Is it so hard to be nice?

This is an honest question.  Is it so hard to be nice?  To be supportive?  I have had several conversations in the last month (all with different people) about how unkind some of their past trainers have been.  Apparently one even went so far as to tell her student to just stop riding because she was ruining her horse.  Now I know that we have all had bad rides, and days where you get off your horse and just want to give up, but part of the trainers job is to offer encouragement on those hard days.  Even in the worst rides you can find something positive, even if it is "well at least you didn't get bucked off".

So I am completely baffled when I hear stories of trainers who beat up on their students, yell at them, tell them what a bad job they are doing.  How is this helpful??  How is this helping to get your student past the rough spots?  Do you want them to stop riding and then you lose a client?  It does not even make good business sense.  Nowhere in the job description for "horse trainer" will you find the words therapist and cheerleader, and yet that is such a big part of being a good trainer.  Their are countless comparisons that can be made between the challenges of learning to ride and the challenges of life but the one I am making today it that a bad trainer, one who is unsuportive or degrading to you, is no better than having an abusive boyfriend.  They will take your money, your time, and your emotional health and leave you with nothing more than a feeling of being unconfident and inadequate.  So my two cents worth of advice to the students of the horse world today is that no matter how amazing or talented you think your trainer is, if you go home from your lessons feeling like crap over and over again, it is time to look for a new trainer.

So lets take a quick poll.  Have you ever left a trainer because they were not nice to you?

Be quiet, stop assuming and listen

Wow, it has been a LONG time since I posted. Oops. I will try to be better, promise!

So today I want to talk about listening. Not just with your ears, but with your eyes as well. Horses are primarily non-verbal communicators and sometimes behaviors that humans might consider misbehavior’s are really the horse doing their best to tell us there is a problem.

Example #1 comes from my own horse, Charlie. Charlie is a 14yr old OTTB that I have owned since he came off the track as a 4yr old. He is, without a doubt, one of the easiest horses I have ever worked with. He is calm, he is kind, he is willing, and he tries his heart out for me. Charlie came off the track with multiple bone chips in his right knee and underwent surgery to remove them and clean up the joint. I was warned by multiple vets before the surgery that he may never be more than pasture sound. I was doubtful of this prognosis because he never looked lame. If the joint had not been the size of a melon, I would not have known there was a problem. The surgery occurred in August 2004 and the next four months were spent on the slow and tedious rehab process. He was back under saddle that December. Here is a picture of just a few of the bone fragments that were removed from his knee.

One day, after being back in work for about a month, Charlie would not open his mouth to take the bit. This had never been a problem before and since it was winter, I assumed that he did not like the cold metal. I warmed up the bit and then made him accept it and we went on with the ride. It was not a great ride and he was more stiff than usual, but I put it off to him being in a bad mood that day. This pattern repeated multiple times over the next month until the light bulb went off in my brain and I immediately felt like an idiot. It was WINTER, he had just had MAJOR joint surgery and he was trying to tell me, by resisting the bridle, that he was sore. This pattern has held true ever since. Any day that he is resistant to accepting the bit, I can find a physical reason for it. An abscess brewing, a bad tooth, sore muscles etc. He is an incredibly stoic horse and it is not often that he will show outward signs of pain, but he still found a way of letting me know when he does not feel good. I just had to put together the clues.

Example #2 is one of my favorite little mares, named Lola. Lola has a reputation of being a princess. She is young, just four years old and is sassy and opinionated by nature and this can make her a real challenge some days. Personally I think she has just the right amount of spice to make her an absolute blast to ride, but she is not for everyone. Most of the time, if she is going to be naughty, it happens on the ground and it is dramatic. Subtlety is not one of her talents. So imagine my confusion when one day I led her up to the mounting block and she took one very large, very deliberate, sideways step away from it and then just turned and stared at me. She had always been very good about standing quietly at the block, so this was very unusual behavior. I tried again and got the same result. Luckily, thanks to Charlies lesson from years ago, I was more aware of the signals and quickly caught on that she was trying to tell me something. After several minutes of poking, prodding and checking every inch of her, I realized that that her shoulders were sore. The saddle that she wore had been fit to her many months before by a professional saddle fitter, but as I said, she is four and her muscling had changed dramatically in that time. A change of saddle and padding as well as a good massage was all she needed to get back on track.  For anyone interested in this fabulous little mare, check out https://www.safehorses.org/?page_id=8980

As humans we are used to communicating with words and symbols, but a horse does not have that option. It is up to us, as their caretakers, trainers and riders, to pay attention to their way of communicating and to respect it. If there is a breakdown in the relationship between horse and human, it is not the horses fault. This is part of what makes them such fantastic animals to work with. So stop assuming your horse is just being a jerk, or was just born with a bad attitude. Take the time to listen and look for the reason behind a behavior. You may be surprised at what you learn.

Baby Steps

Sometimes when training it is necessary to go slow....really really slow.  I am currently working with a mare who is almost completely blind and it has been quite the learning experience.  Meet Bella,

Bella is a very sweet, teenage mare of unknown breeding who has been blind for most of her life due to neglect.  Her owner, Mary,  rescued her many years ago and has now decided that she wants to try to get her started under saddle.  To be honest, at first I did not have any idea where to start.  The normal protocol would simply not work in this situation.   After some consideration and a long talk with Mary, we decided to start at the beginning.  The very beginning.  We started with teaching Bella to lead.  Even though she was several years into her teens and had been led a lot during those years, most of the time she was only taken to a few known places, like in and out of pasture, or back and forth to the barn.  We needed to get this mare to be confident in allowing us to lead her ANYWHERE and know she would be safe.  She also had to learn the importance of "whoa" and to respect it each and every time.  We worked on that alone for nearly two months.

