Ideal Show Jumping Horses

January 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Show jumpers are horses utilised for the sport of show jumping. Horses and ponies of nearly all breeds, builds, colors and dispositions are used to make show jumpers.

Show jumping events are structured with different tiers that minister to all riding skill levels. Rider’s capabilities are reflected in the type and standard of pony or pony that they use.

Show jumping courses feature impressively coloured fences and twists, turns and changes of directions. The rider tries to go thru the whole course inside a set duration of time; if he does so without faulting even once, he has achieved a clear round.

Competitors who achieve clear rounds are qualified for the subsequent event: the jump off, a course that’s shorter but has fences of increased height. The rider who clocks the swiftest clear round is the winner.

Show jumpers come with differing abilities, and are given to riders according to skill level. Beginner riders do best on show jumpers of average capability but with great calmness and patience; these horses or ponies would have relevant experience in beginner level show jumping. These horses and ponies are meant to instill confidence in their riders and give them opportunities to improve their riding abilities, especially over fences. More capable riders need horses in harmony with their own capabilities; they are going to be competing at more demanding levels. The best show jumpers are accurate and bold; they need to be brave enough to attempt tall obstacles and physically tough enough to go through the trickiest of courses. Clearly, the most gifted horses also need to be ridden by the most accomplished riders.

Horses and ponies of several breeds have been successful show jumping. There’s no direct link between show jumping ability and body size. There have several really great show jumpers of no identifiable breed. However , some breeds are rather more consistent in excelling at show jumping.

There is pretty much unanimous agreement that Connemara ponies are the equine world’s best sports breed. They are amazingly athletic and have gravity-defying jumping capability.

The Continental Warmblood is an enormously popular breed. The Warmblood is bred for high standards of performance; this breed is a brilliant show jumper. Warmbloods dominate the highest show jumping levels.

Another breed that’s frequently seen at the highest levels of show jumping is the Thoroughbred. These horses are powerful and magnificently athletic. They have extraordinarily superior jumping abilities.

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How To Boost Your Horse’s Ground Action

June 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You will have many opportunities to earn the deep respect of your horse as you train him. A horse’s world is herds, with leaders and followers; and when training your target is to consolidate your position as the well regarded leader in your horse’s world.

Without even pondering it, horses obey their herd instincts. They follow the dominant Alpha presence in the herd and carry over these instincts to their dealings with humans. If you are able to build your predominance from the first day, your horse will follow you eagerly as long as you show the cardinal virtue of giving and earning respect. The esteem that you get will reflect itself in all of your dealings with your horse, beginning with your groundwork coaching. Be certain about one thing: if your horse does not respect you while your feet are on the ground, he won’t respect you with your feet in the stirrups.

And be aware of another thing: ‘He who blinks first loses’

It’s a rather contrary part of the pony nature that he is ever willing to take advantage if given an opening. If he senses any weakness in you at all, he will try to snow ball you. You can’t afford to let the tiniest of his transgressions remain unseen; while it’s not required for you to hurt him in the corporal sense, you definitely have to let your disaffection be known. You can’t teach him effectively unless he’s fully acquainted with and accepts the fact that you are the leader.

Getting into the middle of it

– Make sure you train in an area with heaps of open space. A pen is fine for the purposes. The area should have a completely flat ground surface freed from stumbling blocks, litter and diversions; ensure there’s very little around that may compromise safety.

– Both tutor and trainee should be in a positive mindset, and the rapport between them should have been well established.

– Be aware of the subtleties of ineffective communication with your horse. Your body language, vocal signals and even unconscious minor motions can send across any quantity of signals. You don’t wish to signal that you are nervous or uncertain in any way in any way. Make sure you know where you want to be in relation to your pony, speaking in physical terms. Know where to exert pressure to get the horse to respond. Props like whips or sticks may serve handy purposes, though not for administering bodily punishment. They should be used only as tools for emphasis.

– Reward your horse for everything he does right. Give him all the positive beefing up you can.

– Keep oral cues to the minimum, use body cues as much as possible.

– Learn and gain experience in ‘hooking up’ it is a smart way to make your pony stop and stay rock still at your cue.

– Keep fully connected to your horse’s signals. Be sensitive to whatever he’s attempting to convey, if it is joy, trouble or exhaustion, if he is signalling boredom or fatigue, stop the training. It is always possible to continue another time.

