One of the best ways to train your horse to be a calm, respectful and responsive partner on the trail is to never pass up a training opportunity. When you ride your horse outside the arena, there will be plenty of opportunities to expose him to new objects and reinforce old lessons.
In this short series, I’m going to share four tips to keep in mind when working on building your horse’s confidence with an unfamiliar object.
Tip #2: Be Patient
Regardless of what obstacle you come up to or what your horse is having a problem with, stay with that obstacle or that particular hazard until your horse is comfortable using the thinking side of his brain. Let’s say you’re working on getting your horse to cross a shallow gulley. If you let the horse jump the gulley in a hurry and you keep going down the trail, you’re telling him that it’s OK to be reactive and scared.
He says to himself, “Yep. My mother was right. All I have to do is use the reactive side of my brain and I can escape anything. Hurry and jump the gulley and I can be done with it.”
I want to teach my horses: You know what? Your mother was wrong; she was on crack when she had you. Don’t hurry over the gulley, because every time you hurry over the gulley, or log, or stream, or whatever we’re going across, I’m going to keep making you go over it and over it and over it until you take your time. The quickest way to get rid of the gulley is to slow down, think about where you’re placing your feet and pick your way through it.
Every single time you take your horse through or across a gulley and you don’t like the way he does it, but you ride on anyway, you have taught him that what he did was acceptable. So it should be no surprise that, when the next time the situation presents itself, he does the same thing. But with a little time and a little effort, you’ll find that your horse has no problems with any gulleys you might encounter on the trail. Again, great trail horses are not born, they’re made, meaning they’re trained with hundreds of hours of riding and getting sweaty saddle blankets.
Read Tip #1: Go Through Your Horse’s Feet to Get to His Mind here.
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