Early Rides

                                                            by Laura Crum

            This is going to be the last in my small series of posts about the way I learned to break and train ranch horses. I had meant to go on and explain the bitting up…etc, but I’ve run into a snag. A mental snag, anyway. I grew up on ranches and with ranch horses and I understand exactly what these methods can achieve when they are applied with skill by a good horseman. But in writing these posts I realized that I cannot impart this experience into words. As I said in the introductory post, none of this will work unless you can read a horse. No method is much good unless you can read a horse. If you respond to a fearful horse thinking he is challenging you, or a rebellious horse thinking he is fearful, you aren’t going to get good results. And so I find myself at a loss to explain how we knew when to push on and when to hold back. We read what the horse was feeling/thinking and responded to that.

These methods are very effective at producing broke horses, if you are a competent rider and you can read a horse. I learned them from competent horsemen who were good at reading horses. Not from a book, not being told a tale, but working beside these men and women, and under their direction. I learned by working with literally hundreds of horses. And this is the way to learn—not by reading my blog posts. Or by reading pearls of wisdom from horse gurus…etc. Someone posted a little quote from a well known horse guru the other day along the lines that you had to change your demeanor in response to a horse’s emotional state. I will admit that I rolled my eyes and thought “Duh.” Can you say “learn to read a horse?” All good horsemen do this, no matter their method of breaking and training.

I’ve become all too aware that I can’t really explain this to people in a way that translates to real life. I’m also aware that among the people that read these posts there is a small subset that have done quite a bit of breaking and training of young horses and have been around it their whole lives. In this group, no matter their specific background, there is real understanding of what I am talking about and how it might work—even if the person in question has used vastly different methods. But by far the majority of readers have not done much if any breaking/training. They may have ridden a green horse or two, and they may have participated in breaking/training maybe one or two colts. Their ideas about training are largely based on how they work with their already-broke-and-trained-by-someone-else horses. And, in fact, their thinking is often all about what was done wrong in said breaking/training such that their poor horse is not trusting. Sometimes they have a good point. And sometimes they are missing the point completely (in my opinion—obviously). But one thing is for sure, they haven’t been the one putting the first rides on a bunch of colts. Like everyone else, these folks are entitled to their own opinions, and I have nothing but respect for them if they are having a happy life with their own horses. But we can’t exactly discuss breaking and training methods on an equal footing. What works in theory is not always (or even usually) what works in practice. And the things I am writing about here are things I learned that work—and know this because I learned them by actually climbing on a bunch of colts and doing the work to set them on the path to being broke horses.

So I sometimes have a hard time with the sort of discussions that come up with people who actually have not climbed on a bunch of colts, but boy do they think they know how it should be done.  Such people have in the past said/implied to me that these traditional methods are harsh and “kinder/gentler” methods work just as well. All I can say to this is that until you have actually done the work of breaking colts and produced some well-trained horses that stay reliable under pressure, you don’t really know what works and what doesn’t. By all means you should work with your own horses as you see fit and I wish you and your horses health and happiness. 

The other thing that bugs me is the fear that someone will try this stuff in their own backyard, never having seen it done by a competent horseman, not knowing how to read a horse, and with no idea how badly things can go wrong. This haunts me. So I’ve decided not to talk about the bitting up and the later training that we did. There is so much potential for it to be abusive and for a real wreck to happen—even if the horseman means well-- but hasn’t had a lot of experience.

So far everything I’ve talked about is pretty straight-forward, though I will stress again that to get good results you have to be able to read a horse and respond appropriately to what he is communicating. This last post will talk about what we tried to get done in the first month of riding.

We rode a horse in the bull pen anywhere from once to half a dozen times, depending on the colt. But we always left the bull pen as soon as we felt reasonably confident that the horse had accepted the notion of being ridden. It is important to keep moving on and doing new things—it does not benefit a young horse to become bored and frustrated with being ridden. Boredom and frustration can be worked through with more tying. Riding should be engaging and interesting for the horse at this stage.

            So rides are kept short—maybe half an hour if in the arena, and an hour at the longest—if we went outside. We went outside as soon as we thought it would work. Usually with an older horse along as a babysitter. Ideally we found a long uphill stretch and if the colt was “up” we trotted (the long trot is the gait of choice for colts) until the young horse really wanted to walk. Trotting a young horse uphill until he wants to walk is a wonderful lesson. The colt gets to stretch his legs, see some country, figure out he CAN relax, and there is no need to fight with him. The hill does the work. Deep sand will work for this, too. But again, not too long. As soon as the young horse was tired and wanted to walk we went back.

            At this point I want to address a couple of common problems. The first one is spooking. Some horses are spooky—they just are. You won’t train this out of them. The way to deal with a spook remains the same from the beginning of a horse’s training until he is 20 years old. You are riding along with light contact and the horse sees something he doesn’t like the look of and spooks sideways. Some give a warning, some don’t. Some spook a lot harder than others. It doesn’t matter. You ride it the same.

            I don’t know how people who ride in English saddles do it, but here is what we did/do. As you feel the horse begin to spook, or think about spooking, you maintain your gentle contact on the reins. You might increase it a touch, in a steadying way, but you darn sure don’t pull on the horse. You keep your legs out of the horse and very loose. You sit deep in the saddle and you grab the horn if you need to. You ride the spook (if you’d like to see what this looks like, watch a cutting run and observe the rider’s posture—you ride a spook exactly the way you ride a cutting horse), and when the horse is done with his jump, you pick up gently on the reins and bump him lightly with your heels and indicate that we’re moving on now. No big deal. You never make a big deal out of a spook. You more or less ride it and ignore it.

            If the colt tries to throw his head in the air after a spook and scatter, you double him. Initially you just double him until you have his attention, as gently as you can, and then ask him to move on, using your broke babysitter horse to give him a lead. But if, as time goes on, the colt repeatedly tries to throw his head and bolt after a spook, you double him much harder and use the spur to make it uncomfortable. The message should be plain. You may spook, but you stay in my hand and you may not—ever—try to run off. Once again, the tying around that you did is critical here.

            About the spurs—we usually rode colts with our spurs on. There were exceptions. A very sensitive horse, we’d take them off. I never wore them on the first few rides because I wasn’t totally confident that I could keep them out of a colt if he scattered, and it is absolutely the worst thing you can do to spur a colt by accident when he jumps because he’s scared. But in general spurs help to make the young horse light and responsive to leg cues. Properly used they are a blessing to both horse and rider. Most people who have trained horses will understand this.

            And this gets us to the second common problem. The horse that is resistant, or “doggy” and doesn’t want to move out. Spurring such a horse doesn’t work very well. It just makes him mad. As I mentioned in the last post, the approach we used was to “over and under” the horse with the long reins—which had a popper on the ends. This caused the colt to jump forward and in the case of a doggy horse, this is what you want—that “forward.” So we would ask the horse to move out, very gently, with a soft touch of the spur, and if he did not do so, he was over and undered. If this is done consistently in the early rides and the rider does not get in the habit of thumping on the horse’s sides to get him to move, it is very much to the horse’s advantage in his future training.

