How to Teach a Horse Ground Manners (Easy Methods)

hey guys today I'm going to show you how to teach your horse to behave on the ground ground manners are essentially any behavior that your horse demonstrates on the ground if they can behave well then they have good ground manners but if they behave bad and they're constantly getting in your space pushing you and taking advantage of you then those are some bad ground manners alright and before we get started make sure you subscribe to our channel and like this video for more weekly horse videos [Music] so the first point we're going to cover for groundwork is probably the most important point and it's also the foundation of horse training it's teaching your horse to respect your personal space so if you have a horse that's constantly pushing you with their shoulder being pushy maybe trying to walk ahead of you when you're leading them or just maybe crowding you and you feel like they're a little too close to you then this exercise will help you so the exercise you're going to want to start doing to teach your horse to respect your space is simply just moving their shoulders over so your goal is to see their front leg cross one in front of the other a horse will move in the direction that their shoulders are pointing so if your horse's shoulders are pointing to you that's when they get pushy because that's when they start running into you and getting in your space so today we're just going to work on getting the horse to move their shoulders away from you so if your horse has never been taught this it can be a little confusing for them in the beginning so very simple and easy way to start teaching them to move their legs away from you is simply taking your hand and putting it up to their eye and I kind of make a pushing motion and I use mile under it and see how they stepped away and so your hand is kind of acting like a wall that's coming to your horse and see how he's stepping away when I step towards him so that's the idea he's learning that he needs to move out of my space good so that's a really simple and easy thing you can start with and as your horse starts to understand the concept of moving their shoulders over you can move on to a little bit more advanced exercise so once the horse starts to understand moving their shoulders over you can incorporate it into some other groundwork techniques so let's say you're lunging your horse or you just want them to go out in a circle around you the way you're gonna move them out is by same concept you know I have my hand up to his face and he moves his front end away so once your horse really starts to understand the concept you can start working with them a little farther away and kind of pushing your personal space out so right now I'm with Tucker so my personal space is from here to his nose about and what I'm gonna do is I can just move his shoulders by standing on the side I want him to move away from so if I want him to move to the left I'm gonna stand on the right I wanted to move to the right I'm gonna stand on the left and all I can do is take my crop kind of wiggle it out of shoulder and see how he steps right over so that's just a great thing to teach your horse to tell your horse that you're the one setting where your personal space starts and ends not them so another thing that this can help with is when you're lunging your horse this can help with them changing direction so a lot of people can have difficulty trying to get their horse to change direction in the beginning but once you can move and control the horse and shoulders it gets a lot easier so the next point we're gonna cover in terms of ground manner is leading your horse so a lot of horses are actually really bad about being led either they're trying to push past their owner or the owners having to drag them behind them so it's really important that you teach your horse to walk up with you and listen to your body language for when they should move and go that means that they're paying attention to you and they're listening to you rather than paying attention to something else the ideal place for your horse to be when you're leading them is to have their head parallel with your elbow and so ideally you can just lead your horse on a loose lead and they'll stop when you stop and go when you go but to teach them that I'm going to show you exactly what to do so the first thing we'll cover is if your horse is too pushy when being led so Tucker is not a pushy guy but just for the sake of the video we'll use him for an example and I'll demonstrate what you're supposed to do but in reality if your horse is being pushy when you're leading them and they're trying to get ahead of you they're not respecting your personal space so you need to teach your horse that your personal space expands anywhere ahead of you the way you do that is if the horse gets ahead of you you immediately stop and make them back out of your space and eventually they're going to learn that that space is yours not theirs so let's say Tucker is getting pushy and I'll just ask him to walk ahead so you can see so what I'm do I'm immediately gonna stop and see how he walks ahead of me out of my space then I'm just gonna let him stand there and think for a second all right let's say push it again I'm gonna stop so he tries to walk ahead of me let him stand there then we'll continue and it's basically repetition and consistency if your horse is doing this you want to make sure anytime they start to get ahead of you you make them stop and back up okay so let's talk about a horse that drags behind you when you're leading them in actuality this horse isn't really paying attention to you or the pressure that you're applying to them so the audio from our video was really messed up due to win so I'm just gonna walk you guys through this with a voiceover so if you have a lazy course that likes to drag behind you you can use a lunge whip when you're leading them to encourage them to stay up beside you and any time they start dragging behind just encourage them with that whip and then another exercise you can do is speeding up and slowing down your speed and this will just help them pay attention and focus in and really start to understand what they're supposed to be doing so if you have a horse that drags behind you another thing that will be helpful to teach them is if you're just standing here like I am with Tucker I'm just gonna apply pressure in a forward motion and have him step towards that pressure and that way he's learning that if pressures applied to the lead rope he needs to move forward so that will correlate with leading your horse when I apply pressure he's supposed to move up beside me our next point is about those horses that love to try and put their head down and graze when you're leading them and so this is really disrespectful behavior it shows that your horse is paying more attention to the grass than to you so what I'm gonna do is when my horse goes to put their head down and eat I am immediately gonna send them out in a circle around me and I'm gonna make them