How do you train horses?
I was just wondering out of curiosity, how to you train a horse? How do you teach them things like walking when being kicked, or galloping?
The training of horses is a complicated but well-studied subject. Read Xenophon’s work, “On Horsemanship” that I reference below to see how far advanced the use and training of horses already was 2500 years ago.
Basically, you try to get the horse to want to do what you want it to do. That’s a complicated sentence, easy to misread. Go back and look at it again.
So what you do is to arrange things so that your cue to the animal (which can be just about any word or action you want, means “do that precise thing” to the animal. Horses actually have things they like to do (eating, being with other horses) and things they prefer to avoid (being away from home or away from other horses). Once your horse trusts you, you can begin to rely on his desire to work with you in solving problems.
Some of the actions commonly used in riding are the natural body motions that you would expect to use for getting a horse moving or for stopping him. In that sense it’s very much like dancing. If you’ve ever danced with a partner, you know that there are varying degrees of “natural ability” and that some good dancers can teach “on the fly” so that you learn without any tedious instruction. It can be the same for horses and for riders, with the degrees of ability varying all over the place.
Some people believe they can train, but they really cannot. Some horses are untrainable. Some few new riders just get on and ride as if they have always been doing it. And some exceedingly few horses accept riding and perform perfectly almost without having anything explained. Most horses need an action repeated about 200 times before they’ve “got” it.
Some horses have “ghosts” that get in the way of training. We have one horse who takes exception to huge, white trucks. And unfortunately we do not own such a truck. But if he sees one, he thinks that means it’s okay for him to behave badly. We’ve not yet figured out how to free him of that ghost, left over from some previous encounter that he had with something that looked like a white truck.
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