training
Filed in: Misc
Mind Versus Body
When I was an undergraduate I attended a country university in northern NSW. I lived in a farmhouse on 22 acres about 15km from the university. I had one horse called Luke who was a Percheron/Arab gelding. Each month I attended the local showjumping club in town with Luke for some friendly competition and training days.
Some people were breeding Percheron horses in a town about 40km away. They were very interested in the competition success I was having with my Percheron cross. But times were hard because we were in the 6th year of what was going to be an 8-year drought. The Percheron breeder contacted me and asked if I could temporarily home one of their mares that was pregnant and had a foal at foot. I had expressed an interest in the mare the year before. My new friends offered me the choice of the foal at foot or the foal in utero in return for looking after the mare and foal. I accepted and said I really liked the foal at foot. It was an 8-month old pure Percheron colt.
Eventually, the drought broke and the owners could take the mare home with the younger foal. I kept the 2 year old who I had gelding by this stage. I named him China because he was my best mate and, as everybody knows in Australia describing somebody as ‘China plate’ is rhyming slang for ‘mate.’ So China was my best mate.
Each month I would ride the 15 km into town on Luke for the showjumping day and China would come along with me. He would just follow behind and stay in the yards at the grounds until I was ready to ride home again. China grew big and cumbersome. He had legs like tree trunks and shoulders like a body builder. But the biggest of all was his head. It was enormous like a moose. China was no centrefold.
Some of the people at the club would joke about China and how ugly he was. It was a running joke that he would never be able to heave his huge bulk off the ground to jump a cavaletti let alone an oxer.
Eventually I broke him in and started riding him around the property and in the bush. He was rising 4 when I woke up one day and made the decision to get serious about training China for dressage and jumping. I knew he would be very limited in his capacity to compete in dressage, but I was not so sure about jumping because I had seen how athletic he could be. The first day I tried to catch him as a yearling he had jumped out of the round yard without touching the 6-foot fence. I worked on his flat work training nearly every day. He was smart and quick to learn. I was having a ball training him.
Finally at around 5 years of age I decided to make a jumping lane in the paddock and see what he could do. I had a friend visiting on the day I was putting the jumps together. I didn’t have enough material to make a wall at the end of the jumping lane to block China from going out the other end, so I volunteered my friend to stand there and wave her arms as China approached. I had already lunged China over some small jumps, so I knew he was not afraid. I just wanted to see what sort of scope he had. I started the jumps at only about 2 ½ feet high. After a couple of repetitions I gradually made them higher. He was doing so well with no sign of worry or tension or stopping that for the last round I raised the last jumps to around 5 foot. He cleared them easily.
But unfortunately he kept going after the last jump. My friend saw China coming towards her and waved her arms to slow him down. He cleared her 5’5” frame without worry. But she went white and fell to the ground. I was so thrilled about China and his capacity to jump that I forgot about my friend. I caught him and hugged him with my heart racing excitedly until I remembered about my friend. She was okay if not a little in shock.
Within a year China was showing people at the jumping club how it should be done. We even did a demonstration at the local show, which was a big deal but a whole other story.
The interesting thing to me is that suddenly people stopped calling him ugly. They stopped making jokes about “The Titanic” and about ploughing through jumps rather than going over them. I heard comments about what a beautiful horse China had grown. I was told how China had the perfect conformation for a showjumper. People asked me about his stud lines and whether the breeder would agree to them putting their mare to China’s sire.
To me, China was the same ugly duck he had always been. I knew he was no oil painting and his conformation was very far from perfect. I also knew that if he fell over the jumps instead of clearing them easily people would have continued their jokes. But from the day I first saw him as a yearling, I knew something nobody else at the jumping club knew. I knew what an amazing mind he had. I knew he was smart, brave and curious. I knew he had the right amount of sensitivity and boldness to make him highly trainable.
I can’t do much about the way a horse is built. His conformation is his business. But I can do a lot with a horse with a good mind. A good mind allows a horse the potential to make the best of his conformation. And a difficult mind almost makes brilliant conformation irrelevant. A horse’s mind has far more influence on the final result than a horse’s body.
China didn’t live long. He died at 14 of ameloidosis. But when people ask me about the best horse I have had in my life I can’t help but let my mind drift back to that little 17hh Percheron who was my best mate.
