HORSE OWNERSHIP. HORSE TRAINING
Please note that this advice relies on you knowing how to lunge a horse properly and safely and with the correct hore gear and personal attire.
For some people they are dealing with a number of factors such as lack of horse training experience, naughty undisciplined horses or just having troubles with a particular thing with their horse.
- Trouble float loading
- Doesn’t like spray
- Won’t stand still
- Fizzy
- Trouble while riding and unable to get a win in the saddle to push through the problem (going sideways, backing up, raring, pigrooting, bucking etc)
Obviously there are many many ways to deal with all these items and seeking professional assistance is definitely one of them but I am going to give you one simple piece of advice: – Lunge and make your horse work hard when they are really bad. WORK – REWARD & RELEASE – WORK – REWARD & RELEASE and so on.
They are big animals and if you start to teach them that misbehaving will end up in hard work they will start to realise that “oh, it’s so much easier to stand still or please my owner”.
If you can’t ride through that bucking experience instead of letting your horse get away with it, just get off and make that horse lunge at a fast canter until they are sweating and tired and continue to do this after every bad (potentially dangerous) situation if you cannot sort it out on the horse.
The best example of this is a horse that doesn’t like spray and our natural reaction when they jump scared away from the spray is to stop spraying and move the horse back to the tie rail. So every time they jump away they get rewarded by you stopping the spray………get the picture? Instead try this:
- Hold your horse short untied and when the horse moves just let them move around you
- Start spraying softly on their shoulder and continue to spray as they are moving about
- At the first sign of them standing still stop spraying as reward for stop moving
- Continue again and again with each time spraying in the same spot and stopping until you have them completely still while you are spraying – it works a treat
- You can then repeat this same activity in different spots all over the horse and in about 15min you could even be spraying all over their head (not in the eyes though)
Give it a try sometime as it’s a huge buzz to achieve this simple technique.