Your horse may consider ground work to be a sort of play with you. Go along with him to the extent it doesn’t negatively affect the efficiency of your coaching. Leading him just a bit in his playfulness will essentially pay off, as long as you don’t allow it to go too far.

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Ideal Nutrition For Your Barrel Pony

May 29, 2012 By 2 Comments

Because Barrel horses are athletes and put in lots of hard work at training and participation in events, their nutritional needs alter considerably from those of horses that lead less laborious lives, like horses living in pastures and getting ridden a couple of times every month. Here are some guidelines.

Hay: Regardless of breed or use, horses require fibre in their feed, whether hay or grass. Fibre should comprise a substantial portion of equine diet. Feed takes second pace, and serves to bring balance to the diet. A method to continually monitor your horse’s nutritive needs is to have your vet conduct blood tests yearly to test for nutritional inadequacies. Feed your pony hay which has been evaluated for nutrient content so that you know what you are feeding your horse. Rural extension offices will generally test your hay without cost. These tests offer a clear picture of the nutritive value of your hay. Together with the result of your veterinaria’s blood tests, these tests will give you an exact idea of what nutritional supplements your horse may require.

The best form of hay for your horse is top class grass hay. You can feed alfalfa to your horse in small quantities, as it is protein rich and in contrast to grass hay, isn’t suitable for feeding in enormous quantity. You should limit daily feeding of alfalfa to one or two flakes, compared with three or four flakes for grass hay. If you mix in alfalfa hay with grass hay, your grain needs will go down. Alfalfa can also be used to maintain the balance if your feed to your barrel pony has a lower nourishment share of say 10%.

Feed: Together with top class hay, feed forms another essential part of a barrel horse’s regular diet. A barrel pony is subjected to heavy work in training and in events, and desires extra staying power and energy to cope. Feeds comprising 10 to 12 percent of protein are acceptable for mature barrel horses. Younger barrel horses will require higher protein part, say 14 to 16 %. This is not to say that you want to get different feeds for different barrel horses; you just need to supplement them differently. I have recommendations on the best feeding formulae below; you would do well to stick to them. Always feed your horses by weight. The feed need for each pony depends on its weight and levels of work load.

Feed is available as grains or pellets. Define the composition before deciding on feeds for barrel horses. Most makers these days have a variety of feeds available as grain mix or as pellets. A barrel horse’s wants cannot be met adequately with plain oats, which will not offer him the level of nutrition required. You must go in for easily digested grains or pellets that have high protein content. Till some time ago, horses found it more complicated to digest pellets, but this difficulty has been resolved now. Pellets are made so they’re more easily broken down in the digestive process, reducing possibility of colic or other digestive conditions. Plenty of horses have a leaning for the taste of sweet grain mixes, but you can slowly bring them over to pellets if you find pellets work better.

Supplements: Supplements are used extensively with barrel horses. It is possible to get a supplement for nearly any specific requirement: hooves, coats, energy, weight building, you mention it. The right supplements can play an exceedingly important role in keeping your horse’s daily diet ideal.

You shouldn’t decide on supplements without consulting your vet. Don’t simply go blindly for the latest trend on the market just because some huge name racer endorsed it. While surplus supplements may not affect your horse’s health, they’ll definitely impact your financial health negatively. Almost invariably, claims that so and so supplement can boost your horse’s performance and win percentage are falsely made. You also have to give seriousness to the indisputable fact that supplements impact different horses in different ways.

A perfect balanced diet is the first step to making your horse the best barrel racer. Correct nutrition gives him just the edge he needs to raise his performance to maximum.

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Bringing A Dressage Horse On The Bit

May 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Are you prone to sawing side to side on your horse’s mouth at dressage, or to using both hands to wriggle the bit to get your horse ‘on the bit’?

‘Sawing’ on a dressage horse’s mouth means to alternatively squeeze and release with the hands, and you ride the pony front to back when you do this. To all appearances, your pony is on the bit with his head down and his nose vertical, but there is no true front to back connection.

Actually, the 1 piece of your horse that’s impacted by your sawing is his jaw. A moving bit leads him to chew, and when he does chew, his jaw flexes.

In essence, this suggests nothing less than this: when you saw you are basically manipulating a jaw that’s flexed. And you may still have no leverage over plenty more body that your pony will have left over.

Flexion might lead you to believe the horse remains on his bit, and you are rather surprised about his disposition to go off his bit when asked to do stuff like transitions.

The reality you might not realize till too late is that your horse wasn’t on the bit. And obviously flexed jaws are of no use at all.

