Owners Need As Much Training As Their Ponies

Much of the time, pets are procured for the sake of companionship. Some pets could be expected to perform certain duties, like guard dogs are. Typically, though, pets are brought in as playmates for kids. The conscientious dog lover may take his pet to obedience coaching schools, so that it can learn good habits like going outside on calls of nature and eating only when ordered to do it.

Some pets like to be near their human owners at most times, like the dog. This proximity makes it easier to teach them once you have gone thru some classes telling you what to coach your pets in and how to do it. The consensus among animal owners appears to be that it takes one class a week over 6 or 8 weeks for training to show effect, whether in the animal owners or the pets. It also takes at least two coaching courses to get the pets to respond constantly to commands and maybe 4 coaching courses to establish fairly complete command over them. It’d be rather nieve to take your new pet to an obedience coach and expect to get back a totally unquestioning instantly obeying animal in 6 weeks or so.

Yet, horses appear to be the exception. Folk expect miracles of their horse and the horses’ trainers. I have seen a lot of newbie horse owners with very little knowledge of riding and even less awareness of training taking on the job of training their horses themselves. Unsurprisingly, all these folk without exception run into problems. Instead of getting tamed, their horse seem to become uncontrolled and pick up all sorts of unwanted behavior patterns. When these pony owners ultimately give up and follow the guidance of their chums to send the animals to a professional tutor, they’re expecting the trainer to reverse all the coaching gone wrong and get the horses to become models of perfect behaviour. A good tutor can work a fair deal of sorcery with the animals, but is it actually only the animals that need the training?

Pony owners expect trainers to complete the training of their horses within so many days or weeks. In all of their anxiety, they ignore one major component of successful animal training: the coaching of the animal owners themselves. Good trainers can get a horse to do practically everything reasonable the owners expect, however it will all come to naught if the owners are also not trained on what’s expected of them and the way to re-enforce the coaching.

A horrible owner can undo a month of good professional coaching in a week.

Think about this: It takes something like 2000 repetitions of a command and its enforcement to remove a set habit and another 2000 repetitions to condition a new habit. It can take almost 10,000 repetitions to make unconscious acts of habits. When you know this, you’d be awfully dumb indeed not to realize and accept the owner needs coaching in keeping the pony trained equally as much as the pony needs training in the first instance. You should also appreciate that it can take a lot of time and effort to coordinate your responses to that of your horse.

Dog keepers generally appear to have no problem in committing 20 minutes or so a day to helping their dogs absorb their coaching better. Unfortunately, it appears to be very difficult to get horse owners to make the same sort of commitment. One comprehensible reason is probably the dog can be kept indoors for the period necessary, but the owner has to go outside to the horse. Further, a large amount of horse owners are bored by ‘basic’ training routines, which can sometimes be more complex than getting a dog to sit or come to heel or beg.

Unless they are well experienced, pony owners generally do not grasp quite how much success they would achieve with the right attitude and the right focus. They should learn how to take it a lesson at a time, without undue expectations of miracles. They must begin with the basics, like following without pulling away while on the lead. It is difficult to train the pony to sit, but without too much effort, it can be made to do stuff like stop and stand in the right position, release to pressure, stand when tied and lead the correct way. These lessons will establish the kind of bond between owner and pony that may later enable excellent connection while riding or doing any other jobs together. Persistence will shortly create a point in time when the owner simply doesn’t want to stay indoors, but would prefer to be out there doing something or the other with his pony.

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 professional choice