I sometimes explain to students that the simple difference between me as their teacher and them as the student is that I have spent a few more thousand hours working a few more thousand horses and making a few more thousand mistakes.
It really is just common sense that we should do our best to prepare a horse for what is ahead. I don’t understand the dogma of leaving horses virtually untouched until we are ready to put them to work. We send our children to school before we send them into the workforce.
There is very little about riding and training that comes naturally to a horse, but fortunately, they have a strong and natural propensity to recognize and give meaning to patterns. We exploit that part of their nature every day with very little recognition of its importance.
If a lesson ends with no more clarity than it began, not only has the horse learned nothing positive, but we also run the risk of making things worse. Doing nothing is usually a better option than doing something badly
In my last post, I outlined some of the important differences between a horse being light and a horse being soft and how you can test when your horse is one or the other. If you have not yet read that post, please do before reading this article.
