(bright upbeat music) - Welcome. Today I'm gonna be talking about building your horse's trust. This is something that is
such an important topic. We love our horses, we
enjoy being around them, we want them to enjoy being around us. So how do we build their trust? Well, today I'm gonna be sharing with you some key things that have helped me to build my horse's trust, and hopefully there'll be a help to you as you work your horse at home. If you like what you see on
this channel, you can subscribe, so you never miss another video. So the first step to
build your horse's trust is establishing a connection. How do we establish a
connection with our horse? Well, to establish a connection,
we need to have a clear, consistent form of communication. And in order to
communicate with our horse, we need to understand how they
communicate with one another. Horses communicate primarily
through body language. Here I have a clip of a couple
of horses out in the pasture, communicating with one
another through body language. Now this differs a little bit from us in that we, we also use
our body to communicate when we're talking to each
other in conversation, but we do a lot of our
responses are based on the verbal cues we're getting, so the tone of someone's
voice, if it's excited or if it sounds frustrated. And when we're working with our horses, because they are taking all
their cues from our body and not from our voice, it's really important that we're present, and that we're really
providing clear direction with our body, by being consistent in the way that we're using it, and how we're asking our horse to do the different movements we're doing. This consistency is gonna build confidence in the cue system we're using, and that's gonna result in a horse that is much more trusting in the work and much more is enjoying
the work a lot more because he understands it. So now we've talked about the
importance of body language with our horses, we've
talked about being present, providing direction and being consistent, and you might be thinking,
well, this is all great, but I already feel like I have
a strong bond with my horse. I just feel like he doesn't trust me in certain situations that I go into. Well, next I'm gonna be
showing you a few examples and talking to you
further about how you can continue to build your horse's trust. So when it comes to new situations here, I'm working over a scary
obstacle with Legend. Personality plays a big role. Legend is very naturally bold and curious, you can see him checking out this obstacle and it didn't take me too long in providing some direction
with him and encouraging him for him to figure out that
he could proceed confidently. Now, here I am working with Jack and Jack is a much more
sensitive horse than Legend. He's a little bit more cautious by nature. And so it takes him longer to
get comfortable and confident going over this obstacle. This is me working with him 20 minutes, and you can see now he's
investigating the obstacle and getting ready to feel more
comfortable going over it. So I reward him and take him around. Now, during this process
of working with Jack, I really focused on being clear in the way I was asking him to go forward. I worked on being consistent
and keeping his attention where I wanted it to be and
giving him some direction. And right here, you can see
them confidently go over it. So I hope this video is a help to you. If you're working on
building your horse's trust, I would love to hear what has helped you to build more trust in your horse, you can let me know in the comments below. I hope you keep enjoying your
horses over this next week, and I'll talk to you soon. (bright upbeat music)