Get your horse truly on the bit by using ‘connecting aids’ close both your legs so that power from behind is added. You need to act like you’re calling for lengthening. When the horse reaches your outer hand, make a fist of that hand so that you can capture and contain the power and recycle it back to your horse’s rear legs. Keep this up for roughly 3 full seconds.

Finally, you have two reasons to squeeze or vibrate the interior rein:

1. The first is to keep your horse’s neck straight. Your objective is to prevent him from twisting his neck outwards by way of response to your closed outer hand. This way, you in all probability won’t be requiring the interior rein when riding with his soft inside since your pony will not be making an attempt to look outside if you should close the outer hand.

2. You can move the bit by making him chew and flex in the jaw.

You need to remember that you ride a dressage horse front to back by wiggling the bit on both sides. What this implies is, don’t do with both hands when you can make do with one. Keep the second hand free for the essential task of power recycling to the horse’s hind legs.

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How To Bend Your Pony

May 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve seen considerable puzzlement among riders about the right aids for bending. You should know the simplest way to evenly bend your pony from his poll to his tail not just on corners, circles or schooling figures like serpentines, shallow loops and figure eights, but also on lateral exercises of the more advanced kind, like haunches-in, shoulder-in and half pass.

I give you a brief guide on these bending aids below.

When circling left:

– Your weight should be on the inside (left) seat bone, cueing the pony into engaging his inside rear leg;

– Your inner (left) leg should be on the girth; it should function as a pole for the pony to bend round and as a technique of sustaining his inside rear leg’s activity;

– Your outer (right) leg should be behind the girth to enable bending of the horse’s body round your inner leg and to prevent any swinging out of his hindquarters. The circle’s size establishes just how far behind the girth you ought to have your outer leg. On a circle of 20 m, for example, you should place your outer leg 1 or 2 inches to the rear the girth. It should be about 4 or 5 inches behind if you’re on a 10m circle;

– Your inner (left) rein demands a 1 flexion to the inside. You must just be able to see the horse’s nostril and inside eye;

– Your outer (right) rein should be steady and supportive. Consider it to be a side rein that controls the extent of bend in the horse’s neck, and as the turning rein that brings the horse’s shoulders round the curve. When the shoulders are turned, the rest of the body follows.

Think of making the perfect union between your outside and inside aids. You’ll require both aid sets to be able to bend the horse along a prescribed turn. The inside aid bends him and the outside aid turns him.

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Getting Your Pony Training Facts Right

May 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

In terms of what you could call organised disciplines, horse training is perhaps one of the very oldest. The homo sapien has been using horses for ages: for war, for work and for pleasure. You may call horse riding a science or an art; as far as I am concerned it has elements of both. Pony training has had its high crests and its low troughs. One of the highlight eras of horse training existed during the Baroque period, which stretched between the 17th and the 18th centuries. For most individuals, Baroque was a skilled art form.

It’s my considered opinion that horse training is experiencing one of its low spells nowadays. There is too much importance on commerce and not enough on quality, and that has eroded both the science and the art parts of horse training.

That does not necessarily imply, though, that you won’t be well placed to scale extreme levels as a horse coach.

I think that pony training has suffered in quality due to lots of misconceptions. I have lost count of the amount of times I have come across people boasting about having trained their horses to lead. It is sensible to outline training or teaching as actions that enable students to procure information they did not have before and to do something they weren’t capable of before.

Built-in instinct has a foal following its mother blindly from the instant of its birth. To do otherwise could be to court death. The mare responds by pointing the foal towards the right things. Have you ever noticed that all foals are really capable of walking, trotting and cantering practically the first day of their lives? And that they also are moderately adept at stopping and backing up?

In terms of ordinary human use of horses, a new born foal may not be aware of just three aspects that it’ll have to be taught later: how to adjust to a halter; how to carry a bridle and how to tolerate a saddle or harness.

What do human beings generally teach horses?

We train horses to respond to commands and cues. We educate them to move at our command and to stop at our cue. The horse learns from us about responding to verbal and non-verbal commands and cues.

At this juncture, let’s get something straight: coaching can be conducted successfully just when the tutor is extremely clear in his mind as to what he is expecting to achieve. The usefulness of coaching can be judged not in the horse’s response to a command, but In the promptness and lack of resistance accompanying that response. If a horse takes its time to act on a command, and shows a great amount of unwillingness to respond, it has obviously not been trained well.