            We also used this “over and undering” on a horse that wanted to sull up and thought about bucking in a resistant way (rather than a fearful way). These horses were usually a bit “doggy” and when we would feel such a horse “balling up” (hunching his back as if he was thinking about bucking, while resisting moving forward) we would over and under that horse quick smart. The typical reaction to this is to jump forward with the head up, and, though it seems a bit counter-intuitive at first—it actually took a horse’s mind off of bucking pretty reliably. It also works well with a horse that wants to balk and thinks of rearing. It’s important to do the over and undering BEFORE the horse is actually bucking or rearing. You do it when you feel the horse ball up in a resistant, balky way. The idea is not to punish the horse, but rather to get him to move forward smartly in response to the leg cue and not to think about resistance.

            There is one more potential problem—but it wasn’t very common in the QH type horses that I worked with. However I did run across it in a couple of horses I trained, so I’ll mention it here. This is the horse that doesn’t spook sideways when alarmed, but rather leaps forward. The forward leap rapidly escalates into a full on bolt. The trick with this sort of horse is to take his head and double him before he gets that first jump in. So if you even felt him think about making that jump, you doubled him.

            Anyway, we rode outside as much as we could. The object was to get the colt to “line out” in a long trot. If at all possible we had the colt follow a broke horse in the early rides and then take turns taking the lead. The goal was to have the colt gain confidence in being ridden and to learn to carry the rider at steady pace. Following a broke horse on a jaunt through the countryside is overall pleasant work for a colt and to begin with, as the colt is getting used to being ridden, it’s important to keep it pleasant.

            Any time a colt would try to bolt or buck, he was doubled. Any time he sulled up or balked, he was over and undered with the reins and made to jump forward. Mostly we just covered country. Again, rides were only about an hour. We did not want these young horses to feel exhausted or overwhelmed.

            Once a young horse would line out easily and seemed pretty confident in being ridden, we would go back to the arena—if we had an arena—and work a bit on getting a “handle” on him. This would usually happen at about the sixty day mark. Again, if I was working on my own horse, I did things as the horse seemed to need them, with no time frame driving me. But when we were starting colts for a ranch or clients, the typical goal was to put 90 days of initial riding on the colt (usually a three year old) and at the end of these 90 days the colt would be “green broke,” and often would be turned out until his 4 year old year.

            Green broke horses were still in the snaffle (or bosal, if that was your way), but definitely still in the two rein stage. They were supposed to be reasonably reliable about not bucking or bolting, though it was accepted that they would be “looky” as befits a youngster. They were supposed to know how to pick up the trot and lope when cued, collect a bit at each gait if asked, take the correct lead, and stop on a cue. Also back up, and turn easily to the right or left. They should understand how to move off the rider’s leg.

            I’m not going to talk about the way we taught these things, for the reasons I explained earlier. Without watching an actual horse respond to cues, my descriptions just won’t tell you that much. And there is much potential for abuse and/or a wreck. Find someone you like and trust and work with/learn from them. Choose a person who produces calm, confident, relaxed, well broke riding horses that seem content and you won’t go far wrong. Hopefully this brief series of posts has given you an idea how we began the process of making ranch horses that were reliable throughout their lives and a pleasure to ride.

First Ride

                                                            by Laura Crum

            So in the last post I talked about sacking, saddling, and tying a horse around, and said that once you were done with these steps the horse was ready to ride. Are there other things you could do first? Sure there are. You could drive the horse with long lines, or lunge the horse with side reins, or do some other forms of checking up. Would I do these things? Not usually. Not until after I was riding the horse.

            There’s a reason for this. You don’t want to put off getting on a horse too long. I don’t know how horses know that you’re afraid to get on them, but believe me, they know. If you keep putting off actually climbing on the colt, and stay endlessly dinking around on the ground, the horse will sense that somehow the actual riding of him is a big deal. And it becomes a big deal in his mind, too.

            There’s a rhythm to the whole thing. Every horse is different, but with a typical colt you’re about two to three weeks into the process when you get on him. You’ve tied him and sacked him and saddled him and tied him around. He’s a little worn down by all this and somewhat inclined to be compliant and accept that new things are happening to him. Hopefully, he’s developed a little bit of trust that if he complies with what’s happening, it will be OK. And now is the time to climb on him. (For more about my thoughts on breaking a colt, I wove quite a story about this into my 7^th mystery novel, Hayburner.)

            Ideally the first ride is in the round pen. With no round pen we often did the first ride with the colt ponied by an experienced hand on an experienced pony horse. Or in the deep sand in the riverbed (at one ranch). The goal is to have a situation where if the colt panics, you have a chance of staying in control. We didn’t often have one panic, to be clear. I can only recall one that really came unglued with me, in all the years I spent climbing on colts. But yes, it does happen.

            You really need to be a competent rider to start colts. It’s honestly no place for a beginner. On the other hand, I was no bronc rider—at any point in my life. And I helped start well over a hundred young horses in my 20’s and 30’s. But I was, at that time, a pretty competent, experienced rider, who could read a horse reasonably well. (At this point in my life I’m much better at reading a horse, but much less able as rider—the perks and disadvantages of growing older.)

            The preferred place for the first ride is a solid round pen or bull pen—thirty to fifty feet in diameter, with ground of good deep sand. It’s best to have no one else in the pen. If the horse won’t stand still for mounting, it’s better to work on him learning to stand still than it is to have someone hold him from the ground. Said someone can really get in the way—and get hurt.

            If you can’t mount from the ground you have no business starting colts. We would usually work the colt in the round pen first, and go through the things he had learned-- trot, lope, whoa on cue-- get him slightly tired. Too tired is no good—“stealing a ride” is not desirable. But tired enough that he was ready to stand still—a light sweat on the neck. At that point we would bring him to the middle of the round pen, and begin the process of teaching him about mounting. With some colts you ended up working on mounting for several days before you ever rode them. But with many the mounting didn’t take too long.

            Basically, you pull the colt’s head gently to the left, and if you have done your tying around effectively, this is familiar and the horse yields easily. You put your left foot in the stirrup, and you begin hopping up and down and pulling on the saddle and what have you. The goal is not to scare the horse, but to get him used to you moving around there. If you have done your sacking thoroughly, this, too, is not usually a big deal.

            If the horse wants to move, you keep him moving in a circle around you with his head bent to the left. If at any point the horse rebels against this, you need to go back to the tying around. But if he just walks around you in a circle you let him walk, often with you hopping along, one foot in the stirrup, one on the ground (being VERY careful that you are ready to jerk that foot out of the stirrup at any time). You don’t go further until the horse stands still.

            Once the colt stands absolutely still no matter how much you hop and pull on the saddle, you pull yourself up until you are standing in the stirrup. Again, you are poised to leap clear of the horse. You have the horse’s head bent to the left. If the colt moves forward at this point, you step down and continue hopping around with him. And you repeat these steps until you can pull yourself up and stand in the left stirrup and the horse is unconcerned and stands still.

            Once the horse is OK with you standing in the stirrup, you begin reaching over the horse,  and talking to the horse, leaning over him, getting him used to the idea that you are on him. He needs to be aware that you are above him, on his back and be ok with this. The whole time you keep his head bent to the left with the rein and you are poised to jump off and pull his head to you if he leaps forward. You work on this until the horse is calm. If he does jump forward and you have to step off, you spend a lot more time working on it. You do not want the horse to feel fearful about you being on his back when you do sit on him. When the horse is absolutely OK with you being above him like this, you are ready to sit on him.

