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- Hey guys.
Today's topic is on bonding with your new horse.
I thought of this topic
because there's a lot of new horses
that have come into Sandhill recently
and started working in the lesson program.
One of those horses is Dory here.
Super cute.
And I wanted to take some time to do a little video
on three tips that I find can be a help
when you're just getting a relationship started
with a new horse.
So you're starting to form that bond for the first time.
So my first tip is spending time with your horse.
And this may seem like common sense.
Obviously, if we want to build a stronger bond
and relationship with our horse,
we want to spend time with them.
But many of us have really busy schedules.
We have a lot on our plate.
And so it's hard to cut aside the time in our schedule
to spend with our horse.
A lot of times when we do think about coming out
and spending time with our horse,
we think about riding them.
But there's so many things that you can do
to strengthen your relationship
and bond with your horse more
that are not involving riding.
A couple of the things you can do
are just spend a little time brushing your horse
like I'm doing here with Dory.
You could also take them out for a walk around the property,
work a little bit on you're leading with your horse.
Lead them around the outside of the property.
Lead them into the indoor if they're new to the facility.
These are all new things that are gonna help you
to help your horse relax a little bit more
in their environment and get more confident.
Lastly, you can do groundwork with your horse.
Doing groundwork is a great way
to connect with your horse more
and get to know their personality a little bit better
through asking them to do different things.
I did a whole video on this topic.
You can check it out here.
And remember that the more time
that you spend with your horse,
the more you're getting to know them as a unique individual
and the more that you're spending time on the ground
in that one-on-one place with your horse,
the more that you're going to be able to
have a better riding relationship when you get under saddle.
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My second tip is reading your horses body language.
So whenever we're with our horse,
they're always talking with us.
If you look at Dory here,
you can see her attention is a little bit down
the barn aisle here.
She's got one ear forwards listening forward, one ear back.
So this is telling me something about Dory
and where her mind's at.
She's thinking about what she's hearing over here.
The more that I can read my horse's body language,
the more I'm gonna be safe around her
and the more I'm gonna be able to
set her up for success as we go to work together.
Now let's look at a couple examples
of our horse's body language.
So here I have Meg.
She's walking out in the jump field
and you can see she gets a little bit nervous.
Spooks from something.
It's a windy day out.
And I knew she was gonna spook
because she was tense already in her body.
Her head was up, she was tense over a top line.
So by the time she spooked here,
I was prepared to work her a little bit on the line
and get her relaxed.
Here we have an example of me walking out
in the jump field with Legend.
And Legend is very relaxed in his body language.
He's walking around with his head down very confidently
over the jumps and around them.
And this is important for me in our bonding.
I can see that I don't need to support Legend
by doing any work, moving his feet
or helping him relax at all as I had to do with Meg.
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Tip number three is learn together.
When you've got a new horse,
you don't really know a lot about their personality yet.
You haven't seen them in a lot of different situations.
So there's a lot of kind of unknowns.
It can be a little bit scary.
But if you do some basic things with your horse,
making some basic requests,
you can get to know them a little bit better.
One thing I did with Dory is I took her out.
We walked around a little bit.
We hand grazed.
We came in the barn, we went outside.
So I got to see how Dory was outside.
I got to see how she was in the arena.
And while I did that, I had some responsibility
and Dory had some responsibility.
So my responsibility was to pay attention
to Dory's body language,
be aware and be consistent in my requests from Dory.
Her responsibility was to respond to me
to the best of her ability and try to stay focused on me.
So anytime that you're going out
and making even just basic requests from your horse,
you are getting to know what type of learner they are,
how they handle different pressure in their environment.
And that's really gonna help you to have success.
I hope these three tips were a help to you.
If you're just starting off with a new horse
and developing your bond for the first time
or you're trying to strengthen your relationship
with a horse you already have.
If you have anything further to add to this video,
you can let me know in the comments below.
I'd love to hear from you.
I release new videos every week.
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Keep enjoying your horses.
Keep fueling your passion to learn
and I'll see you in the next video.