A trainer may be said to have achieved success in his task only when his charge is programmed to respond like a robot to commands and cues with an unquestioning response which has pretty much become 2nd nature.

Training can be done with a great deal of refinement , at the greatest heights of horse riding, an observer will see only the end results. He won’t see the cues given by the rider to the horse, because they are going to be so refined and practically invisible. That sort of height is reached only with the most perfect of coaching techniques.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about professional choice

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What Do You Mean By Only A Trail Pony

May 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Do you wish that you could do more with your pony than simply trail riding? You shouldn’t, especially if you like trail riding. Thousands of people play baseball, basketball and soccer, but only a select few become pros. Think about all of the folk out there who haven’t ever been close to a pony in their lives, and you will realize just how lucky you are to have a pony to ride trail with. Trail riding is a fabulous activity that allows you to see more country side than you might otherwise. It’s an activity that can be plenty of delightful fun for both horse and rider.

Don’t make the frequent mistake of presuming that trail riding is a simple activity, that a pony does not need to be especially trained for it, I beg to differ For more years than I care to recollect , I have been around horses of all kinds, horses that were used for every purpose conceivable. I can confirm that a horse utilised for trail riding needs as much training as horses used for any other activity. Take a breath and give it a thought. When you are out trail riding, you are covering a lot of country. Dependent on where you reside and where you ride, you might be covering any sort of terrain, friendly and hostile, in any kind of weather. You could be passing through country with deadly fauna like snakes or bears or mountain lions. There are one hundred and more factors that you may not expect, that may crop up to trouble you. You’ve got only yourself and your pony to get out of tricky scenarios and make it back safe.

Even if you are riding a horse that hardly knows it’s whoa from its go, you are pretty dependent on the pony to carry you safely through the ride and bring you back in one piece. When you have a pony that is not schooled to handle itself in adverse conditions, what happens if the situation calls for more than just a whoa or a go? You could find yourself in any amount of difficult situations; such as where your horse needs to back up, get around an obstacle, negotiate a tight enclosed turn or side pass. Under such circumstances, the rider tells the pony what to do and the pony obeys, if he is trained to obey. If he is not, and he caves in to his inbuilt instinct, he might take you out of the frying pan into the fire.

Even trail horses must be trained: they have to be taught first and foremost to obey their riders regardless of what the circumstances. They have to be taught to react coolly if their feet get snagged up in brush or in vines. They must be perfectly attuned to even subtle cues from their riders: a small movement that may get the rider’s knees and head out of the way of an oncoming tree, clear obstacles like fallen trees, ignore branches that slap at them and their riders. They have got to be fine on rocks, in water and when going downhill or uphill. They must control their natural tendency to bolt when they come across threats. Even if you are riding in a group, your pony needs to be individually controlled and respond individually, without blind aping the pony in front.

Left to themselves, most horses will follow their own instincts. Even the untrained pony will do what he feels best in any situation, but there’s no way of telling whether his call will protect his rider or further endanger the rider. Most horses do need rider guidance out of tough situations.

Hopefully, that should persuade you that the pony you are riding on the trails is just as highly trained as any other horse used for any other discipline.

When a person asks you what you utilise your pony for, you don’t say “Nothing much, only trail riding” in a hangdog fashion. You puff out your chest and declare in a proud voice, “We go for some beautiful trail riding all of the time”.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about stable rugs

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The Horse World Jargon

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Instructors in dressage, events and hunter/jumpers are full of commands like ‘work on the bit’, ‘get some self carriage’ and ‘let’s have some more impulsion’. To the instructors, these directions might be plain, but to the frightened student, they may as well be Greek.

I write this to help you out with some of the terminology common to pony rearing, riding and coaching. I hope this will help you with all of the language your instructors throw around.

Self carriage: Self carriage makes reference to the goal of getting the pony to move with excellent balance and grace. He should do this without the rider’s continuous intervention, i.e, he should be able to sustain the proper carriage himself. You can test your pony out for this capacity by surrendering the reins: some horses are near helpless without their rider’s cues.

Resistance: Resistance occurs when a pony won’t heed his rider’s aids and fails to respond the right way.

Suppleness: Suppleness is attained when a pony is responding with no hesitation or resistance at all to his rider’s command to bend and then to give flexion.

On the bit: This is a term used when the pony energetically moves into his rider’s hands. The pony is responsive to bit contact, to the extent of seeking contact with his rider’s hands. He does not show evidence of resistance like raising his head above the bit or sucking back behind it.