            This is the moment of truth. The moment where you swing your leg over a horse is the most vulnerable moment for a rider—always. Even a good rider is vulnerable at this point. We tried, always, to have the horse calm and accepting of the idea that you were “on” him before we swung that leg over. It is very important that from the first ride on the horse learn to stand still for mounting and not move off until given a cue by the rider.

            So yeah, when you felt the horse was ready-- calm and standing still and comfortable with you above him and on him-- you took a deep breath and swung that leg over, settled yourself in the saddle and found that right stirrup with your foot, hopefully without upsetting the colt. Once you were settled on him and ready to roll, you took a bit of time to talk to him and praise him, all the time keeping his head slightly bent to the left. And when you felt that he was ready, you asked him to take a step forward, while bending to the left.

            The goal was to walk him in a small circle to the left, say whoa, have him stop and praise him, then bend his head to the right and have him do the same thing on the other side. If you got through this calmly and smoothly, your chances of having a “good” first ride were very high.

            Of course, it doesn’t always go like this, though I’m here to say that with the colts I started, this was a more common scenario than not. But sometimes the shit did hit the fan.

            Colts would startle and leap forward—there were two possible responses to this and you had to choose quickly. The truly great hands always just let the horse alone. If he wanted to scoot around that round pen, they let him ago until he wanted to stop. If he wanted to bog his head and buck, they let him do it and sat up on him and rode him until he was ready to stop bucking. Nothing makes a broke horse quicker and better than someone who can do this. Unfortunately, I was never that person. I know very few people who ever were that person. I have seen it done and it is really is the best way to start a colt. He learns early on that bolting and bucking just don’t do any good—and that lesson sticks with him for life.

            However, for me and most people I knew, this approach wasn’t an option. I simply did not ride well enough to ride out a bucking horse. I have let one scoot around, but I was ready to grab his head if he started to put it down. And that is your second option. You double the colt, and if you’ve done your work well, you are able to get him in a tight circle, pulling his nose to your stirrup, and you just keep him going around until he stops of his own accord and puts slack in the rein. And then you praise him and release him and start again to get him to take a calm step forward, always with his head bent to one side or the other.

            The other big problem was a horse that did not want to take a step. This was surprisingly common. We tried to avoid thumping on a horse with our heels to get him to move forward, and I never used spurs on a first ride. The usual approach was to pull the horse’s head around as if you were doubling him, thump on him as much as you had to with the outside leg, and release/praise him as soon as he took one step. Usually this problem went away after a couple of rides. But if it persisted, once we were sure the horse was not frightened by having a rider on his back, we would over and under him with the long snaffle bit reins that we used, and get him to jump forward (not on the first ride). From very early days it is important that the horse develop the habit of moving forward quickly and lightly in response to the leg cue.

            A good first ride lasted maybe ten minutes, and the horse walked in circles in both directions and whoaed on command. He got a lot of petting and praise for doing this. Then came the mounting procedure in reverse, because you had to start all over again to be sure the colt would be OK with the dismount. It was a HUGE negative to have a successful first ride and then have the colt panic when the rider dismounted. So we always took our time getting the colt comfortable with the idea of the dismount.

            Some people dismount and mount several times at the end of the ride to reinforce this. I think that’s a judgment call. Sometimes it can be a good idea—depends on the circumstances.

            In the next post I’ll talk about early rides on a horse and what we tried to accomplish.

            Gunner as a three year old—a green broke horse—I had put about ninety days on him at this point.

            

The Next Step

                                                            by Laura Crum

            I started this series of posts because a few people said that they wanted to hear my views on horse training. By the time I was done with the first post, I really began to dread the scathing responses I felt sure I would be getting, accusing me of cruelty…etc. But I went ahead and put it out there, because it’s what I honestly believe—after forty years of non-stop owning/training/riding horses. Though I am sure many people disagreed with what I said, the lack of ugly, attacking responses was encouraging (in the sense that we can all discuss this subject civilly). I want to begin today’s post by (again) explaining why I used these methods and what they achieve.

            I know I’m repeating myself here, but remember, these are just my own opinions. If you’ve achieved a good relationship with your horse through other methods, more power to you. I’m happy for you. If you want to insist that your method of breaking/training horses is “better” than mine, that’s fine, too. But I want to be clear that we’re comparing apples to apples. I want to hear how your system works to create horses that stay reliably obedient even in stressful situations—because that is what I am talking about here. How to train a horse that is reliably obedient—a “broke” horse.

            I want to digress for a moment, because I have spent a lot of time thinking about this subject in the last week. Some of my horsey facebook friends have put up quotes from various horse gurus, along the lines of “we don’t properly prepare the horse to accept breaking and training and thus it is frightening to him,” and “the horse is just trying to survive in this sort of breaking situation—he feels his life is on the line.” And these gurus were referring, I believe, to the very method of breaking a horse that I’m writing about here. The more I thought about these statements, the more I understood the point of what we did when we broke ranch horses in a traditional manner. So I’m going to explain it as well as I can in reference to these statements.

            When it comes to preparing a horse to accept the breaking process, I want to repeat something I said in the last post. The tying solid is the preparation. In a perfect world, a colt would be tied solid until this was no big deal to him, and this might take months. Once a colt has accepted this restraint, and understood there is no point in fighting it, he has the basic understanding that will enable him to accept the breaking process. Also, in a perfect world, every step that I describe in this series of posts would be done every day until the horse accepted it completely—however long it took to get that done. This doesn’t always happen because in the real world the horse was expected to get ninety days of training and be “green broke.” Most of the time we were breaking horses for someone else—the ranch owner or a client. We weren’t free to take all the time we wanted. With my own horses I always kept the time frame completely open-ended, and I think this is by far the best way to train horses.

            The second statement—that the horse is just trying to survive in this sort of breaking process, that he thinks he’s fighting for his life—well, yes, that’s true. At some points that is exactly how he feels. I’m going to explain this concept the way I understand it, and I’m grateful to the person who posted that horse guru’s comment, because it made me think.

 A horse is a prey animal. His instinct when he feels truly threatened is to run away, and/or buck that predator off his back. If we are going to ride him and stay safe (and keep the horse safe), we have to change his perception. When he is scared and his adrenaline comes up, he has to follow the direction of his rider/handler rather than those deeply ingrained instincts. And there is (in my view) only one way to create this mindset. We have to put him in a position where he does feel that he’s fighting to survive (hopefully without actually threatening his health/well being) and let him discover that the only way out of his dilemma is yielding to the pressure exerted by the halter or the reins. We want to do this before we ride him, so that when we are on him we have a good chance of staying safely on his back. This is the ONLY way to be sure that when a horse is truly scared/excited/angry that he still remains obedient.

