Is He Too Much Horse For A Beginner?

all right so I'm here with Livia and uh you're having some trouble with your horse Jake and could you just describe to us a little bit of some of the challenges you're having with him why you invited me out here yeah well Jake is my very first horse so I have no experience with horses before he gets very nervous and he Spooks I cannot really control him have you had any like accidents or incidents with him of where it was like okay this is becoming dangerous if he continues this yeah there was this one day that he spooked when he was cross tied he spooked with the hay cart and he reared up and hit his head on the lamp is there any ground work that you would would show us that you kind of have trouble with when you have him online uh yeah well I told you about the lunch line yeah he and do you feel like this is an issue that him pushing you with his nose yes it is an issue and he does that all the time yeah I would definitely say that's an issue yeah he he hit my nose just just the other day would you agree if I said it makes sense that we should establish some leadership with him on the ground before writing yes like that that that Mak sense to you totally okay um so what you have to me is a lot of rapport with him like he's your friend but I don't see res much respect and when I say respect it's not respect as in like I respect you as a human you respect me it's not like that it's not the same it's it's a respect is appropriate response to pressure and so if you're going to deal with a horse being a prayan animal they're going to have pray animal behaviors which means they're going to Spook sometimes they're going to go too fast sometimes they're going to have reactions to things and that's when the Rapport goes out the window and you're left with in that moment will they have an appropriate response to pressure for us to control them and then resolve that and then then move on horses aren't aren't ever going to be just perfect where they never do those things and so things are going to come up you know sometimes a lot sometimes only a little bit uh but we need we need to establish that respect and control uh when things are going well cuz it's it's basically like I could see you have very little control over him right now when things are going well if you went on on a trail and he got more spooky or if there was more things happening um than us just standing here in the arena you would have like really no control and so that's not going to be safe for you but it's also going to lead to him being more anxious and so we need to I'm going to show you some ways on us uh having that leadership role for him because with horsemanship there's two main things that we're doing is one is building confidence and one is working on yields and that's what when you're backing him up there you're trying to get a yield and that's what is not really working right now but confidence-wise he seems pretty confident especially we've just walked a long ways from the barn away from the other horses and we're out here and so it's not really a confidence issue it's more of he needs to see us as a leader so let me we're going to jump in I'm going to help you out here before you get mauled too much but one of the things I'm going to encourage you to do is switch over to a rope halter so you see it this is very light but it's very thin and so it's just going to be a little bit harder for him to lean on so I'm going to have more of an advantage there of getting him to yield off the pressure the second adjustment we're going to make is I'm going to play a little game with him called owning space and so when he's pushing you and you're backing up he's claiming your space and in horse language that means he's the leader and so he's already testing it with me the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to wave my stick here and I'm just going to say to him this is my space and he doesn't need to trot around I'm just going to establish and see there he's try he tries to test it again and so I'm just waving my stick and just saying that it's going to be uncomfortable if you're in this space I don't want it to mean Circle so I'm just going to interrupt him if he tries circling but you can think he's anticipating lunging there a little bit and then I'm going to walk somewhere and I'm going to do that same game so I'm just going to stop and then I'm going to wave my stick again and establish my personal space so you can see it it's not it's not hard to do it doesn't take a lot and I don't think he's a bad horse at all in any way or like overly pushy it's just a matter of you communicating to him hey there's a boundary here that that you can't come into and as a rule of thumb to be safe with a horse on the ground I would rather the the idea be if you want to be closer to him than your arm the arms length that you would have to walk into his space or ask him to come into yours but for me when I'm working with horses I work with a lot of dangerous horses that have lot of bad habits and so as a general rule for me to stay safe around them I don't let them any closer than my arms length unless I ask them or I go into their space but I never accept them just coming in when I didn't ask them to now if I was ready to groom him to saddle him or something like that um I would go into his space or you or if you want him to follow you around you could invite him in does that make sense uh but to just allow him to come into your space and then Retreat out of it is going to encourage him that he's actually the one in charge so in horse language whoever is moving the other one's feet is the boss so I like that that was a little bit better response he started stopping a little earlier the next level of this would be I'm going to walk through his space okay so I'm going to pick a line directly through him and again if I'm the alpha horse I'm not going to walk around him to go over there I'm going to go through him if I like if I wanted to pet him my life would come down I would relax I would walk in and I would go to pet him with the