I have to give a huge amount of credit to Mary for laying a fantastic foundation over the years. She was and is completely dedicated to taking the time and doing the work that needs to be done for Bella to be as strong and confident as possible. She has worked with Bella extensively using clicker training and it makes a world of difference.  Whenever we introduce something new and Bella gets nervous, we can revert back to something she knows well and it helps to build her confidence.  And lately we have been introducing lots of new things!  As you can imagine, Bella is very wary of things that flap around or make strange noises, so things like saddle pads and the reins of a bridle take some getting used to.  We opted to go with a bitless bridle in order to keep things simple for Bella, and since it works off of pressure points similar to a halter, which she already understands.  Bella has worn a saddle in the past, so we simply had to reintroduce that to her.  And here we are about seven months later, with a fully tacked up, confident mare!

 

We still have a long way to go, but I am thrilled with how far we have come.  Good job Mary!

 

Building blocks

I work with a lot of horses who's background is unknown.  Maybe they are broke to ride, maybe not.  Maybe they have great training, or maybe there are big gaping holes in that training. Who knows.  So it is quite the guessing game for me to figure out what they know, what they don't, and what I can do about it.  I am currently working with a fabulous little quarter horse mare who knows A LOT.  I don't know much about her past, but I know she had some western training.  She stops on a dime, leg yields like a champ, and is one of the least spooky horses I ride.  She bathes, clips, ties and can be safely ridden by a novice rider.  So imagine my confusion when I realized that she does not know how to canter, or seem to have any idea whatsoever that she had a third gear.  Somehow, in her fifteen years of life she was never taught this skill.  It kind of baffles me, to be honest.  It seems so basic.

I decided to go back to the beginning and started off lunging this mare in a round pen.  At first, she would only give me a stride or two of canter before she would lose her balance and fall back to trot, but that was OK.  Even just those two strides were a big step for her.  Eventually she was balanced enough to make it around a full circle, then two circles, then three.  It was slow going.  As she got stronger and started to understand more, we progressed outside the round pen and onto a lunge line, then to under saddle.  I have been very careful to take is slow as she needs, she gets upset when she makes a mistake and I don't want to blow her mind.  It has been about six weeks and just the other day she finally offered me a relaxed canter that I barely had to ask for.  We still can only make it about halfway around the arena, but we are making progress.

A bit of an understatement

OK, so lets start with a fun one.  Awhile back I got a call from a woman who has a mustang cross that "rears a little".  She primarily wanted to do trail riding and whenever they would get to a point he did not want to go past, he would "pop up" and backpedal.  Apparently this "popping up" behavior was something that he also did with his previous owner, so it had been a habit for a long while.  Now I know that I am not an expert in problem horses, and I know that rearing is the scariest, most dangerous and totally unacceptable behavior a horse can have.  So to be fair to this woman, I told her I would not know whether or not I could help her until I met the horse and saw the situation.  I was prepared for something like this:

 

 

What I found looked more like this:

 

And that was just when he was asked to lunge.

 

The very first thing I told her was that there was no way ANYBODY should be riding this horse until the problem was resolved on the ground.  The underlying issue was actually a serious lack of respect and so we went back to the basics of establishing respect on the ground and on the lunge line.  There were a couple of hard and fast rules.  1.  His feet were not allowed to leave the ground in any way whatsoever other than to be able to walk, trot and canter when asked.  2.  He was not allowed to turn and look at me when asked to stop, because he would use this as an opportunity to challenge me.  3.  Forward was not optional.

 

I was very pleased to find that after just a few sessions he came around to being a very well behaved gelding.  He did not rear once after that first day and after awhile I felt confident in being able to ride him safely.  Our next challenge was to take him out on the trails and address the backpedaling behavior.  The primary problem was that he did not want to leave his buddies and so he would put on the brakes and back up.  Since we had already established on the ground that forward was not optional, this problem was minimal to fix.  We did spend about ten minutes circling endlessly as he walked backwards trying to make his way back to his friends, but essentially all I had to do was wait it out and let him figure out that it was so much easier to do it my way.  And once we made it to the other side of the field....there were cookies to be had.

 

Since then his owner has been able to trail ride him successfully with no problems and she is very happy with his behavior.  She understands that she will have to constantly maintain respect and we have some follow-up visits scheduled.  Overall I am very happy with the progress of this pair and I think they have a great future together.

 





Welcome to HKR Horse Training

I have been teaching and training for a long time and I never cease to be amazed at how much I learn from horses every day.  The intention of this blog is to tell the stories of those lessons.  The good, the bad, the funny and not so funny. 

Whenever I talk to a new client one of first questions is always "so tell me about your horse".  The answer to this question tells me A TON about what I am getting into.  Some people just start to gush about how amazing their horse is.  Some get kind of quiet and then say "well................................." which is then followed by something like "my horse rears a little bit".  Either way, there is always a reason why I have been called and this first talk it always enlightening.  These are the stories I intend to share in the hopes that the things I learn will be helpful to others too.  I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I enjoy telling them.