Now here’s the exception. If you are training a horse for yourself, and you have spent a lot of time teaching that horse that it is rewarding to do what you say (whichever method you use), that horse may be inclined to enjoy being with you and he may do as you say in your day-to-day interactions. It is still my opinion that the first time the horse is truly frightened/excited/feeling rebellious, that horse will ignore your leadership and bolt/charge/buck—whatever his instincts tell him to do, and you will be very unlikely to stay in control of him. He simply has no training in being obedient when he is stressed. But let’s say you survive intact and you’re still on him, and you eventually calm him down and he’s listening to you again. Let’s say this scenario happens maybe a dozen times in your first two years of riding/handling your horse—with the same positive outcome each time. By the third or fourth year of your partnership that horse may very well listen to you when the chips are down. He’s grown to trust your leadership even when he’s frightened. For you, anyway, he’s a reliable horse.

I’m sure you can see the hole in this theory. There are a couple of holes, actually. First you have to survive those scary potential wrecks in the early months/years of riding. If you or the horse or both are badly injured, both his trust and your mutual future are gone. And that horse learns to trust YOU. Whether or not he can transfer the trust to another rider/handler is problematic.

When we broke ranch horses we were trying to make a horse that would be safe and reliably obedient for whatever rider was on his back. As I said, most of the time the horses were not going to be our personal riding horses, and we knew that. We also knew it was in the horse’s best interest to become a reliably obedient “broke” horse. And the methods we used worked to achieve this goal. I think the distress a horse goes through being trained in this traditional manner is actually worth it, even from the horse’s point of view (and yes, there is some distress). Far better for him to learn from the beginning how to be obedient even when things are stressful, and thus have a chance at a decent life as a well-loved riding horse, than to spend many years being considered problematic and dangerous, because he has bucked/bolted too many times when he is fresh or scared. Better for him if he were “broke”-- with all that entails-- than suffering the fate that almost inevitably comes to horses that have hurt their rider once too often.

            Once again, the first goal of training should be to create a horse that is reasonably safe to ride and handle. A horse that will obey the rider’s cues, even when that horse is fresh, or scared, or pissed off, or whatever. And the most important cue is “the brakes.” And the thing that makes brakes is not response to “whoa” or a seat cue or what have you. This stuff works when a horse is not feeling resistant. But when the horse is resistant (for whatever reason), the one thing that gives you a good chance at control is a deeply ingrained tendency to yield to a pull on the reins.

 You are not going to achieve this response by bribing a horse with carrots, or bribing him in any way. Sure, you can get a horse to do “carrot stretches”—no question. But if you think this will translate into the horse yielding to you when you pull on a rein in an effort to stop him when he feels like bolting—well, I’ve never seen this work.

            In actual fact, what I have seen when people talk about training a horse without bitting up or checking up, is horses that “may” yield to the bridle when nothing much is going on. They may walk, trot, lope in a ring or on the trail and stop and steer, when nothing is happening to disturb them. I have never seen a horse trained this way that could execute at speed or under stress and still answer the bridle.

            Let me make this plain. If you have a training method that you think works, I want to see that your horse will respond to the bridle when running hard after a cow, or when he is in a crowd of other horses that are all galloping off, or if he is trying to bolt because he’s scared. If your horse has never even been asked to go faster than an easy lope, or dealt with any kind of pressure, you don’t KNOW if he’s broke. And if he comes unbroke any time something scares him (or he feels excited, or rebellious) and runs through the bridle (whether he bolts, bucks, rears, or runs sideways), then you and I have nothing to talk about. Because your system isn’t working.

            (An aside here—my horses are not machines. They spook and/or prance if they get “up,” depending on the personality of the horse. The difference is that they stay under control. A horse that is prancing or jigging because he’s excited or scared, but still “in your hand,” is one thing—a horse that is bulling through the bridle, out of control, is a completely different thing. A horse that spooks--and my Gunner was a huge spook-- but never tries to run off, is very different from the horse that spooks and spins and runs away.) 

            For those who say that they don’t need to put this kind of pressure on a horse to get him broke, because their horse is only going to do gentle riding type things and will never chase a steer…etc, all I have to say is you are deluding yourself. Even if you never ride your horse outside of an arena or go faster than a slow lope, there is still the unexpected. Someone else is riding in the arena and her horse bolts, scaring your horse. A tree falls next to the arena, or a helicopter flies over, or a loud tractor your horse has never seen before pulls up to the fence, or the snow slides off the roof with a loud whomp. I could go on and on. The truth is that every horse needs to be broke such that he will stay reliably obedient even when scared or excited, or he is not safe to ride.

            So…back to my system. Once a horse was really solid on the tying, the next step was sacking and saddling.             Sacking and saddling is either done tied up or on the leadrope in the round pen. There are advantages to both ways. If done tied up, both horse and handler have a greater chance of getting hurt, but the tying lesson is reinforced. Sacking and saddling in the round pen is a bit safer. Both ways take patience. It’s important to work on the sacking until a horse is really OK with it. Sometimes this takes an hour a day for two weeks or more.

            And here I must digress again and talk about circumstances. I broke horses on a variety of different ranches. And in every case the circumstances were different. On one ranch we had a nice arena, but no round pen. On another ranch we had a round pen, but no arena. On yet another ranch there was no round pen and no arena, just working corrals and pastures. And some of the time we had both a round pen, an arena, and plenty of good trails.  So the way we broke horses depended on the circumstances. In all cases there was (or we created) a safe place to tie. The tying was an essential part of the breaking process. If there was no round pen, the sacking/saddling was often done with the horse tied.

            Anyway, sacking is usually done with a light saddle blanket. This is gently run over the horse and gradually escalated until it is flapped and swung over every part of the horse’s body—quite vigorously. When the horse is absolutely calm about sacking, it is time to start saddling.

The saddle can be shown to the horse and dragged up on the horse and taken off and on the horse for as long as is needed for the horse to be comfortable with this. But when you make the call to cinch it up, that needs to happen in one smooth and effective move that cinches the saddle reasonably snugly. Because nothing is worse for a horse’s training than to have him buck with a loosely cinched saddle and buck the thing under his belly and eventually get rid of it.  Thus we were always very careful to first have the horse quite calm about the saddle, and then to cinch it snugly in one move the first time we pulled the cinch.

            Once the horse can be saddled and is reasonably comfortable with the process, the horse is caught and saddled and left tied with the saddle cinched so it will stay on. He is also taken to the round pen (if you have a round pen) and taught to move at the walk, trot and lope, carrying the saddle. And when the horse no longer has periods of jumping around in a panic when the saddle “catches” him, then it is time to begin checking him up.

            In those places where we didn’t have a round pen, the next move (after the horse could be saddled and would stand calmly tied up with the saddle on for several hours) was to pony the saddled colt from another horse. Be warned: it takes skill, a well-broke pony horse, and a saddle horn wrapped in rubber to safely/effectively pony a green colt from another horse. You have to know when and how to dally in order to prevent the colt from bucking/bolting. And your pony horse has to know how to take a jerk and/or drag a reluctant colt along. It does a great deal of harm to a horse’s training if the colt is able to jerk the lead rope out of your hands and run off.

            In any case, once the colt could move freely at the walk, trot and lope with the saddle on his back we began the checking up.

