Why Train Your Own Horse?
Posted on 31. Mar, 2009 by in Horse Train
You’ll know by now that I really LOVE horse train and everything about them! I search all four corners of the globe to find out new and interesting things about it. Well, I found a real treasure yesterday and I wanted to share it with you.
I pasted the article below and I think you’ll find it really interesting. Don’t forget to come back to the top and check this out for MORE on horse train.
Training your own horse is an option for anyone who wants to have a close and dynamic relationship with his horse. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons this approach to training a horse makes sense:
1.Have control over the training process.
2.Progress at your own pace.
3.Develop a better relationship with your horse.
4.Educate yourself on training and problem-solving techniques.
5.Improve your riding skills and boost your confidence.
6.Know your horse’s strengths and weaknesses.
7.Monitor care and feeding of horse.
8.Avoid the occasional unscrupulous professional trainer.Control the Training Process
If you train your own horse, you will be calling the shots about what skills your horse will learn. You will be able to control what type of training methods are used on your horse. This is especially important if you plan to employ natural horsemanship techniques. A few professional trainers still scoff at these methods and may give them lip service to get your business and then train the horse the way they want to.
For novice trainers an ideal situation is to have a professional trainer you trust on call to give advice on difficult situations and perhaps even to structure a training program. This is the recommended approach even if you have an entire library of horse training books and videos. There will always come a time when a professional trainer can get you past that unusual stumbling block for which no book seems to have an answer.
Progress at Your Own Pace
You don’t have a client to please and you won’t be tempted to take short cuts to show quick progress when a more gradual, slow approach might be called for. It could be the horse that requires more time on a specific skill, or it may be you that needs the extra practice to develop the proper cues and intuition necessary to successfully master a phase of the training.
Develop a Better Relationship
This is rather self-explanatory. If you are doing the training, you personally are going to be able to instill trust and confidence in your horse. The horse will learn how to react to you, not to a trainer, and you will not have communication problems later with the horse. You set up the rules and the tone of the relationship and enforce those every day in your interaction with the horse.
Educate Yourself & Improve SkillsThe next two points really go together. When you made the decision to train your own horse, you likely did not come to the table with a complete set of training skills. The process requires constant efforts to study and learn the principles of natural horsemanship and how they apply to both normal training techniques as well as troubleshooting problems. The very process mandates that you continuously learn and deepen your knowledge as the training process progresses.
Improve Your Riding Skills and Boost Confidence
When you progress from the theoretical stage of training to actual in-the-saddle training, you will be amazed at how much you have learned. This will become even more evident after regular riding sessions with your horse. The combination of study, the practical application of what you have learned and the more frequent riding that training necessitates will improve your riding skills beyond your wildest imagination. Each time your horse learns a skill that you have taught him, your confidence will soar.
Know Your Horse’s Strengths and Weaknesses
When you work with your horse on a daily basis, you will have a much clearer understanding of what your horse does well and what he still needs work on. You will know what his phobias are and what situations he is comfortable in. This will allow you to spend more time in his weaker areas to train a well-rounded horse.
Monitor Care and Feeding
When you send your horse away for training, you are not going to know under what conditions he’s being kept unless you make regular unannounced visits to the training facility. Your trainer is not going to like this no matter what he tells you. Most people you talk to who have sent their horses away have some kind of horror story regarding the shape they found their horse in. If you train your own horse, you know what the horse is eating, drinking and how well he’s being treated.
Avoid the Occasional Unscrupulous Professional Trainer
Let’s preface what comes next by saying that the majority of professional trainers are competent, well-meaning horsemen. There is the occasional bad egg, though, and we’ve heard a lot of stories about them and had a few bad experiences ourselves. We know personally of a case in which the owner of a well-bred horse picked up his colt after “90 days of training,” and took the horse home. The next day he saddled up what was supposed to be a well-broke colt who proceeded to buck off the owner and send him to the hospital to get a pin inserted into a broken bone. That’s extreme, but it happens. The more usual scenario is that you pay for 30 days of riding and the horse is pretty much put on the back burner and ridden half the amount. Obviously, when you train the horse yourself, 90 days of riding is 90 days of riding.
This article is written by:Anita Lamb
Awesome article, huh? I thought you’d like it.
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