hi it's josie and today i've got something a little bit different for you
but before you click away i would like you to watch this if you ride a horse or train
a horse because this is where it all starts and this is horse training at its very basic so when
i learned to do this stuff all of my riding and training of my horse took a bit of a quantum leap
because i started to understand the basics the very basic building blocks of what was involved
in training a horse so today we're going to work with my four-week old foal grayson here i'm going
to show you how i start training them as young as four weeks old so come on in and let's go
so when my mares are feeding foals they get fed twice a day so i do work with my foal
every day when i feed my mares you can see what i do in the very early days i'll link it up here
because last year we had lily and i showed you how i in the first few days i taught a foal to
not struggle when i needed to hold it the reasons i do that is because i might need to get them some
veterinary care and i like to make sure that my foals are not going to be stressed if i handle
them and then have to have veterinary care on top of it some people don't like to handle their foals
that's their that's their decision i have the reasons why i do and i'm quite happy with them
so when i feed my mares in the morning i'll often sit here i have done this for a while
grayson's is used to this now but i will sit with them so that the foal can interact with me on his
own terms usually if you sit a bit lower you're below the foal so you're not quite so intimidating
and my hand always comes up underneath and i stroke my foals on the neck so if you think about
what the mother does to them when they're born she licks them she doesn't bump them she licks them
you'll often find if you scratch a foal you'll end up getting teeth back on you because they're
trying to groom you so in the first few days whilst they're really little i often sit on my
feed bin so that i'm down low i'm in one spot once they get a bit used to me i will move around them
and what i aim to do you'll see he's not yeah he's four weeks old but i haven't done a huge amount
they will kick foals it's part of their um protective mechanisms within them so if i reached
out and grabbed him on the bottom now there's every chance he would double barrel me because in
the wild if a predator grabbed his butt what's he going to do kick you just need to be aware they're
not being naughty it's part of their survival instincts so i will come up and i will just i
bring my hand underneath and i will stroke him and i stroke them from head to foot i will still to
this day at the moment would not walk up and touch him on the bottom he's not been handled a lot
but i'll do it from this end and i'll just brush him with my hand stroke him all over i need to be
able to touch my foals everywhere i showed you how i can restrain them and see he didn't go anywhere
then and i'll link the lilly video up here so you can see how i taught him to stop when i do that
the other thing i do it's time you need to be able to touch your foal's legs so i started in
the beginning just being able to touch them so i'm breaking my training down even for my foal
i've got a free guide and i'll link that up here if you'd like to go and get that it's free for
you and it talks about three principles that i use whenever i'm training a horse and it doesn't
matter if it's only four weeks old so he gets his legs they've been i i have done this guy
so i have just worked my way down and now that's just a foal playful thing but he's not allowed to
do that because it's cute while he's this size but it's 600 kilos it's not much fun but i can
take his leg here and he picks it up i don't want him to hold it up i just want him to pick it up
no teeth mate there you go i can do a back leg sorry you're going to have my back but notice
how i work my way down and then i will just uh good boy there's a couple of sensitive spots on a
foal and they're all to do with reflexes and one of them is up here they don't like you touching
or pushing up there and the other one is i'll just get i'll go around the other side so you
can see but a flank here they're very ticklish there you can see his um skin twitching and they
will quite often cow kick you the first time you touch that so it's also a reflex you can't tell
them off it's just part of nature good boy so i don't know if you can see but we have a in the
summertime here we have a huge fly problem my horses all wear fly veils mainly because
i don't like irritated and ulcerated eyes but obviously he's little i don't want to put a fly
veil on him so i have been using fly spray i use the same principle to put fly spray on my foal
because he's already been used to my hand what i did in the beginning
was i put the fly spray on my hand and then i put it on him for the first few days we were working
he got used to the noise of the fly spray and the fly spray on him
now he'll stand still i'm just moving up this thing because seriously this could
tickle him and he could kick me he would not mean to kick me but that's just the way it is
so i can just spray him all over and how i i used to pop it on my hand to put it on my face
but he's so good now that i can pop this up literally on the skin and just put
a couple of dots on like that and then i rub them now this bit of rubbing his face
is very important as well because next weekend grayson is going to get a halter
now i have done a video on how i haltered lily and i'll pop that up here so i need to be able
to touch his face all over to get a halter on him and we like to keep the flies away from you
don't we mate because they are just disgusting here there you go little man i'm really not into
putting a lot of things on young animals but it's better than the flies and i don't know if
the cameraman can zoom right in on his nose there i'll see if i can bring his nose back this way
you will see that he's pink skinned and he's actually going to get sunburned and blistered
so i need to be able to put sun protection on him at the moment he gets sunscreen on that
but i'm going to buy one of the powdered ones which actually completely blocks out the sun
so how does that help you as a rider and a trainer it shows you how you need to break things down to
the smallest possible piece before you then build on it doesn't matter if i'm teaching my horse to
leg yeild or if i'm teaching my foal to pick up his foot to pressure as i said i have the guide
it'll be linked in the description if you missed the link back further in the video i'll pop a
link in the description as well and they are three things that i think about always when i'm
training my horses i hope that helps i hope you enjoyed meeting grayson and thanks for watching