It helps no end with your handling of a horse when you know just what makes him tick. In so many different ways, horses share human characteristics on smaller scales: they are individualistic, they’re perceptive, they’re stubborn, and they’re sensitive. When you base your approach on your recognition of these facts, you won’t go wrong.

Reach out to the horse with language of assurance, not language of threats. You will achieve far better results infinitely quicker. You will be surprised at just how much a horse can reciprocate good will. I think that good vibrations between a person and a horse begin from the 1st instant of the first meeting, right on the ground, long before the man gets astride the horse. I really like to call it the Ground Control.

So many folks who’ve observed me at work and listened to my propound on ground control presume that I am just referring to ground work different words. I don’t agree. Ground work has developed into a much overused term, used in so many contexts it has lost its original meaning. Ground control believes in beginning on the ground with the 1st act of putting on a halter and a lead; and progressing really slowly. The guiding concept behind ground control is that each step forward should not only boost the horse’s skills and responsiveness, it should also strengthen the trust and warmth between rider and horse.

In my days as a beginner, I fairly often heard that you had to have the ‘feel’ for handling horses. Much as I attempted, I could never latch onto what exactly ‘feel’ meant. I asked lots of individuals, and not one of them had a convincing answer. I knew it didn’t refer to physical feel, so clearly the connotation was psychological. Soon, I figured out that it meant sensitivity to the horse. I preferred the word ‘touch’ that I heard somewhere else. It seemed to describe things better, because I learned that there was a good touch to which horses responded well, as well as to a light touch, and there was also a horrid touch and a heavy touch which they did not react favourably to. For a considerable time now, I have extolled the advantages of employing a ‘good light touch’ with horses.

A good light touch is when you use something perhaps even lighter than what’s commonly referred to as feather touch. A good light touch depends as much on the sort of virtually mystic expectation that total understanding brings as on physical or oral cues and commands. Ever seen professional riders steering their horses at the more top-notch shows? Ever spotted the indisputable fact that their horses seem to respond to no cues at all (as if they actually read the minds of their riders) and are nearly always spot on? That kind of nearly peculiar coordination is the result of a superbly coordinated pony and rider and a light touch that isn’t really visible or audible to onlookers.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers read more