It is always educational to me to watch how other people interact with their horses and how their horses respond to them.
Some things across a broad enough pool are highlighted over and over again..
Do you know what your horse is doing? Do you care where the feet are at..
Do you ambush you horse?
Be aware.
Common themes that through just haltering a horse and leading them around you can un-cover…
Then you have the deeper things..
Deeper issues in a horses makeup…
When you get a horse and on the ‘surface’ everything checks out…
Then as you run it through its gears you find a little sore spot.. A little sticky spot..
A spot where…. everything could go sideways….
Now I am not claiming any great understanding here.. Most of my work to date with horses has been colt starting and ground handling. I am just now getting off my own feet and getting a better set of four…
Yet you can still uncover things from the ground that could realize themselves in the saddle..
And then because you found them on the ground, you can be safer in the saddle…
Take one horse I was working with…
On the ground the horse seemed ok.. Kinda quick, but ok.. Not too push, seemed to respond ok.. Until I went on the left side… Then if I moved to quickly on this side the horse fell apart… Meaning its head goes up, its feet goes back and it gets worried and starts to check out…
Now if I was riding that thing I would be working on left to get it solid.. More flag work, more slow work, more building the horses confidence and trying to find key to where everything broke down.. I don’t know what that key is but I know its there somewhere…
Then take the same horse.. That horse had a huge bulge on its neck..
Which means somewhere in its lifetime it was rode.. I mean rode.. Like some gal was a barrel fool and had an ass like glue and rode that horse… Rode it without asking the horse to think. Rode it without asking the horse to fill in for them...
The horse had plenty of go.. But I am sure it would get nervous, and try to get away from the bit and the owner felt they needed to “control” it and they tied it down…
That horse had no fill in.. It was a good horse, dont get me wrong.. But it was not a thinking horse.. It was not horse who would try to hold in there with you..
So there were a couple of things..
1. The horse showed physical signs of control
2. The horse had a touchy place on its left side in which it felt it needed to defend itself ( by moving away)
3. The horse had plenty of go but was nervous under saddle.. Ie waiting for the shoe to drop…
So if I was more experienced I could have pulled away more of the issues and tried to find the real problems, in order to help the horse..
In order to show the horse it did not need to defend itself, it did not need to feel it had to be on red alert all the time.. In order for it to gain trust in the human…
But at least I found something.. At least the horse let me uncover some golden nuggets… I was able to find the letter A in a jumble of letters. I was able to add that to a few more letters and spell a word.. The horse showed me that much with my meager set of tools…
Now I need to refine those tools, and make sentences out of the words I find…
My goal… is to someday make poetry.. but right now I am happy I know what language we are writing in!
HiHo!
LW
No comments:
Post a Comment