do a nice hard-working trot because a trot is the hardest gait for a horse and I'm just gonna do this for a few minutes what I'm trying to teach the horse is if they try to put their head down and graze that's gonna be a lot more work for them compared to just leading next to me correctly and so you can just do this any time your horse tries eat grass personally what if I had a horse that struggled with this I would dedicate time to solving this problem I just go out for 30 minutes walk them through a field of grass and any time they tried to eat I would just lunge them around me and make sure I correct that behavior another disrespectful behavior that horse may demonstrate on the ground is sticking their head up when you're trying to put their bridle on and this is just them trying to escape pressure that you're applying to them when you try to put the bridle on so what I like to teach my horses is to lower their head just with the very lightest pressure and I do this by applying downward pressure on the lead rope and I just hold that pressure until they dip their nose even an inch towards the ground or even you know half an inch towards the ground as soon as that they make that downward I'm gonna release the pressure so they learned that that's what I'm asking for and as you continue to do this you could ask them to hold their head down longer and you can ask them to stretch their head down closer to the ground and you can also teach them this by putting your hand on top of their pole right behind their ears and just lightly pushing down on top of their head if your horse doesn't like this you can do this as you're pulling down on the lead rope just so they get the concept but ideally you teach your horse both ways because sometimes you're not gonna have a lead rope to ask your horse to put its head down and you're gonna need to put your hand on top of their head so our next point is dealing with horses that show aggressiveness at feeding time so if you have a horse that you feed and if you walk towards then they pin their ears back and lunge at you that is not safe and it's not good and your horse shouldn't be doing that if you watch horses in the wild the alpha horse can always get the other horses to move away from the food so if your horse can get you to move away from its food that means that your horse pretty much things that they're the Alpha in the relationship so to correct that and we're gonna do some groundwork we're going to use the point that we learned about teaching your horse to respect your space and we're going to integrate that into this session how I do this is I start with just an empty food bin and I'll let my horse go over and smell it so they can get this concept of feeding time and thinking that oh they may be getting food but then I'm going to move my horse away using groundwork so I'll just encourage them and go out in a circle around me and I'm the one moving their feet so in the wild the alpha horse controls the other horses movements so that's what I'm doing here I'm telling my horse to move away from the food bucket when I want them to but then I'm also gonna allow them to move back to the food bucket when I decide the time is right and I do this with the empty food bucket to begin with just because I don't want the stress in the pressure of having real grain where the horse may feel obligated to act out I'll start with the empty food bucket first just so the horse gets the concept of what I'm telling them and then I'll add grain to the bucket once they seem like they understand when you're doing this stuff it's just very important that you remain assertive and confident and not back down to your horse if it's something that you really are timid and afraid about always get another trainer or go to a professional to help you out and they can walk you through these steps and help you correct this behavior in this point we're gonna cover horses that get a little iffy about going in tight spaces this is whether you have a horse that has a hard time getting on a trailer or maybe they start to freak out in their stall because they're feeling claustrophobic and most of these horses are actually demonstrating fear their horses are like claustrophobic animals and if they get in tight spaces and they haven't been in that situation before they can get a little antsy and nervous many of these horses will be nervous about walking you through narrow gate ways or stall doors so where I'm gonna start is actually by getting my horse to walk in and out of the stall multiple times just so they can start walking through it comfortably not speeding up they're paying attention to me they stopped when I asked them to stop they go when I ask them to go so before we do this exercise you're just going to want to make sure that your horse knows your cues for if you put pressure on the lead rope to walk forward and when to stop so this is a problem that Tucker has actually had previously we've worked through it but that's why I think he's the best horse to demonstrate this so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna ask him to walk in and out of this stop in the beginning your horse may start to try and run in and out of the stall in and out of the stall walk quickly through the gap and all of that a horses learn by repetition so you the more you do this likely it is they're gonna get more comfortable with walking through that narrow gateway and so once they do that and they get good at that I can add some other things to this so now that walks through I'm gonna come out just come to the door but then I'm not gonna let him I'm going to just make stand and then you can start really getting them to pay attention to you rather than what they're feeling so then I can ask him to take one step out good boy or I can ask him to back up through it and just adding these things so the stall door in the opening now becomes kind of a game rather than something they are to be afraid of so if you have a horse that's nervous about getting on a horse trailer walking through a stall door is actually a perfect place to start believe it or not but these things correlate together so the more narrow areas you can find your horse to work through the easier it may be for them to walk up on the trailer so once your horse starts to get a little bit more confident with going through tight places you can set up some new obstacles for them so now I'm taking the barn doors and I shut them to be a little bit tighter and I'm just gonna do the same thing wrong I encourage you to walk through so this kind of mimics walking through a trailer and walking up into a narrow space if you have any other questions or situations with ground manners comment below and let us know and maybe we'll do a video on it thank you guys so much for watching make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel for more 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Channel: Equine Helper

Views: 107,026

Keywords: How to Teach a Horse Ground Manners

Id: 0iszsbUr54Q

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020