When I was an undergraduate I attended a country university in northern NSW. I lived in a farmhouse on 22 acres about 15km from the university. I had one horse called Luke who was a Percheron/Arab gelding. Each month I attended the local showjumping club in town with Luke for some friendly competition and training days.
Some people were breeding Percheron horses in a town about 40km away. They were very interested in the competition success I was having with my Percheron cross. But times were hard because we were in the 6th year of what was going to be an 8-year drought. The Percheron breeder contacted me and asked if I could temporarily home one of their mares that was pregnant and had a foal at foot. I had expressed an interest in the mare the year before. My new friends offered me the choice of the foal at foot or the foal in utero in return for looking after the mare and foal. I accepted and said I really liked the foal at foot. It was an 8-month old pure Percheron colt.
Eventually, the drought broke and the owners could take the mare home with the younger foal. I kept the 2 year old who I had gelding by this stage. I named him China because he was my best mate and, as everybody knows in Australia describing somebody as ‘China plate’ is rhyming slang for ‘mate.’ So China was my best mate.
Each month I would ride the 15 km into town on Luke for the showjumping day and China would come along with me. He would just follow behind and stay in the yards at the grounds until I was ready to ride home again. China grew big and cumbersome. He had legs like tree trunks and shoulders like a body builder. But the biggest of all was his head. It was enormous like a moose. China was no centrefold.
Some of the people at the club would joke about China and how ugly he was. It was a running joke that he would never be able to heave his huge bulk off the ground to jump a cavaletti let alone an oxer.
Eventually I broke him in and started riding him around the property and in the bush. He was rising 4 when I woke up one day and made the decision to get serious about training China for dressage and jumping. I knew he would be very limited in his capacity to compete in dressage, but I was not so sure about jumping because I had seen how athletic he could be. The first day I tried to catch him as a yearling he had jumped out of the round yard without touching the 6-foot fence. I worked on his flat work training nearly every day. He was smart and quick to learn. I was having a ball training him.
Finally at around 5 years of age I decided to make a jumping lane in the paddock and see what he could do. I had a friend visiting on the day I was putting the jumps together. I didn’t have enough material to make a wall at the end of the jumping lane to block China from going out the other end, so I volunteered my friend to stand there and wave her arms as China approached. I had already lunged China over some small jumps, so I knew he was not afraid. I just wanted to see what sort of scope he had. I started the jumps at only about 2 ½ feet high. After a couple of repetitions I gradually made them higher. He was doing so well with no sign of worry or tension or stopping that for the last round I raised the last jumps to around 5 foot. He cleared them easily.
But unfortunately he kept going after the last jump. My friend saw China coming towards her and waved her arms to slow him down. He cleared her 5’5” frame without worry. But she went white and fell to the ground. I was so thrilled about China and his capacity to jump that I forgot about my friend. I caught him and hugged him with my heart racing excitedly until I remembered about my friend. She was okay if not a little in shock.
Within a year China was showing people at the jumping club how it should be done. We even did a demonstration at the local show, which was a big deal but a whole other story.
The interesting thing to me is that suddenly people stopped calling him ugly. They stopped making jokes about “The Titanic” and about ploughing through jumps rather than going over them. I heard comments about what a beautiful horse China had grown. I was told how China had the perfect conformation for a showjumper. People asked me about his stud lines and whether the breeder would agree to them putting their mare to China’s sire.
To me, China was the same ugly duck he had always been. I knew he was no oil painting and his conformation was very far from perfect. I also knew that if he fell over the jumps instead of clearing them easily people would have continued their jokes. But from the day I first saw him as a yearling, I knew something nobody else at the jumping club knew. I knew what an amazing mind he had. I knew he was smart, brave and curious. I knew he had the right amount of sensitivity and boldness to make him highly trainable.
I can’t do much about the way a horse is built. His conformation is his business. But I can do a lot with a horse with a good mind. A good mind allows a horse the potential to make the best of his conformation. And a difficult mind almost makes brilliant conformation irrelevant. A horse’s mind has far more influence on the final result than a horse’s body.
China didn’t live long. He died at 14 of ameloidosis. But when people ask me about the best horse I have had in my life I can’t help but let my mind drift back to that little 17hh Percheron who was my best mate.
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Filed in: training
Having A Bad Day?
