Round penning is just a series of exercises that teaches the horse to get "used to saying yes."
When we begin with a horse we have a horse that's "used to saying no" to everything - and it has no
idea... It just wants to resist because that's nature. But round penning gets the horse used to
saying "yes." And we build things very slowly. We start at the bottom of the totem pole in the
horse's mind and we gradually work our way up. Eventually through this series of exercises,
we become the boss in the horse's eyes. Round penning is not about tiring the horse out, okay?
This is about using the very simple fact that it's a round pen and we use that to our advantage. Every
time, for instance, the horse wants to take off and run away from us, he has nowhere to go but
right back around to us. So in a lot of respects, it's the very shape of this... the round pen,
that helps us do this training. Horses very much believe that whoever gets the other to
move his legs first is the boss and so round penning, for instance, draws a great deal on this.
By keeping the horse moving, by speeding it up, for instance, if it isn't trying, then eventually
what happens is that the horse realizes that when it turns in and it faces me, for instance,
I allow it to stop and stand and relax. It doesn't take all that long before the horse realizes that
when he plays the game - when he stops and looks at me, or when he turns in a particular direction - that
I will allow him to stop and stand and relax. After you round pen the horse you would
begin doing what I refer to as "bridal work from the ground" where, again, you're still on the
ground - but the horse has a bridle in its mouth and you teach it to respect the bit. You move its
hind quarters away. You, move its shoulders away... and you teach the horse how to move
based on pressure and release. Doing the round pen exercises, followed by bridal work from the
ground, keeps us much safer. Think about the obvious fact that if we're on the horse's back
and the horse didn't know how to carry a rider yet - especially if it's a horse that wants to
buck - that's obviously a whole lot more dangerous than doing this preliminary work from the ground
where this work is all about getting the horse "used to" hanging out with a human, "used to" saying
"yes," "used to" doing as we ask. After round penning comes bridal work from the ground; after
bridal work from the ground, the next step would be to get the horse used to carrying a saddle - and
then of course a rider. Round penning follows the same basic steps every time that you do it. Now,
you can mix and match some of these different steps - but for the most part we follow the
same procedure each and every time. We begin with a horse that doesn't know us from Adam,
who thinks it's the boss, who doesn't even know that we're alive... so the first thing that we
want to do is wake this horse up to the fact that not only do we exist but that we're not
going to go away - and we're not going to stop annoying the horse until he does as we ask.
Through a series of exercises, very simple exercises that build on top of each other,
you're able to gradually grow control within this horse - because it's all about control. It's about
getting the horse "used to saying yes." It's also about teaching the horse to do as you ask
the next beat. So in the round pen, for instance, one of the things that we try to instill within
the horse is that when we ask it to do something I want it to start doing that thing in the next
beat. If the horse just stands and stares at me, it shows me that I have no control. Everything we
ask the horse to do is very, very simple. What makes horse training difficult, quite often,
is simply the resistance we get from the horse. If I ask you to lift my hand - but I keep pushing
down - that's not a hard thing for you to do if I was to relax. But when I push down it's my
resistance that makes it difficult. It's the same thing with horse training. After we get the horse
moving around in the round pen, without changing direction, without changing its speed on its own,
then we want to start teaching it to turn it towards us and changing direction,
to turn away from us and changing direction... From there it's a matter of teaching it to move
its hips away, to move its shoulders away... We can use this not only to create a riding horse.
one that's used to doing as we as we request with little to no pressure, that we're the boss,
that we're not gonna go away, that he might as well just do as we ask the first time...
but also the movements like, say, asking the hips to move away or the shoulders to move away - we can
use those things there on the ground for immediate purposes. We can teach the horse to lead next
to us. The round pen then is the place where you begin training a horse. You can also take an older
horse there that needs to be restarted and you can begin your restart there. And the bottom line is
that in the round pen we as professional trainers are watching for physical changes from the horse
that reflect changes in his brain, changes that show us that he has given us more respect - which
is obviously a very important thing because someday somebody wants to get on that horse.