Sometimes
horses spook at things, and then it is very important how the rider reacts.
If the horse spooks habitually, the rider wants to make the spooking less
likely in the future, and if the spooking is something new, the rider wants
to prevent it to become a habit.
It is my experience, that if a horse is afraid of something it really has
only two choices, to bolt or to freeze. I´m in for freezing.
If the young horses I'm training are afraid, I try to give them always
the choise of freezing, and if they are beginning to bolt, to stop the
motion as soon as possible, and reward the horse when it stops. This
is a safety measure, as usually the
owners,
that get the horses back later, wouldn't be able to hang on a spooking
horse. In almost all cases, the horse starts to relax
a tiny bit when it is allowed to stop, and I can encourage forward movement
again after 1 second or after 10 seconds, depending on the amount of hysteria
in the horse. Do it softly enough though, that the horse still has
the choice of freezing, reward the horse for every tiny step towards the
wiched-for-direction, and do not drive it towared bolting.
Many riders say that if I do this, I'm teachin the horse that it is okay
to be afraid. I am totally of another opinion, this method has worked
well for me and many others, and I've never encountered a horse that became
more nervous when given time to think about things. If you push the
horse to go past a thing it is afraid of, while it's frame of mind is still
along the lines that it wants to bolt away, then it will. And I don't
want the horse to learn that if it is afraid, it should bolt. I want
it to stop. All riders can sit a freezing horse, many riders can't
hang on a bolting horse.
Do not take the horse away from the spooky thing, let it stop, watch, think,
relax a bit, whether it takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes. When the horse
has stopped being stiff and shivering, encourage it with your legs and
soft voice to walk on. If it totally doesn't want to walk on or starts
thinking about bolting again, step off, lead the horse to the scary thing,
pet the thing and show the horse it is harmless, let the horse sniff it
and pet the horse, then go on when the horse has relaxed, and mount again.
You'll propably find that the next time you go past the thing, the problem
will be smaller or vanished. As you do this more often, you'll find
the courage and calmness becoming more in the horse, and it becomes easier
to go past or up to scary things. Try riding past the scary thing
later and see if the horse still reacts, if so, lead the horse to it again.
You
are spoiling the horse only if it is using this as a trick to get away
from obeying you, and is not frightened at all. Theses cases exist,
but are rare.
You build the confidence and the thinking in the horse by waiting and not
pushing.
Sometimes
I'm asked for help because a horse suddenly becomes spooky, even though
it has never been so before. The first thing that comes into mind
then is that the horse has been pushed into more work than it wants to
do, or forsed into something it is afraid of, thus
bolting/spooking
to get away. If a horse is scared, and gets then hit by a crop to
push it past the scary object, so the horse bolts past it, then bolting
becomes a learned behavior. If the simply does not care to work so
hard, the process of stopping these objections of it's behalf (and getting
it to work) takes longer time. Then you have to divide the
work into easier steps that the horse can handle, and you can handle.
You can push the horse more than it can handle, but then you also have
to be ready to hang on. You have to decide for yourself if you are
good enough rider for that, and if future riders are good enough riders
for that.