stick now he misread my energy there or my intention so I can see where this is where the spookiness comes up a little bit so that's also a hole in his foundation he didn't read my intention and he needs to learn that he needs to know when we're just hanging out petting saddling moving around it's safe he doesn't need to feel like he needs to kick or get defensive so there he got very defensive when my stick came towards him and so that's that's a bit of an issue so he needs to more confidence with my tool with my stick and string but I start with the owning space and and and moving his feet first because I need to be safe that if he gets bothered at some point that he will be out of my space not come through me okay so even though he is intimidated by the stick I'm still going to move forward with him asking him to move off the line because we need to start with that for safety sake so I'm gonna wave my stick and I'm GNA walk on a line and I'm just going to ask him to move off that line and then I'm going to continue walking on the line so by me walking on this line and just going back and forth across the arena it creates a predictable pattern so like here if I go to walk off the line he's moving off it no problem so this is good this means he doesn't want to be in charge at all so I don't need to do that a bunch so that's good I am going to spend a little bit of time here petting him with the stick and maybe test throwing this over his back here now I'm going to block him there if he tries to go forward if he gets scared of it and he goes forward a horse can go forward and be scared for a really long time and so I'm going to interrupt him for going forward by just lifting up and kind of bumping on that halter a little bit if he were to back up or Retreat kind of in that way I would just follow him then um because they're not going to back back up for a very long time he's also a little bit more intimidated with me on his right side than his left side which is pretty common most horses get handled more on the left side than the right um because he went to block me there with his nose so for me this is teaching him to read my intention versus the energy of the stick and string and everybody would love for their horse to know this that if you're calm your horse will be calm but you have to train them to make that true they don't just come out of the box understanding that if you're calm oh I can be calm too does that make sense now the next thing that is important for you to understand is if he does get afraid you need to ask the him to yield his hind quarters the opposite of getting uh powerful ready to react is to disengage and even in the word disengage explains what it is it's doing it's taking the power down so I'm going to ask him to yield his high quarters now so I've changed my intention can you kind of see that like I I get more serious and I'm asking him to move here there we go now I like how s see how slow and soft his feet are moving that's a great time to quit if if you go to yield his hind quarters and his feet are fast and reactive don't stop keep going because horses kind of live in different mindsets and so if he's in a reactive mindset you don't want to release the pressure if he gets calm then you want to release the pressure okay so now I'm going to switch to petting him again and with him because he's not real familiar with the tools that I'm using um I would alternate it like like every time I'd yeld the H quarters now I come back and rub him and I like how quickly He adjusted to that he didn't get afraid of it he's letting me pet him his head's down now I'm going to switch so I change my intention now I'm asking him to yield again and this would be what I would call a recovery strategy so this is something that you would want to teach a horse proactively ahead of time when things are going well like today so that if someday you're leading him you're doing something and he gets bothered and upset you can go back to that exercise and say hey recover settle down it's you don't have to be worried about that so now there he's looking away from me so I'm going to go ahead and yield his hind quarters because one of the things I also want you to be aware of is expecting him to pay attention to you if you're keeping him busy giving him something to think about he will have less time to be spooky but if you're not a aware of when he goes what's that over there and you don't don't do anything about it well the next thing is him deciding if something over there should spook him or not so if if he does that look right there and you go ahead and redirect his attention back to you not aggressively or anything but all I took was just talked him out of it well now he's back with me now we did discover there's a couple of spots on him that are a little bit Goosey a little bit touchy more so than I would like to me he needs a higher tolerance of things especially at his age of things touching his hind quarters so if you were trail riding and a and a branch kind of brushed his leg that could cause him to react just based on this string touching him and him reacting to it so I'm going to go take some time to reinforce that idea of energy versus intention with a couple of other tools so one other one would be just taking the end of the lead rope here and so like there he's a little bit worried and so I'm going to wait for him to recover so you watch and see if you can see when he's trying to be calm there his feet got quieter so I'll Retreat there then there he's he licked and chewed so when he got worried and he started backing up I kept going and a lot of people's instincts would tell them to stop like I'm scaring him so I should stop but you have to pick a level of pressure that is achievable okay so this bothered him a little bit and and then because I stopped it when he got um when his feet get got still he got more comfortable with it now I'll just take the rope and throw it over his back there so that's pretty good um would you mind handing me that flag behind you so the flag is more noisy like not like literally but it's