When you own horses, and especially if you keep them at home, sometimes it seems like your whole life revolves around doing their bidding—food service, housekeeping, valet service, maintenance. Most people who dream of bringing their horses home (after boarding them forever) are stunned to discover they have even less time to ride.
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Horsemanship clinics are intensive training opportunities, usually with an expert from another area. As a horsemanship clinician, I generally work with riders and horses I’ve never met, and usually on a one-time basis.
There are both pros and cons of working with horses and their owners only once. The obvious benefit is that I have no preconceived notions about horse or rider;
In the next two articles I am going to give you two methods to change your horse’s direction when working at liberty in a paddock or arena. Each technique eliminates the need to stop the horse and “manually” turn him around so that he is facing in the opposite direction. Instead he will learn to respond to your commands to turn and change directions on his own as he travels on a “diagonal track”
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Hoof care is an important element in the care of a horse. With a young horse it is really important to start foot care early. Handle the feet as soon as a foal will allow it. You can prevent a lot of conformation problems by trimming early. Sometimes a hoof grows upright and boxy instead of at an angle like a normal hoof. This is called a clubfoot.
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I grew up in Florida, where the main riding season is the winter. Our main chore to get ready for winter was body clipping the horses, to get rid of the winter coat they were not going to need. For the last 30+ years, I’ve lived in the mountains of Colorado, at an altitude of 8000 feet, where the winters are long and cold and preparing your horse and barn for the winter comes with some important concerns.
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We need to set standards and have expectations for our horses. There is always a pecking order in a herd. When a horse is a member of a herd, it knows how to behave and what is expected of it. It is no different with us. We are obviously not going to kick our horse if it doesn’t do what we want as a boss mare would do. However, we can duplicate that leadership by controlling the feet and putting pressure on the horse,
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What qualifies a person to be a horseman or horsewoman? I think maturity is the number one factor. By this I mean handling horses over a lifetime. We can certainly have a talent for horses and get along with them but being a true horseman or woman is not something learned over night. I was first introduced to horses as a teenager and I thought that every older cowboy I met was a horseman.
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The last Lynn Palm article explained how to safely and effectively work our horse at liberty. In Part I, I explained the benefits of liberty work, proper use of the whip, which is an important tool, and handler position.
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We often speak about making sure our horse is collected. Collection is important for every rider whether you trail ride or you are serious about showing. So what is collection and why is it so vital for every rider?
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Horses rise or fall to your level of expectation, no matter how high or low. If you think he’s going to spook at something, he generally will. If you think he is going to throw a fit about getting in the trailer, he will oblige (especially if his emotional outbursts have gotten him what he wanted in the past).
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