In Search Of Pony Training Excellence

In an earlier article on pony coaching, I had claimed the day comes when there’s nothing left to teach. The pony is about as trained as you are actually capable of making it, and after that it’s just a question of watching over the horse’s behavior and performance.

I was only in part right. Exceptions prove rules, and there is an exemption to this one. Horse coaching never ends when you’re endeavoring for excellence.

A long while back in Pheonix, at one of the AMHA’s yearly conventions, a horse owner friend had just finished with a packing clinic. As he wrapped up, another female buddy and I rushed away to move our horses before they started serving dinner. My pony was still charged with practically everything you can pile onto a horse, while my friend’s horse was tacked the English way. We located a free arena and had just got the horses moving when we discovered we were in the midst of some spectators. We were the spectacle.

My buddy did a dressage of level 2 quite close to the rails, while I went roaring up the centre line, sliding to a stop and turning to go again with all sorts of odds and ends flopping around. The horses were freaking out, and so were we. By the time we had wrapped up, more than half of the convention attendees had turned up to watch. The situation was later brought up by the AMHA president as a actual example that vividly illustrated the breed’s flexibility.

My buddies and I talked about things later and came to the conclusion that this was simply the best performance we had ever put up on horseback. Though I wasn’t especially fond of reining, I had achieved sliding stops with reins practically grounded. The girl’s specialization was jumping; she was not particularly into dressage. Our 2 individual horses matched our respective backgrounds, my pony did no reins and hers did no dressage.

So what’s the moral of this story?

A horse is usually trained to a level which is set by the trainer based on the trainer’s own coaching capabilities, not on the horse’s learning capacity. All coaching is then stopped and the owner happily lets the pony stagnate at that level so long as it lives.

You should basically refuse to accept any ceilings for your horse. Operate on the presumption that your pony has room for just a little more improvement. You could be surprised at just how much fun you and your pony could have. Because you’ve finished with the structured coaching, you can go the unstructured route. You can work on anything that takes your fancy, as long as it does not excessively strain your horse. Who can say what extraordinary abilities of your pony you can unearth?

I remember a spell of a couple of years in my life when I was helping a buddy run his ranch, where he also hosted groups of ‘city slickers’ we rode our horses at all times of night and day, testing out all kinds of new tricks, and I don’t have any doubt that on many an occasion camping city people considered us to be lunatics as we went side passing by them. Our philosophy was extraordinarily simple: why not mess around, the horses were prepared and so were we. So what was there to stop us? We continually tried to find something new, like when we became rather good at the side pass, we tested ourselves and our horses to determine if we could do it using little reins.

Obviously, a neverending search for excellence keeps both the rider and horse peppy and consistently on edge. I never ceased to get surprised when a pony I assumed would be knackered out after a day of work would liven up and get chomping at the bit to go for little bit of non-conformist lunacy.

You should try it, It can be superb fun!

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about equestrian wear