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.