what can you do to BE and FEEL safe with your horse?

You can fix fear easily with each step of helping your horse to be a safe horse and probably by being a more secure rider too.

And if you don’t know how to help your horse to be a safe horse and you don’t know how to be a more secure rider, then hang around here for a bit longer and you’ll find out just how easy those two things can be. If this is your first time here, check out what we can do for you on the side bar and sign up for a flow of lessons and articles that show you how incredibly effective this gentle work is. If you’re on a mobile the sidebar is underneath this article.

Rescue Remedy for Horses too has its pros and cons to be aware of.

If we’re using rescue remedy as a crutch for our horse for a fear that happens routinely, then again, we’re asking for trouble – physical trouble for us as their behavior escalates with their fear or they can experience health trouble as they express their fear in physical symptoms. It doesn’t always have to be a muscular skeletal problem like my stuck neck. Suppressions tend to be where the weakness is in each individual, so apart from bigger reactions or bigger behavior problems next time the fear comes up, a suppression can also cause a problem in an organ too.

Every fear we suppress in our horse, whether it’s with the gear that we use to control them when they’re afraid or with something like Rescue Remedy, then the next fear is intensified. Until our horse is terrified of small things that just don’t make sense to us. How often have we seen that? Horses afraid of something and the amount of terror they’re experiencing just doesn’t make sense to us?

Rescue Remedy can be good for horses too, to help with a short term overwhelm while you sort out the root CAUSE of their fear and actually clear it up. (Helpful Hint: It’s not necessary to need Rescue Remedy for that purpose, you can develop a relationship where active listening will help with overwhelm and then you wouldn’t need to get anything into their mouths at a difficult time.) Or you can use Rescue Remedy to help them with a one off difficult situation. It’s also brilliant for shock in animals too.

I recommend pretty much the same dosage for horses – 5 drops, one minute apart for 3 to 5 doses, observing carefully and stopping as it takes effect. Roll the horses lip open, hold the back of your hand against the side of their face so that the glass dropper can’t get knocked – yeah because it’s glass – and drop the 5 drops onto the inside of the lip. If you’re unsure you can do that safely, then put the drops onto a spoon and pour it into the side of their lip. Or – it only needs to go on the mucous membranes, so you could also put the drops on your finger and gently swipe it over the inside of their lip or smooth it over the inner part of their nose. I don’t much like the idea of adding to a horse’s fear by squirting the rescue remedy spray at a horse that is already terrified of something.

And yeah… there’s more to fear than the simplicity that I’m talking about to make my point about Rescue Remedy – there’s fear and excitement getting all tangled up together when we can’t tell them apart, there’s inherited fears where we can clear up that predisposition to fear for both ourselves and our horses and we can release even old fears that are intensifying the current ones when we know how.

And we do all of that for ourselves and our horses around here…

Check out the sidebar for ways to experience how you can help your horse to feel and be safe and be a confident, happy and better rider too. See you around!

p.s. I’ve come back and added a link about this falling off horses crap…

A bombshell ahaaa about riding