Horse Articles

When you are trying to get a horse’s attention, the first thing you go for is his ears. Once an ear swivels in your direction, you’ve got his attention. It may take a little longer before he turns and faces you or before he walks up to you. But those bigger movements start with that little tiny movement of his ear.

When you first start teaching a horse to heed, you use a corridor of aids or pressures to create a feeling in the horse of where you want him to move. As the horse’s understanding increases, the handler can not only change the direction of the horse’s strides but also their length, speed, and cadence.

Heeding uses methodically applied directional pressures to create shapes that the horse can understand. You create those pressures by changing the relationship between the horse’s primary and secondary lines of influence and your own. The primary line of influence runs from front to back. Yours runs from out in front of you through your chest and straight out behind. The horse’s runs from in front of him down along his spine and out to the rear. The secondary line of influence runs from side to side through the shoulders for either one of you.

We use aids to teach things to horses. In teaching horses to heed, we define an aid as a methodically applied directional pressure used to create a shape. Aids need to be horse logical. That means they must make sense to the horse in terms of what his natural instincts tell him to do.

When you first start training a horse, everything is about getting his attention. Once you’ve got his attention, you start directing his attention where you want it to go. To get the horse to pay attention to you, however, you first have to pay attention to the horse.

A lot of amateur trainers MythUnderstand what the training process is all about. They think that training involves dominating a horse, showing him who’s boss. They approach training as though it were a battle in which one party wins and the other loses.

If you’ve ever taken riding lessons, you can relate to your horse when it comes to being corrected for something you didn’t do quite right. Maybe the instructor just got a little sarcastic. Or maybe she raised things to the level of a good scold. Maybe you messed up big time and got yelled at big time. Or maybe to prove her point about what you did wrong, the instructor got really stern and made you do whatever it was over and over and over to drill into your head.

Close up, horse shows look like serious business. They’re certainly business because their economics affect an awful lot of different people in a lot of different ways. For breeders and trainers and show managers and hamburger slingers and farriers and lots of other people, horse shows are a big investment both literally and figuratively.

As the horse moves along through his training, you go from showing him what you want to asking him for it and finally he knows what you want well enough that you can just tell him.

Here is an exercise called the heart. Work on this for a couple of weeks and you will gain a lot of control.

Learn to tie the quick release safety knot, always tie your horse with this knot and NEVER leave it alone while it is tied.

A lot of people think you train horses with equipment. This is one of the biggest MythUnderstandings out there. Try this bit, try that bit. If those don’t work, try a thinner bit or one with a longer shank. If those don’t work, tie that sucker’s head down or crank him in with draw reins.