If you’ve been riding horses for a bit, you will probably have experienced the actual joy of riding a pony that’s remarkably well trained. But did you ever give thought to the periods of time and energy, and most likely money, spent on making that pony that way?

You can’t train a pony in a day, a week or a month, I might go so far as to say a year, because as far as I am concerned coaching is a permanent process. It takes amazing patience and perseverance.

When coaching a horse, it is basically a battle between your patience and the horse’s resistance. If you show implacable patience, you’ll come out the winner. If you lose patience and snap on any specific day, you lost that day’s battle. Lose too many battles and you will land up losing the war. Handling horses is like handling youngsters. Fury and disappointment only inflame bad eventualities. Anger has no role to play in training or handling a pony, and demonstration of outrage is an absolute no-no. Loud remonstrations, cursing and physical action are among the 7 cardinal sins.

If you cannot accept the unshakable fact that there is no alternative choice to patience, you have no business coaching horses. My apologies, but that’s the blunt truth. Each shortcut you take today is a failure waiting to happen along the way some other day. Like most children, horses learn only through constant repetition. And like with children, some horses require a load more repetition than other horses.

If you come across any books or videos or audios that promise to train you how to teach your pony everything it needs to be taught in 60 minutes, a day or a month, you want to burn that baloney. The single thing you achieve with super fast teaching strategies is disaster. Your pony is not designed by nature to be a genius, so don’t try to make him one. When he learns at his own pace, he learns for life. When he learns at a turbocharged pace, he learns for an hour, or perhaps a day. It’s irrelevant that you need days to teach him something that to you seems to be the easiest thing in the world to learn. You aren’t a pony, and your pony is not you. Start every day with your pony brightly, and ensure it ends brightly. If you should happen to feel anger building up over something, take the day off and do something, anything , that has nothing to do with horses. Tomorrow will always dawn fresh.

As vital as patience is persistence is. Your pony isn’t going to learn constantly if you are not teaching him consistently.

For all the undeniable fact that it could take tons of time, horse coaching is not a difficult task. The largest challenge is finding the patience needed. Anyone who tells you that horse coaching is an arduous task is either too bone-idle to try it himself, or has screwed up by employing short-cuts. Malicious manipulation of whips, bits and spurs will only bring about a defiant horse, and the more the punishment, the more the defiance.

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