            The first checking up move that we did was to tie the horse around to the side. First the horse must be accustomed to the bridle. We put a plain smooth snaffle on the horse, making this process as gentle as possible. And the horse wears this bridle, sans reins (or with the very loose reins tied to the saddle horn), along with the saddle, for more round pen work (or ponied work) until the horse is accustomed to the bit. During this time the horse learns to move out at the trot and the lope on cue and stop on cue. There are a lot of different systems for this—I think there is probably something to be said for most of them. At this point the horse is working with his head free. He’s getting used to carrying the saddle at all gaits, and to moving out when cued to do so by a cluck or a “kiss,” and stop at a “whoa.” Some people reprimand a horse for bucking at this stage, some don’t. I think it depends on the individual horse and the circumstances. To go back to what I said in my first post, you need to be able to read a horse. In any case, as long as he is bucking, or seems nervous, he needs more round pen work (or ponied work).

            Eventually most of them start to move around that round pen quite freely, and to stop when the trainer says whoa. They quit acting like the snaffle bit is a terrible affront. They ignore the saddle and its flopping stirrups. And this is the point where you can tie them around.

            (If we did not have a round pen, we tied a horse around in the arena, or a corral, or in whatever sort of pen we had. At one stable where I broke a three-year-old, I made a round pen in the corner of the arena out of show ring jumps that nobody was using. It wasn’t—obviously-- too strong, so in that situation I also had my colt on the lunge line while I was teaching him to move out.)

            We tied a horse around to the stirrup. I have seen it done many ways, but tying the rein from the snaffle to one stirrup was the way I did it. The stirrup gives and moves a bit, which makes it easier on the horse. The first time it is done it is very important that it not be tied too tightly. The horse’s head is very gently pulled just a little to the left and the rein is tied such that the horse must remain with his head slightly cocked to the left. And the trainer observes.

            It’s important to stay there and watch. I never left a horse alone tied around (I know some people do this, but I don’t believe in it). It’s important to see exactly how the horse responds and to either tighten, loosen, or release the horse, as the situation calls for.

            If you have done your previous work tying solid with a halter, your horse will probably accept the tying around without too much struggle. And it may sound paradoxical, but we liked to see the horse resist the tying around—at least a little bit. If he didn’t struggle with it a little, we were never sure the message had been received. Said message being that if the rein pulls you to one side, you must yield. No matter how scared or mad you are. Fighting won’t work.

            Like the initial tying solid, all horses respond differently to this tying around. Some fight a lot, some fight very little. If a horse seemed scared, I would loosen the tie, but the horse stayed tied around until he “gave.” If that was a struggle for the horse, then he was untied the instant that he did give (the first time).

            There were two kinds of problematic horses. The kind that fought too much and the kind that fought too little. The kind that fought too much got beside themselves with fear or sometimes anger. Such that they would throw themselves down. Just like with the tying solid, we did not release a horse for such behavior. It just doesn’t work to do this. But I would loosen the tie, and encourage the horse to give, just a little, and as soon as he did give, he was released for that day.

            The kind that fight too little are more of a problem. They feel the tug and give their nose—no big deal. But they didn’t learn the important lesson—you must give even when you are scared or mad. So we would often encourage this sort of horse to keep moving, until at some point he wanted to throw his head or stick his nose out—but couldn’t because he was tied around. If he struggled with this, even a little bit, and then gave, that was enough for the first session.

            Tying around was repeated every day, on both sides, until the horse would reliably give his head. Again, sometimes this took a couple of days, sometimes a couple of weeks—depending on the horse. The ties were tightened over time until the horse’s nose was almost tied to the stirrup, and when the colt was encouraged to move he had to go around in a tight circle. When the colt would do this calmly in both directions, even under a bit of pressure, he was ready to ride. Because you had your one rein emergency brake in place—what we called “doubling” the horse. If you could double a colt—pull his head around such that he went into a tight circle—you could stop him from bucking or bolting or rearing. But that response had to be solid—thus the tying around.

            I should point out that when we had reached the point in the tying around where the horse was tied pretty tightly, we did not leave him that way long. Maybe a minute on each side, if he gave to the pressure. Any time a horse resisted the pressure in a significant way, we would re-tie him, a little looser this time, and wait until he seemed OK with it. Then try him again tied more tightly. For those who wonder why they had to be tied tightly at all, well, once again it comes down to safety. If a colt wants to buck and/or bolt with you on his first or second or third ride, your only real chance of controlling him is to pull his nose right around to the stirrup before he gets going. So essentially you’re training him to accept this “emergency brake.”

            In the next post I’ll talk about putting a first ride on a colt…

PS—And here is a pretty photo of my last trail ride on Sunny. Sunny is a product of the sort of breaking and training I am talking about here, and I think those who own such reliable horses will understand the pleasure I take in going for a two hour ride in which my horse does nothing but behave calmly and obediently and enjoy the ride with me. No spooking, no jigging, no balking, no resistance or overly “up” energy. Yes, broke horses are worth their weight in gold (especially for those of us who are old enough that we dread coming off).

Why Your Horse Won't Behave

                                    by Laura Crum

            CAUTION—this post may be quite upsetting to those of you who view horse training very differently than I do. In fact, I had almost decided not to do this series of horse training posts. I really don’t need to convince anybody of anything, and I feel nothing but admiration for those of my fellow horsemen who achieve a happy relationship with their horses. I don’t care how you get there if it works for you and your horse. So, yeah, I had almost decided not to rattle anybody’s cage (even inadvertently) with this post.

But…I got an email after I had posted my last blog post (which was about a nice trail ride that I had on my reliable horse). And this young lady very sincerely wanted to know how my horse got the way he is. She loved her horse, but she was afraid to ride him on the trails because he was so unpredictable—and on his bad days he did violent, scary things, which she quite rightly felt were putting both of them in danger. In the course of our conversation I became aware that she didn’t even know that these methods that I planned to write about existed. And, of course, the way all of my horses became reliable riding horses was through this particular breaking/training process.

  So I am putting my experiences out here in case they help someone who isn’t happy with how his/her horse is behaving and doesn’t feel that the methods he/she is using are helping the horse all that much. I was raised (in the horse world) by some pretty handy cowboys, and the horse training methods I learned are, by and large, the methods used to turn out a reliable ranch horse. Those of you who have ridden a good ranch horse will know that this is a pretty dependable sort of critter—these posts are aimed at explaining how we “made” such reliably broke horses.

 Also, the “your” in this title doesn’t mean you. It doesn’t mean anyone in particular. It is a generic “your.” I absolutely wasn’t thinking of anyone when I wrote it. And again, this post is just my opinions. No need for anyone to agree. I have no wish to convince you that my way of thinking/training is right.

If you are happy with how your horse behaves, more power to you. If what you are doing works for you, you should not care at all that I might find your horse’s behavior completely unacceptable. We all have different standards for our horses and different goals, for which we need different cues and responses. As I said, if you are happy with your horse, why should you care at all what I would do?

            That said, I see and read a lot of stuff about ill-broke horses. Horses that grabbed the bit and bolted, or spooked and spun and ran away, or balked and reared and fell over, or bogged their head and bucked their rider off. I hear about people who are hurt, or almost hurt and very scared, or too anxious about their horse’s behavior to want to ride any more, or selling their horse because they’ve become afraid of it, or spending all their precious riding time trying to convince the horse to do the most basic of things. If I know the person/horse, or I’ve been following their blog, I often know exactly what (in my opinion) happened to cause this crap, and, in fact, I’ve often been sitting here at my keyboard shaking my head and thinking “this isn’t going to end well”—months before the horse started behaving really badly.

