The Tools of the Trade

In the very beginning, right out of the pasture, consistency builds trust. Before a horse can trust you, it can trust the routine. It can trust that it will do the same thing and it will experience the same treatment. That is the first step. Kindness and consistency. It may not seem like it at first, but it is kindness that is harder to manage on a daily basis than consistency. Humans like routine as much as horses do, so once one is established, sticking to it is not that hard. Constant kindness, on the other hand, that is harder. Kindness must override your fear, your stress, and your impatience. Young horses are really large babies with mood swings, tantrums, and just some plain bad days. It is easy to be kind and gentle when everything is going right, but what about when you have had a bad day? What about when your bad day is the same day your young horse bolts out of your hand, breaks its halter, runs around screaming its head off for an hour, and only after running around with a grain bucket do you manage to catch it? Then what? Can you be kind then? And that’s the hard part, for that is the moment when you must be kind. It is one of those crucial moments. If you hit that horse, if you shake the lead rope in its face, if you take it behind the barn to “teach it a lesson”, you have just taught that horse that if it gets loose from you, it better not come back. Whether or not you intended that to be the lesson that horse will put two-and-two together. It was caught, so you hit it, pure and simple. I will bet you money that horse will remember that. And especially if that horse is a baby, I will bet you a lot of money it will be harder to catch next time. 

You must be patient. In every moment of those first few months and throughout the years to come, you must practice patience. It’s like a muscle you build. Somedays you remember to flex it and you congratulate yourself. You did a great job not getting frustrated when your second “this is my space and this is your space” lesson with a pushy two-year-old does not produce any better results. You know you did a good job keeping your cool when you get nervous in the show ring, get a launcher of a distance to a jump and your young horse goes a smidge beyond “playing” on the other side of it. But somedays you forget, or your patience is not strong enough yet. Those days you mess up. Then you get to live out the consequences of your impatience. Maybe you pushed a horse to start over fences too early to keep is owner happy, and now it’s stopping or running to the fences. Or maybe things were going so well you decided to start lateral work just to see what would happen, and now your crooked and stuck. At those moments you sit yourself down, look at what you did, and make a plan to go back a step. You promise yourself you will never make that mistake again. Spoiler, you will keep making mistakes. If you really did learn the first time around, you won’t make that same mistake again, but you will make others. You will have set backs. With individual horses, in your career, and in your life. Never mind those, they will pass. It is slow, and perhaps at times incremental, but none the less you will move forward and onward.

You will need all this experience. All of the wisdom, knowledge and skill you can muster will be your lifeline and your livelihood. If you are like me and you love babies, young horses, and the older horses who just act like babies, then be prepared. You will be given the naughty ones, the ones that bite or kick, the ones their owners can’t ride, the ones without experience, and the ones that will definitely buck. You will ride them all. You will ride the ones that are scared, sacred of everything, even their own shadow. You will ride the spoiled ones. The ones that have gotten away with it and now have a trick up their sleeve. Some will be stubborn, others unsure, and a few will be mean. And with each and every one of those horses, you will treat them as an individual. You will treat them with kindness and respect. You will, you must, see it from their perspective. If they are scared, you must ask why. Are they inexperienced? Have they been beaten; do they have the mental or physical scars to prove it? If they are mean, are they being defensive? Do they hurt? You will look for all the ways to make sure you are not repeating another’s mistakes. 

In this way, you will gain their trust. In this way, they will come to like you, and you them. You will speak softly to them, you will use a gentle hand, and you will reassure them, again and again if necessary. Do not break that trust, it’s what makes this whole endeavor possible. Fear is your enemy, and in all its forms should be avoided. It is not that you will be soft and yielding to these horses, it is rather that you will be clear. You must be clear in your expectations and precise in your corrections. Do not be afraid of using pressure. To allow bad behavior or bad habits can be almost as detrimental to a horse’s life and future as being too harsh. You will always be as gentle as you can, but you will be firm when it is necessary. Using a whip, spurs, or a chain should not be a first resort, but they are tools that can be necessary. In some hands and on the wrong horses they can be cruelty, but in other hands and in the right situation, they can be strong communication. Do not mistake the two.