There are two angles you can adopt when talking of pony training, when you’ve got the first of these attitudes, you find training slow, hard and drudgery. You would not be wrong on the “slow and hard” part. If you’re graced with the second attitude, you find coaching loads of fun. You are moulding one of god’s most glorious creatures to your specs.
If you’re one of those lucky ones who find training fun, you must know you can make it even more fun if you use another horse.
You can use other horses to big advantage if you’re coaching horses that are still very young. Here’s some clarification on what I am saying.
I’ve got a pretty standard technique for training foals. My first priority is to get them used to my presence. I even touch them and scratch them and groom them delicately to get them used to human touch and handling. When they are comfortable with me, I put my hat on them. I have my reasons for doing this. My hat desensitises the foals, ears and other areas round the head. Since it is a completely new and probably dangerous object for foals, they should learn to trust me that there is no harm intended, especially since the hat impedes full vision.
Here is where the other horses come in. Without them, the process would be more prolonged and involve harder work. With them, my objectives are met quicker. Since my horses all hang around in a herd, I put my hat on every one of them close to the foal I’m training. These older horses are totally unexcited by my hat, and so they show no reaction whatsoever. Each time I am taking my hat off a pony, I praise that pony fulsomely.
I achieve a significant advantage by doing this. When the foal sees other horses accepting the hat without any reaction in the slightest, it understands the hat is something of no significance at all, negative or otherwise. And when the foal hears the praise the other horses get after wearing the hat, it understands also that there must be something excellent about wearing the hat. The natural consequence is that the foal loses fear of the hat.
I once had an absolutely revealing experience with 4 new Morgan mares I got from Montana. They’d not been trained or handled beyond being halter broke. I had 2 adjacent paddocks, and I put the mares in one and utilized the other for coaching them. I don’t think I have ever had an easier time. All I had to do was bring in one of my trained mares and make a massive show of picking her feet up and cleaning them. Clearly my trained mares endured the process with total detachment. It had been a piece of cake attending to the new mares after that. I was amazed when the last mare actually lifted her front foot up in expectation as I approached her!
In the first stages, I had to go into their paddock and bring them out one at a time for their coaching. About a week later on they were all swarming at the gate, waiting for me, as if each mare was willing for me to choose her first.
When you employ a trained pony as a form of motivating factor for an untrained one, you are not only adding to the fun side of training, you are also making it very easy for the untrained pony. You will be surprised how observant horses can be. I have regularly seen them learn simply by watching other horses. You can make use of this characteristic if you stick to one practice: praise every trained pony handsomely for whatever demonstration it helped you give: the praise mellows the untrained horses and makes them hugely receptive.
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 tack shop
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