visually it's more pressure and so you can see it's already got his attention and so again the flag is going to have a lot of energy a lot of life in it but my intention is going to be calm and so he should follow he should follow my intention not the flag so if he gets scared here you see I just tipped his nose towards me because he thought about running off there a little bit and there the flag is in his bubble but he's trying to be calm trying to recover so I'll take it away at that moment on my um I have a patreon page and on my YouTube channel I show a lot of like horses getting experience with different things and problem solving like kind of more pizza by the slice uh on my patreon page I have a whole program that people can follow it's a fundamental series that just shows like stepbystep all things I would really recommend that you take him through that um if if you did there's about seven video series on the ground and seven riding it would take you probably about a month if you did it every day or two months if you did it you know a couple two three times a week to get through one of the things that I have to consider um when I'm playing with these horses is trying to decide what's achievable for the owner versus what should somebody else work with and I've only seen him for this morning but my recommendation to you would be to put him in training with somebody for a little while maybe at least a month maybe a little longer depending on how far you want them Le lessons and stuff would obviously be great following that patreon page would be great but there's going to be a point where there's a day where it's windy it's cold out like today and something can happen and I personally would just feel more comfortable recommending to you that he did have some training with somebody um before you continue and that would just help him get a little over the hump and then if he did that while you were also learning some of these fundamental things and doing that with him I think that would bring you guys that would just close that Gap a little bit because right now your skill set and where he's at in training there's a little bit of a gap there I'm going to do a couple more things with him here um I'd like to address how pushy he was with the halter and so I'm going to put a little feel on this here essentially I'm just using the stick to reinforce the halter so if he pushes on the halter I add my stick if he doesn't push on the halter then I don't don't add the stick good there all right so that went pretty well one more thing I'm going to do can you hand me that rope behind you so I'm going to do this because of him being Goosey around his hind legs with the Rope touching him so this one is just I'm going to ask him to wear it again to me these are all things that I do when I'm starting Colts and like just baby horse preparation stuff but to me this is just kind of some Basics that it's not it doesn't take that much time to get them used to it and can kind of make a big difference so you can see how he's not comfortable with it yet and so that so it's going to stay on there it's just going to follow him now there you see him walk calmer now I'll release the pressure so now I'm going to put it in a little harder spot so again first is just wear it I just hold my hand up so it doesn't slide down their leg I like to have it above their Hawk because if they were to kick it won't pull on my arm as much if it's down lower on their leg you know there's not as much muscle there and if they kick it really jerks your hand a lot now I'm want to put a feel on it and release so that was good I expected him to have a bigger reaction to that that was that was a good response at the end of the day he needs to have really good yields and he needs to read the human's intention versus energy if he does that really well you can bypass a lot of individual things that you could get a horse used to I like efficiency and so I pick a handful of things that are pretty scary like the flag the stick and string a l rope maybe add in a tarp or a feed sack in there and you can really cover your bases with just a handful of tools that are all pretty cheap and to deal with you know you don't have to go build this you know crazy amount of obstacles to do that now again he's crowding me just a little bit and he wasn't being naughty there he was being inquisitive but I like I said for five days five Training sessions I would established hey this is my personal space taking lessons would be a great thing to do but I still think he needs a little bit of work you need to learn those things in a perfect world you would have kind of a more experienced horse that you could practice on a little bit but if he got that experience from a trainer and then you continued and kept up with the groundwork that would be a good good situation as well and I have a couple trainers in the area I can recommend I think you're actually going to have a very natural propensity for this what I saw with you is I saw you wanting to connect with him and build a relationship and even doing the liberty and having some success with some things with fairly limited knowledge but then I also saw you be assertive to Magic and say hey you need to not be here and be out of the gate a lot of people struggle with that they really struggle to say excuse you I don't need you to be here right now and I don't see you having any trouble with that the the way you were you know handled him earlier and that to me it was more you just didn't know what's acceptable and what's not and um so I I have very high hopes and expectations for you guys I think I think you're going to do great but I do think by following some of the advice I'm giving you it'll be a safer process and that's I think what's the most important thing

Channel: Ryan Rose

Views: 207,044

Keywords: horse, horse training, first time horse owner, Ryan, rose, Ryan Rose, rose horsemanship, Ryan Rose horsemanship, horses, horse trainer, pushy horse, ground work, western, cowboy

Id: KkfcsshKH6I

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023