Contact: This term refers to hand-based communication with the pony through the reins and the bit. The contact is live, active and consistent.

Flexion/roundness: Terms used for supple bending involving all parts of the horse’s body (mostly in connection with the poll, but often also to the neck, the back and the stifle and hocks. This is also referred to as riding a pony round.

Bending/bend: A bend occurs when a horse curves his body from his ears to his tail, by way of the spine. Bending brings about superior suppleness helping engage the horse’s hind legs laterally. You can conceive of this as curving with the arc of a fictional circle you are riding. The bend is in proportion if you can see your horse’s nose with one eye’s peripheral vision and his hindquarters with the other eye’s when taking a look at the illusionary circle’s centre.

Engagement : Engagement is alleged to happen when the hind is tracking well with further hock and stifle flexion, something that makes the horse ‘sit’ to a very great extent by bringing down his haunches. It’s easy to get the right engagement only when you are riding the pony properly on his bit and he’s moving on and trying for self carriage.

Lateral movements: Lateral movements refer to moves like the leg yield or the shoulder. To execute these moves, the horse needs to cross his legs while moving to either side and sightly forward.

Impulsion: Impulsion appertains to forward energy when the pony is moving well, with his hindquarter thrust working optimally to push him forward.

Suspension: Think about a gorgeous dressage passage, when the horse looks to be moving without touching the ground. Suspension generates enhanced energy as well as collection that appears to direct the horse upward instead of forward, though obviously the motion is typically forward. Since the legs are raised higher with every step, the pony appears to be using shorter steps that reach higher.

Collection: If you put in some engagement to a pony that is balanced with self carriage alongside impulsion so he’s still energetically progressing forward, as also suspension so that energy is received with forward motion, you end up with a frame that shows shorter strides and more height. The pony has lower haunches, with a shorter frame. You shouldn’t confuse this phenomenon with slowing, like so many novices do. The energy is still the same, however it is just directed upwards. You can relate if you can conjure up a psychological image of a pony in piaffe, the still trot.

Travelling through: When a pony is stepping completely under himself using his hind legs, energy traverses his back, causing it to go round due to a belly that is raised, then skim his neck’s top surface, rounding it off softly, and creates relaxed poll flexion on to the bit. This is the route the energy takes, and if it gets blocked anywhere, the pony can’t be travelling thru.

Don’t let all of this confuse you: begin with the basics, carry on to submission and relaxation and soon enough, the rest will follow kind of automatically.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about bull whip

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Good Horse Grooming Tips

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It is a standard tendency when you are in a rush to take a few short cuts and wish for the best. This is true in whatever you do, even stuff like grooming a horse. Nonetheless haste does make waste, especially when grooming a pony.

There are a few grooming guidelines that positively shouldn’t be neglected.

One of the primary needs of grooming a pony is to check him out often for injuries. No matter how much of a rush you are in, you should do an exhaustive job of this part of grooming: run your hand slowly and carefully all over your horse’s body, particularly his legs, and gauge if there are any injuries or swellings that may have arisen while he was in the field the day before or in his stall over the night. Your assessment by touch should complement your visual assessment. A stitch in time saves nine, so make sure you take whatever time is necessary to be sure your horse is positively injury-free. Stock your grooming kit with first aid accessories like disinfectant, cotton wool and an antibiotic protection cream.

When you’re grooming your pony because you plan to ride him, you are able to afford to do a not quite perfect job aside from the injury checking part. He’s going to dump most signs of his grooming in 1 or 2 minutes of riding, anyway. You should take care to remove any deposits of dirt in the bridle and saddle areas, particularly the areas that the girth is seated in, and the area the headpiece occupies, back of the ears. You can remove most of this kind of grime with a dandy brush in good shape and a curry brush of rubber or plastic, but do take some extra care on the areas surrounding the head: it is a good idea to use a softer brush in the delicate patches to the back of the ears.

There’s a lot of argument about tying up. I speculate just how many folks actually do tie up while grooming their horses? I’m sure not that many people do. It sounds ideal to tie up a horse when he is being groomed, whether in the box or elsewhere. It might appear like a pointless precaution, but it does not take particularly long and it definitely can stop grief from kicks or trampling. Don’t make the mistake of presuming that your pony is too angelic to kick or tread on anyone’s foot; you never can tell with these animals. Horses are receptive to the moods of the human beings around them, and if your horse senses that you are in a rush, he can become a little unpredictable. It is more safe therefore to tie up. You also have got to think in term of the horse’s own safety. Is he liable to try to bolt? Would he tread on you or the grooming kit and cause damage to either? Is he sensitive to getting brushed in selected areas? If he is, you are more safe and your horse is more safe when he’s tied up.

