We want to talk about training the horse, developing the horse
and we want to take advantage of their basic nature.
The horse is basically a flight animal. If they get scared,
and something happens, they run away.
This horse is pretty quiet and relaxed, and isn't very excitable,
Basically a horse flees. Now if you get a horse in a corner,
and they can't get away, that's when you're going to have a fight on your hands
sometimes. So when we train a horse, we always want to give the horse someplace to go
so that when we ask the horse to move,
he can go someplace and he doesn't have to stand there an tolerate us
bumping on him or thumping on him, or whatever else.
So, understand if he's trying to get away, he's just trying to survive the situation.
Secondly, the horse's have a basic language
a very subtle language, that they have with each other.
Now that language is based on dominance. One horse dominates the other.
There's a dominant horse in the pack, every other horse moves out of the way.
So, when that dominant horse walks through, goes to feed, goes to water,
or just walks by, all the other horses get out of the way.
If we're training a horse, and we walk into the horse,
and the horse doesn't move, it's not concerned about us
and basically that tells us that maybe this horse is the dominant player.
And so if the horse is not responding to you, and it doesn't get out of your way,
or even lays their ears back and threatens you when you move into their space,
then you need to do something about it.
So we're going to ask that horse to get out of the way,
and so we become the dominant player in the relationship.
If you're not the dominant player, then you are in danger.
Because if the horse is a dominant player, and feels he can run over you, step over you,
if he gets excited and he's going to turn and kick at you, then you're in trouble.
If in fact he's listening to you, and he sees you as a dominant player,
then we don't have a problem
Now the third concept is we want to sensitize this horse to the things we want him to know
and we want to desensitize him to the other things.
So for example, if we're going to use a crop,
or a rope, or a lead shank, whatever to get this horse to move,
we want him to be concerned about it, but we don't want him to be afraid of it.
So we're going to desensitize this horse by
rubbing him with our crop, or with our rope,
or slinging the rope around him and getting this horse very quiet and relaxed
and not worried about these things.
At the same time, when we ask this horse to move,
we want him to be sensitive to it, so we give him a cue
and ask the horse to move out of our way,
Then, you see, we've got a horse that's very concerned and will move out of the way
because he's concerned about us, at the same time, we're going to go right back
ok, it's alright
We're going to desensitize him to it, but at the same time, we want him to be sensitive
to the fact that we're going to move him.
So if he understands that we're the dominant player in the relationship,
he is sensitive to the things we want him to do, and he's desensitized
to the things we don't want him to be afraid of,
then we've got a chance at getting a horse that listens to us,
who is very responsive, but he's not afraid of us.
Now, the other thing we want to do is get the horse where he thinks his way through all situations.
Horses tend to be reactive.
The first thing that happens, they react to it, and we want him not to react
or we want him to react to the things we want him to,
but we want him to think about it. So if we do something,
he thinks about, and he things "eh, I don't believe that was bad."
And if we keep doing these things, then he says, 'ok, that's alright, this doesn't mean anything,'
But if we ask him to move, and bump, he understands that we're asking him to do something
So we want him to think his way through this process
and not just react to us.
So if we take advantage of the horse's natural flight,
his natural dominance characteristics, his sensitivity and thinking,
and create a sensitive horse that is desensitized to things we want him to be,
then we have a horse we can train and do some good things with