            Do I tell the person? Short answer—no. I used to do this. It never worked. The people were insulted, and nothing changed. I don’t do it any more. So this post is what I would say if someone asked for my thoughts. If anybody benefits from it, that’s a good thing. If everybody would just like to argue with me, that’s fine, too.

            Anyway, most of these problems that I see were caused by the way the horse was trained—or not trained. The horse hasn’t got a decent foundation. He/she is not (in my vernacular) a “broke” horse. And so, when he/she doesn’t feel like obeying his/her rider/handler, he/she just jerks the reins/leadrope away, or bulls through the bridle, or pushes through the handler, and follows his/her own inclinations. And usually, someone gets hurt. In my view, this is a lousy system.

            (The other common reason for behavioral problems that I see is a basically well-trained horse that has learned he can get away with bullying his particular owner/rider. But that’s another post.)

            My way of training horses isn’t so popular these days. Some people will tell you it is cruel. And in my lifetime I definitely moved into a gentler approach than the one I learned as a young woman. But I still kept the basic principles and steps. You know why? Because they worked.

            Horses trained the way I trained horses do not, in general, come unglued and untrained and hurt their riders. There are exceptions, sure. Some horses will not become solid citizens no matter what method you use. But overall the methods that I used produced horses that stayed broke, even under pressure, even when they were feeling fresh…etc.

            I am (or was—I don’t train horses any more) a traditional western-style horse trainer. This is almost a dirty word in these days of natural horsemanship…etc. But I have not seen results from these newer methods that are anything like as effective as what we could achieve with traditional methods.

            Before I go any further, traditional methods can be abused. They can be cruel. Yes, that is true. Pretty much any method can be abused. And when a horse is trained so ineffectually that he is a constant danger to anyone who handles/rides him or is around him, and he ends up on a truck to Mexico through no fault of his own—well, that is abuse, too, in my book.

            Horses are dangerous. They can kill you. The very first goal of horse training is or should be to teach a horse to be safe for humans to deal with. Safe to handle, safe to ride. We call that a broke horse. It is a fundamental concept that people disregard at their peril. And the peril can be pretty extreme.

            So when I trained horses in a traditional way I did a lot of things that were aimed at showing a horse that it did him no good to resist the human handler/rider. These things were all set up such that the horse could not win. Yes, that is what I said. The horse could not win. Because that is the foundation of a safe horse, a broke horse. Even when the chips are down he will obey your cues—because his training has taught him that obeying is the only answer.

            Let us contrast this to the currently fashionable approach, which boils down to trying to get the horse to do things because something good will happen—like food or a positive response of some sort from his human. The horse learns that if he does what’s wanted he wins. Sounds good right? Until the day the horse doesn’t give a flying you know what about what’s wanted. He’s too excited or scared or pissed off or fresh or what have you. He doesn’t care about pleasing you and he is going to do what he feels like doing. And at that moment you are totally screwed. Your pleasant training system is going to fail you. And every single proponent of this sort of training that I know of has gotten themselves in this sort of pickle (by their own account). Excuses are made, but yeah—the horse kicked them or ran over them or dragged them or dumped them or bolted with them or stepped on them or flat refused to do what was asked…etc. And in my opinion most (not all) of these wrecks could have been prevented if the horse had been given a different sort of training foundation.

            Let’s say you are riding through the woods on a tough trail and your horse sees something that really, really scares him. He spooks and leaps forward, and there are rocks and crap ahead. You pull on the reins to check him (no room for a one rein stop or such green horse stuff) and the horse does one of two things. He gives his head to the pull, because he has been trained in a traditional way and was checked up enough that giving to the pull is automatic and ingrained, and even though he is terrified his nose comes down in response to the pull, and you gain control of him. Or he throws his head wildly in the air in response to your pull on the reins, and keeps running, completely out of control—because he is scared and he has never been shown beyond any doubt that he MUST to give to the pull—under every possible circumstance including terror. Which response do you want? Which response might save your life?

            For those who will say that you can get the first response without checking up and other traditional methods I would say—maybe. I haven’t seen this but sure, it could be possible. But I will bet anything you want that 90% of horses that respond in the first way were trained with traditional methods, including “bitting up” or “checking up.”

            What I have seen (a lot) is that horses that were trained without traditional training will often behave just fine—until they don’t want to. And then, whether scared, mad or fresh, they simply stick their noses out, or up, or down, and jerk the reins through their rider’s hands and do what they damn well please. And you know what? You can’t stop them.

            A horse is much stronger than you. Neither a harsh bit, nor a running martingale, nor a tie down will stop a horse that wants to resist your pull on the reins from running right through the bridle. The only thing that will keep the horse responding to the aids is successful training. Training that sticks no matter how extreme the situation—and this training cannot only be “feel good” training. Because gentle, feel good training only works when everything feels good. When the pressure is on and the shit hits the fan, the horse won’t give a rat’s ass about feel good training.

            I will digress here and say that if you have spent many years developing a partnership with a horse and covered hundreds of miles and been through plenty of tight spots (even if the horse acted like a complete jackass in a lot of those spots), yeah, sure, the horse may trust your leadership—no matter what training method you use, including strictly feel good type training. But I’ll be damned if I personally want to go through all the near wrecks and the years of not knowing how the horse will react under pressure that this system involves.

            The problem with all this is the danger. You are risking your life. You are risking your horse’s life. The only way to be on the safe side when you ride/handle a horse is to be really sure that the horse knows you are in charge and his training has taught him to obey your cues. All the time. No matter what.

            And how you get there is by putting the horse in some tough situations and teaching him that that he cannot win by resisting. He can only win by obeying. I’m not going to discuss all the different methods of achieving this, because I don’t know all of them. Some versions of traditional training are very cruel—and I have seen this. But it is not the methods per se that are cruel. It is the way they are applied. You have to be able to read a horse and know when it’s time to stop and when you must push on. And you have to care about a horse’s well-being. Every single thing that I talk about can be overdone, or done too harshly, and then it becomes abusive. Horses are hurt, or emotionally shut down, or turn into rebels when these methods are poorly applied. I will tell you what I learned to do—and I CAN tell you that, properly done, the methods I used produced reliably broke horses—unless the horse is determined to be an outlaw. (And they do come that way.) 

            The other thing about the methods I use is that they are safe for the rider/handler (if you are not completely clueless). They are ways to teach a horse to give to pressure that are done on the ground. The horse is fighting himself (if he fights) and not you. And the situation is set up so that the only win lies in yielding to pressure and getting the release. This is a very effective lesson (if done properly) and will truly stick with a horse, even when he is scared or mad or what have you.

            Before I go any further I want to add that those who actually know me will say that I am, if anything, too easy on my horses and too protective of them. My horses trust me and they do what I ask willingly. Those basic tools that were instilled in them by traditional methods aren’t really needed any more. But the trust doesn’t happen overnight. There was a time, when these horses were young, that the basic training that was given to them provided the foundation for the trust. The horses obeyed because they’d learned that was the only workable answer, and thus we all stayed safe in the years where they were learning to trust in their rider.