Since getting back home from my recent road trip of clinics I’ve been riding my two thoroughbreds, Riley and Six. It’s always the best fun to ride my own horses – even on their worst days.
Six is a very sensitive mare and Riley is a pretty easy-going gelding. I like them both a lot, but Six has the right amount of sensitivity that when she is on her game it is like she is reading your mind. She is already doing it before you even realized you asked.
I don’t ride my horses nearly as much as I should. There is a distinct lack of consistency in their work, which makes progress close to snail pace. But having ridden Six nearly every day for the last week I am seeing some good changes. However, yesterday she was really crooked and stiff on her right rein. The right rein has always been stickier than the left, but she is not normally as bad as she was yesterday. I spent only a small amount of extra time working on it, but only made a small dent in improving her response. I decided not to worry about it much because I knew there was a reason and it was unlikely to be a training issue. If I believed it was a training problem I would have been more serious about trying to find a way of improving her response. But for the most part I left it alone. After I had finished the ride I checked the saddle and her teeth etc, but found nothing to explain her unusual degree of crookedness and resistance.
Today she was excellent. Her response to the right rein was better than usual. She was very straight and gave to the rein softly. I was very happy with her.
After today’s ride I started thinking about how we pick on things because they are not right. I few years ago I would have hammered away at fixing Six’s crookedness until she made a big change. I believed it was important that I not leave a resistance in a horse and by the end of each session there should be good improvements. I thought that was the point of a training session. But with more experience comes more wisdom.
It bothered me that Six was resistant and crooked on the right rein a couple of days ago. But what didn’t bother me was making sure I fixed it. This is because I know she had her reasons and the reasons had nothing to do with her having learned bad stuff. I still don’t know what those reasons were, but I felt that after trying to give her a little help to soften and having not much success, leaving the issue alone was the right thing to do. I didn’t stop riding her. I just stopped picking on her crookedness to the right. I let her be crooked. And now I am glad I did.
There is no useful purpose for training on something that is not a problem. I know Six can be a lot softer to the right than she was the other day. I know that she knows. But something was getting in the way of that softness and if I couldn’t eradicate the cause, what was the point of telling her not to be crooked? I didn’t know what was the problem, so I didn’t know what to fix. It’s different if you know your horse doesn’t understand the rein or you a unbalancing your horse or your horse is distracted. These things you can address with training. But this wasn’t the case.
My conclusion is that Six was having a bad day. I believe horses do have bad days. Not every issue is a training issue. Some are just bad days.
Since getting back home from my recent road trip of clinics I’ve been riding my two thoroughbreds, Riley and Six. It’s always the best fun to ride my own horses – even on their worst days.
Six is a very sensitive mare and Riley is a pretty easy-going gelding. I like them both a lot, but Six has the right amount of sensitivity that when she is on her game it is like she is reading your mind. She is already doing it before you even realized you asked.
Today she was excellent. Her response to the right rein was better than usual. She was very straight and gave to the rein softly. I was very happy with her.
After today’s ride I started thinking about how we pick on things because they are not right. I few years ago I would have hammered away at fixing Six’s crookedness until she made a big change. I believed it was important that I not leave a resistance in a horse and by the end of each session there should be good improvements. I thought that was the point of a training session. But with more experience comes more wisdom.
It bothered me that Six was resistant and crooked on the right rein a couple of days ago. But what didn’t bother me was making sure I fixed it. This is because I know she had her reasons and the reasons had nothing to do with her having learned bad stuff. I still don’t know what those reasons were, but I felt that after trying to give her a little help to soften and having not much success, leaving the issue alone was the right thing to do. I didn’t stop riding her. I just stopped picking on her crookedness to the right. I let her be crooked. And now I am glad I did.
There is no useful purpose for training on something that is not a problem. I know Six can be a lot softer to the right than she was the other day. I know that she knows. But something was getting in the way of that softness and if I couldn’t eradicate the cause, what was the point of telling her not to be crooked? I didn’t know what was the problem, so I didn’t know what to fix. It’s different if you know your horse doesn’t understand the rein or you a unbalancing your horse or your horse is distracted. These things you can address with training. But this wasn’t the case.
My conclusion is that Six was having a bad day. I believe horses do have bad days. Not every issue is a training issue. Some are just bad days.