You must judge just where the corners are that you can cut when you are grooming your horse and you are in a hurry. You should not be taking risks with his safety or yours. Nevertheless you have other work to attend to. Keep some emergency grooming accessories in your grooming kit. These accessories can save you a lot of time. That’s another reason why you shouldn’t scrimp on your grooming kit. When you get the finest, you are making sure the well being of your pony and his handlers.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about troxel

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Exchanging Trust With A Pony

May 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As it is with all your other relations, so it is with your horse: trust is the cement that builds a strong relationship of mutual sentiment and respect. There are two sides to that coin: the side that embodies full trust and a healthy relationship, and the side that symbolizes puny trust or none at all. This side reflects the more deadly of the types of relationships.

You can get a graphic illustration of the way trust works when it comes to horses if you take time out to study a herd of them. Ideally, you want to study a herd of wild horses out in the open. The herd leader, a stallion, will be the sentry on permanent duty. He’s alert, all of his senses attuned to even the littlest scent of anything threatening. When a threatening situation does arise, it is the lead mare who decides on the subsequent plan. Her decision will often be to take flight. Every single horse in the herd will obey her cue without the tiniest hesitation and there’s very sound reason for that: it relates to the old proverb about strength lying in unity. As a herd, the horses can protect one another. Any pony that’s isolated becomes simple prey for predators. The mare leads the retreat because it’s the duty of the stallion to take up position at the rear and keep the herd tight. The lead mare and the lead stallion are trusted blindly by the whole herd.

Now that was a horse to horse situation. How does one as a homo sapien gain the unquestioning trust of your foal?

I’ve got a story by way of an illustration here. A few years back I was visiting at a friend’s ranch in Arizona where a wild Colonial Spanish herd of horses had just been rounded up. I was challenged to tame one of the stallions and I do not run away from challenges where horses are concerned. At the beginning, my efforts with that horse drew a large amount of laughter and derision. I made a few forays into the pen, and each time I had to leave rather suddenly and unceremoniously. Every time I exited over the 6 feet high rails like I used to be a professional athlete. The best I could manage was to get to within 10 feet of the herd before it became provident to run.

That first approach of mine clearly finished in failure. I tried a new tack. I just got onto the fence and sat there, making no motion that could be construed as threatening. Shortly enough, curiosity got the better of the stallion and after a few mock approaches he finally loped up to me, took a good sniff and loped off. I was sweating, and I’m absolutely sure the Arizona heat wasn’t the main cause. Over the following few days, others were working with the mares, while I did nothing except sit there, always within sight of the stallion.

It wasn’t long before he came up again. This time his approach was less frightened. He was almost assertive as he approached and took another good sniff. His posture really made one or two folk around me scream at me to leap.

I did the opposite: I slowly descended from the top of the fence on the side of the stallion. The horse backed off a bit, but came forward again some time after I slowly sat down on the ground. A quick sniff or two and he seemed to relax significantly. After a while, I slowly got up on my feet and he observed me thoroughly, showing neither aggression nor fear.

I made up my mind to test him: I talked with him for some time and then walked away slowly along the rails, still speaking. He hesitated for some time and then followed me.

Since that time, I have used this method in varied forms with plenty of purportedly huffy wild horses. Many of them have had tons of experience being chased by riders with a rope. I just wait them out and let their natural curiosity work for me. They come, sooner or later. I’m taking my time, and eventually I make sure they follow me as they are , without halter or rope. Each time, that point is when I know That I have achieved success in taming one more horse using nothing more than the tool of trust.

I know one thing for sure: if a foal trusts you, you can have faith in it. Horses attack you only when they fear you: they give into their natural flight or fight instincts.

You want to work at gaining a horse’s trust and you need to work at keeping it. The best way of keeping a horse’s trust is to refrain from ever forcing or even asking a horse to do something it’s incapable of doing, or it doesn’t know how to do.

You must also take care never to lose your temper at a horse simply because he’s not done what you wanted him to. If he didn’t act on your wishes, he had sound reason. If you identify that reason and work on easing it out, you buttress the horse’s trust in you. If you fight that reason and attempt to bend your horse to your will, you lose his trust.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about western show clothes

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