            The other thing about this sort of training is that it’s very helpful if you want to put a different rider on your horse—especially a beginner. The horse will obey, not because he “trusts” the new rider, but because his training foundation is there. If the rider pulls on him he gives to the bit, and stops or turns, which, along with going forward when kicked, is the simple bottom line of “broke.” If a horse is broke he can be sold and passed from one rider to another and he will stay obedient for all of them. (My Henry is a very good example of this.)

            So, how did we achieve “broke” horses? First I am going to refine the definition a bit. In general, what I learned to make was a reliable all around western horse—a ranch horse. The basis of what we did was the cowhorse tradition, which comes from the Spanish/Mexican vaqueros. Such horses not only stopped and steered reliably, they “bridled up,” or collected easily. They took the walk, trot, or lope at a signal; they would stop at a light touch on the reins, even from the gallop. They would “watch” a cow (meaning turn with a cow), and you could rope a cow off of them, and open and close a gate from their backs. They were reliable in any sort of high pressure situation, from wide-open gathers on a twenty thousand acre ranch in rough country, to the intensity of parting/branding cattle in a big corral. (By the way, all my horses can/could do all these things.) These are the skills that are useful/necessary when doing ranch work.

In general, ranch horses are not handled much until they are three. At three they are given ninety days or so of training, which is the foundation for everything that comes afterward, and establishes the “broke.” They are given six more months of riding as a four year old, turned out for the winter, and brought into full use as a five year old. Some time between five and eight (depending on the individual horse and the skill of the rider), these horses are deemed broke. At this point they will obey whatever rider is on them, and can be trusted to do their job under a wide variety of circumstances.

Everybody breaks horses a little differently. But what I will give you in this short series of posts is a very brief overview of some general steps that are often/usually used to turn out the sort of broke all around ranch horses that I’m talking about here.

           

            The very first thing we did with any green horse was tie him up. This is the basis of everything. If you cannot tie a horse hard and fast and have him stand there as long as needed, your horse is not broke. It is a fundamental part of training that underlies everything else. Some horses have a lot more trouble with this than others. But they all need to learn it.

            It isn’t pretty to begin with. It isn’t fun for the horse. But it is the single best way to get a horse started on the path to being broke. Yes, they can get hurt. But they can get hurt no matter what method you use to train them. If you tie with some thought and care, they are unlikely to get hurt. To be effective, a horse needs to be tied for a good long time. Young ranch horses were fed in the morning, caught and tied after that, taken to water at lunch, and tied for the rest of the day until dinner. Not in the blazing sun, no. But yes, all day. For those of you who think this is cruel, all I can say is that after a week to a month of this (depending on the individual horse—some only needed a couple of days), those horses were much better able to handle the breaking process. They had learned the main thing that they needed to know just from the tying. Fighting doesn’t get you anywhere. And they had learned patience. Two absolutely essential qualities in a broke horse.

           

            We always tied a colt until being tied was no big deal. We did nothing but tie him until he could be counted on to stand quietly as long as he was tied, in a relaxed pose that indicated he understood that there was no point in doing anything else but wait patiently. At that point he was ready to move on with the breaking process. And it took some horses a good long time to get to this stage. But this is by FAR the best and easiest way to get a young horse into the frame of mind that enables him to accept training to be a reliable saddle horse.

            Tying does some other things that aren’t immediately obvious. It gets the horse used to giving to pressure on his head, rather than fighting it, which helps him with giving to the pressure exerted by the bridle. And it makes him far safer to lead and handle from the ground. A horse that has been taught by tying can almost always be counted on to yield to a well-timed tug on the leadrope, rather than bulling through it. So much better for leading and also for ponying from another horse.

            Tying is useful throughout a horse’s life. Whenever I’ve had a problem with a horse, I’ve always gone back to the tying. Leaving a horse saddled and tied for a few hours will go a long way toward resolving many things. When the horse stands relaxed, with one hind leg cocked, you can often go back to work with him and find that his attitude is significantly more cooperative—and thus a fight is averted.

            I will write about the methods we used to check a horse up in the next post. I’m sure I’ve managed to alienate a bunch of people just from what I’ve already said. The last time I talked about tying on this blog a few people called me “cruel.” But bear in mind—I love my horses and take good care of them and none of the horses I own (including the two of them that I broke as three year olds and rode for their entire working lives—one is 25 and one is 34)—EVER hurt me. They didn’t once dump me, or bolt with me, or step on me, or drag me, or run over me, or kick me. I rode them all on many, many trail rides and gathers and had no wrecks. And they are all living a happy life with me today. So these methods do have a good side.

PS—Please do not take an older horse that has never been tied and tie him solid to fix his problems. Older horses who have set patterns do not always or even usually benefit from such attempts at retraining. When I buy an older horse (older than eight) I make sure that I am OK with him the way he is. Older horses who have a ranch background and have been tied as part of the breaking process will often benefit from some hours of tying—especially if they are showing behavior issues.

PPS—Tying is a very effective training method with a young/green horse, but if you have not done it before PLEASE be sure to get some help from someone who has. It can go very badly wrong. Never tie to something a horse can break. I am not going to try to describe what is and isn’t a safe tying situation—because I am afraid that someone will get hurt trying to follow my ideas without really understanding the potential problems. I learned to break young horses with the help of people who had done it many times, and this is the approach I would recommend to others.

Disclaimer

                                                           by Laura Crum

            After I asked what people would like to read about (A Question to Readers), I got some interesting responses. Most of the comments were on facebook, so if you don’t go there, you won’t have seen them. The overall consensus was that I should write about both my horse training ideas and how I developed my horse property. Some people suggested alternating, but the two subjects will both require a series of posts, so I think it will have to be first one and then the other. More people seemed interested in the horse training theme (at least on facebook—blog comments tended to favor the horse property theme), and I have a post already written on this topic, so I’ll start with that. And what I’m really going to start with is a disclaimer.

            I am not a “professional” horse trainer. I worked for half a dozen professional horse trainers as an assistant and helped train well over a hundred colts, but horses that I trained solely by myself from start to finish number roughly twelve. Some of these were my own horses, some belonged to friends/family. I rode them all for at least a couple of years in order to take them from not-broke (or less than thirty days previous riding) to broke saddle horses. Three of these I kept as forever horses, the rest were either sold or not mine. But they all made good reliable horses.

            I learned to train horses from some handy ranch cowboys and the professional trainers that I worked for. All of these trainers/cowboys came from a cowhorse background and shared some thinking in common. Over time I refined the methods I was taught and came up with my own basic protocol. Every horse is different and the protocol got modified to fit each colt. But certain steps always were used—some horses needed them only very briefly—others needed a lot of one thing or another. I always tried to pay attention to the individual horse and what that horse needed.

            I can explain my methods in these posts, but I can’t teach anyone how to read a horse. And it is the ability to read a horse that counts the most. Because you must read a horse accurately to know when it is time to back off or quit, and when you must push on. And so I am the first to say that the methods themselves are not the answer. But they are a start.

            These methods may seem cruel to some of you. And they can be cruel if you don’t know how to read a horse, or if you don’t have any compassion for a horse. I have seen these methods used in very cruel ways.

