In terms of what you could call organised disciplines, horse training is perhaps one of the very oldest. The homo sapien has been using horses for ages: for war, for work and for pleasure. You may call horse riding a science or an art; as far as I am concerned it has elements of both. Pony training has had its high crests and its low troughs. One of the highlight eras of horse training existed during the Baroque period, which stretched between the 17th and the 18th centuries. For most individuals, Baroque was a skilled art form.

It’s my considered opinion that horse training is experiencing one of its low spells nowadays. There is too much importance on commerce and not enough on quality, and that has eroded both the science and the art parts of horse training.

That does not necessarily imply, though, that you won’t be well placed to scale extreme levels as a horse coach.

I think that pony training has suffered in quality due to lots of misconceptions. I have lost count of the amount of times I have come across people boasting about having trained their horses to lead. It is sensible to outline training or teaching as actions that enable students to procure information they did not have before and to do something they weren’t capable of before.

Built-in instinct has a foal following its mother blindly from the instant of its birth. To do otherwise could be to court death. The mare responds by pointing the foal towards the right things. Have you ever noticed that all foals are really capable of walking, trotting and cantering practically the first day of their lives? And that they also are moderately adept at stopping and backing up?

In terms of ordinary human use of horses, a new born foal may not be aware of just three aspects that it’ll have to be taught later: how to adjust to a halter; how to carry a bridle and how to tolerate a saddle or harness.

What do human beings generally teach horses?

We train horses to respond to commands and cues. We educate them to move at our command and to stop at our cue. The horse learns from us about responding to verbal and non-verbal commands and cues.

At this juncture, let’s get something straight: coaching can be conducted successfully just when the tutor is extremely clear in his mind as to what he is expecting to achieve. The usefulness of coaching can be judged not in the horse’s response to a command, but In the promptness and lack of resistance accompanying that response. If a horse takes its time to act on a command, and shows a great amount of unwillingness to respond, it has obviously not been trained well.

A trainer may be said to have achieved success in his task only when his charge is programmed to respond like a robot to commands and cues with an unquestioning response which has pretty much become 2nd nature.

Training can be done with a great deal of refinement , at the greatest heights of horse riding, an observer will see only the end results. He won’t see the cues given by the rider to the horse, because they are going to be so refined and practically invisible. That sort of height is reached only with the most perfect of coaching techniques.

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