            But…here’s the flip side. I have seen WAY too many people trying to get along with horses that are not truly broke. Basically any time the ill-broke horse feels that he doesn’t want to obey, he simply bulls through the bridle (or halter) and does what he wants. And this just doesn’t work out. People get hurt or killed or very, very scared.

            Horses are dangerous. The number one goal of horse training should be to produce a horse that is reliably obedient and thus relatively safe. This really needs to be kept in mind.

            In my view the rather unpalatable sounding truth is that what makes a horse reliably obedient is not “feel good” training. It’s teaching him in effective ways that resistance doesn’t work—such that the habit of yielding rather than resisting is ingrained. This kind of training isn’t always pretty. It can’t be. If we stick to what’s pretty, we will never have a horse who obeys when things get tough.

            When do you really NEED a horse to obey the bridle? Moseying down the trail on a calm day? No. In the roping box at the start of a run, or at the start of an endurance ride, or when something has truly scared him? Yes. When the adrenaline comes up and the horse really wants to ignore your signal—that is the moment you most need him to stay broke. So that you stay safe. And this is where my traditional “coercive” methods will really pay off.

            By “coercive,” I do not mean hitting or spurring or punishing the horse. I mean using traditional horsemanship methods such as “checking up” or bitting up” that teach a horse that resisting the pull of the reins is futile. This is done in such a way that when the horse fights the pull by throwing his head he only increases the pressure on himself. If done skillfully, a horse will forever respond to the pull of the reins by “giving” his head—even under difficult circumstances. And thus the rider will always have a good chance of staying in control. Horse and rider will both be safer. And that is the goal of training.

            So I am going to begin a short series of posts describing the way I learned to train horses. It’s fine if you don’t agree with these methods and you are welcome to say so. But please bear in mind that though at times this training is not “fun” for the horse, the ultimate goal of making a consistently obedient horse, even under pressure, is something that I feel is truly valuable. Such horses are both far safer to ride and handle, and also far more likely to find a good forever home than their ill-broke, unreliable (and much more dangerous) fellows.

PS—For those of you who wanted to hear how I developed my horse property, I will do a brief series of horse training posts, and then a much longer series of posts about this property and how it came to be what it is. To be honest, it will take me awhile to both contemplate what I want to say about my home and write the posts. Developing this property has been my life’s work, as much or more than writing my mystery series, so there is a lot that I want to talk about, above and beyond what makes for a good horse set up.

            

A Question to Readers

                                                  by Laura Crum

            So today I want to ask for your thoughts. I have in mind two possible writing projects for blog posts. One is a series of posts on different horse training subjects, based on my years of training horses and addressing the many things I see today that I do not agree with. I am quite sure these posts will provoke a good deal of argument, as my views are not currently fashionable.

            On the other hand, I don’t train horses any more, and I don’t really have a deep need to write about the subject. What I do want to write about—for myself—is a piece about the way I developed my own little horse property. This would be a series of posts similar to the autobiographical posts I did a year or so ago about my life with horses. And also similar to the series of posts I did on building my little pond. There wouldn’t be a whole lot about horses in these posts—some horse stuff, lots about garden design and architecture…etc. I feel sure these posts wouldn’t generate much discussion.

            So here’s my question—which would you prefer to read? I would really love it if you would let me know in the comments (either here or on facebook). Thank you.

            And here, just for fun, is a photo of my most recent solo ride through the forest on my good little yellow trail horse. We had a lovely time. I hope summer has also been good to all of you and your equine friends.

Predictable Problems

                                                by Laura Crum

            There are some horse blogs that I follow in random ways—just checking in from time to time out of curiosity. For whatever reason, I didn’t become “addicted” to the blog—maybe the blogger’s way of working with/thinking about horses is just too different from mine, maybe I left a comment or two and got no response, maybe I don’t care for the writing style…whatever. To be frank, the biggest reason is usually that I get the sense the person is headed for a trainwreck with her horse, and I know perfectly well that she doesn’t want my advice, and I can’t stand to watch. So I don’t keep track of the blog in the way that I do the bloggers I have really connected with. But I will look at these other blogs from time to time—just out of curiosity. And almost inevitably there eventually comes the result that I expected.

            The horse dumps the rider, and/or the horse’s behavior gets worse and worse, the rider becomes afraid of the horse. Sometimes the owner/rider gets hurt, sometimes she is just unhappy. The horse is either sold or put into training. Sometimes the professional training works, sometimes it doesn’t solve the problem. But it is ALWAYS the case that the owner realizes that her initial “I’ve found just the right horse and I’m going to have so much fun,” assessment was a little off. And the sad thing is that many experienced horsemen could have accurately predicted this result from the get go.

            I know, I know, I’ve said this before, but I will say it one more time in the hopes that it will help someone to have a happier life with horses. Unless you have had a good deal of experience training horses, or you plan to work for several years with a trainer, don’t choose a green horse—unless, that is, that you are prepared for some risk of life and limb, and willing to persevere through this. By green horse I mean a horse less than eight years old, or a horse that has had less than four years of steady, competent riding—doing the thing that you intend to do with the horse. If you do choose a green horse, just be very sure you are up for some drama. Because no matter how mellow that young horse seems when you first get him, there is a 90% chance (really, seriously) that you will be dealing with some very exciting/scary moments with the horse in the years to come. If you’re up for that, Ok then.

            What I have seen over and over again, is the only mildly experienced horseperson—has ridden quite a bit, but has not trained very many horses, if any—chooses a pleasant four-year-old (or three year old, or six year old…you get my drift). And the usual pattern goes like this: first six months go well, next six months not quite as well, between a year and two years the horse has developed some serious problems. He dumps rider, or scares rider, he consistently is difficult for rider/owner to deal with. And then we get to the send-to-the-trainer and/or sell point.

            The most constant feature of this story is that rider/owner has a huge list of reasons why things have gone this way. Horse has health/soreness/emotional problems, horse has had to move barns, owner hasn’t had enough time to spend with horse…etc. It is very rare for the owner to actually realize that she should not have chosen a young/green horse. And yet this is the usual problem spelled out in simple terms. And it’s common as dirt.

            I myself have trained many, many young horses. My two retired horses, Gunner and Plumber, were trained exclusively by me and became very competitive in their events and never once dumped me. I know the game. But after taking several years off from riding in my forties, I’m perfectly aware that now, in my fifties, my skills are similar to those not-that-experienced horse people I’m talking about. The difference is that I know better than to pick a young/green horse to ride these days. I choose those solid older horses that I would recommend to less experienced horsemen. And it has worked out quite nicely for me. No drama, no dumping, no fear…just a pleasant life with horses.

            Those of you who are young and willing to take your lumps (or older and willing to take your lumps, for that matter), I get it. More power to you. I have watched some of you turn around very difficult green horses through sheer persistence (via the internet), and make good partners out of them, and I applaud you. I was once in your camp, but I’m not any more. However to the very many of you (me included) who don’t want those “scary” or frustrating moments with a horse, I have one thing to say to you. Quit buying young/green horses. You’ll be a lot happier.

            (As always, I welcome dissenting opinions. I learn a lot from people who disagree with me.)