I audited one day of a Charlie Snell clinic in my area. I'd seen him before. He has worked with all the old timey guys; Ray Hunt and the Dorrance bros, and he also works with Harry Whitney, who is my trainer's mentor. it's a small world, the world of horse training. folks get to knowing each other.
Charlie is a been there done that sort of guy. he even jockeyed as a young man, which doesn't surprise me as he's about 5' 4 and maybe 90 lbs or bone and muscle. his face shows the years out in the sun and the dust, and he has that way with horses where the animal just feels better standing next to him.
here are my notes. they are not elegantly arranged. may not make much sense at all. in fact, I'm wondering if I should even post them . . . . h m . m . m . . . . oh well.
First working with a nervous, sensitive fox trotter mare:
Petting horses, and ‘leaving’ horses
When you go to pet her, make sure she’s looking at you. Don’t pet her if she moves her head away to avoid you. Don’t go pet her shoulder if she’s still trying to move her head away. She’s saying she is still looking for a way out, and can barely tolerate your touching her. Get her looking right at you, pet her once or twice, then move away from her. Do not pet her so long that she leaves you.
This applies to unhaltering a horse when you are putting them back into their pasture/paddock after a work session: you get them to look right at you, pet them once or twice, then take the halter off and YOU leave THE HORSE, not the other way around. (I’m not 100% sure of the importance of this, but Charlies says it makes a huge difference to the horse) If you allow the horse to leave you, you are still ‘there’ and yet you are allowing the horse to take his thought away from you when you are still ‘there’. this sets him up into thinking that he can do this , here and in other situations.
So, don’t pet your horse a lot, don’t pet them when they are trying to avoid being petting (get them to give you two eyes), and YOU leave the horse, not the other way around.
Round penning that little mare, he noticed that she had a fixation on one side of the round pen, where she was wanting to look outward more. In all her moving around the pen, she had her neck bent so that she was always NOT looking inward, and Charlie didn’t do a whole lot to force her to look his way, but, eventually , he went and offset himself into the area she wanted to be in, saying, “this is mine now”, and she got more agitated and more willing to try looking at him. It was as if she had been ok in the round pen not giving the human any kind of real part of herself because she was mentally ‘in’ that area, even when actually circling the whole pen. But, when she could no longer own that side, she had to turn and look at him, (he was in HER space, and she HAD to look). Then he could start getting to consider looking that way more and more, and this lead to him being able to walk up to and pet her (two eyes). He was very soft on her, but very ‘on’ her. Meaning, as he approached her, if she moved the tiniest bit off to the side, he’d say, “she’s fixing things up to leave”. Meaning, she was getting ready to make the decision to run. Charlie would back up infinitesimally, and she’d be drawn back to looking at him.
Hard training = Hard horse
Eventually, he got her hooked on him enough to spin around and KEEP him in her two eyes, but she didn’t’ want to actually walk around behind him much. She had her hind legs stuck into that sand. Charlie said he could get ‘harder’ on her and MAKE her follow him, but she had probably had some hard training put on her in the past, and ‘the harder you put training on a horse, the harder will be their reactions. “ . He said, he sees horses who come from the training where they’ve been shown the choice is between “a rock and a hard place” (both HARD), instead of a “good place and a not so good place”, as he likes to train.
Moving the horse’s thought right then left
When she was standing next to him, after finally allowing him to come up to her and pet her a bit, he asked her to ‘look right, . . . look left”. I asked about this, and its value. He said it helps the horse ‘turn loose’ and pointed out how as he did this, her head got lower and lower. And, he said, it’s not that you want the horse to ‘snap right, snap left, as they might do if they are avoiding you” No! You want the horse to THINK left, THINK right, so you really want to see where their eye is going.
All this is part of the foundation of this training and that is:
CAN YOU GET YOUR HORSE TO LET GO OF ONE THOUGHT AND TAKE UP ANOTHER.
There are many ways to do this, no ‘right’ one, just what works. Practice it because it might save your life.
The more you practice getting your horse to do this, the more accessible their mind will be to you in ANY circumstance. And that translates as being safer.
While we do repetition to cement training, in reality, if the horse is in the right frame of mind, all you have to do is show them something once or twice and they’ve got it. The repetition is in part for the human, and in part to be sure that you can get the response in any kind of situation.
Next horse:
Large, pinto Fresian mix mare. Green horse, heavy and resentful
One of the first things Charlie noticed was that the owner , when leading the horse, moved off before having the horse’s attention. He said, get the horse’s attention first, then walk off. If you move off while the horse’s mind is outside the pen (somewhere else), you can move the feet, but you’ve left the mind behind. Any time you separate a horse’s body/feet from his mind, you are looking for trouble.
Getting some life into the resistant horse
In lunging this horse, on a line, the horse had a lot of resentment at the handler’s way of applying too much constant ‘whirling and flipping’ of the line in the non-leading hand. Charlie said, use the line to put a forward feel (and he spent some time showing people the different hand positions that seem the same to us, but make a world of difference to the horse). Mainly, not to have our arm out in such a way that we are pulling the horse in front of us, onto us. Rather, you give a forward feel that is extending your arm out at about a 45 degree angle from your shoulder, instead of so much off to your side, more toward the horse.
Charlie wanted her to offer the feel, then if no change, use her rope, or slap her thigh, once or twice and look for a small change and be sure to do nothing for the times that the horse is making even the smallest try. You build on this, little by little , to get a horse that will become more willing to move out. It’s tempting to get harder and harder, to ‘insist’ that the horse go, but then you just get the horse coming back at you harder and harder with resistance and resentment.
After doing some lunge work, the owner wanted to rider her. So, they spent quite a long time working at the mounting block.
“Lunging at the mounting block”
. Charlie said that you can do a ton of work at the mounting block to get your horse’s mind with you, maybe as much as you could do in a round pen session. Several of the horses at the clinic had issues lining up at the mounting block, with some of them coming in too close, and pushing into the rider. So Charlie had them get their horse positioned well. He had them work on what I call a ‘figure 8 exercise”. you send the horse one way, get the hips to disengage, the front to step back around, and then repeat going the other directs. It’s the commonly done exercise called ‘front end, back end’, but you do it from a static position, as if you were standing on or near the mounting block. He said, it’s as if you were sitting on a fence, getting the horse to line up to the fence. Charlie said this is a good exercise to practice anywhere, anytime; that of getting your horse to line up to you as if you were a mounting block.
The important thing about doing this, either for practice or for real mounting, is to do it slow. One step at a time. Get the horse to wait for instruction, and have him ‘thinking his way through it”.
Mounting up
At the mounting block, Charlie showed how to pull the saddle, slowly but firmly, no jerking, toward you and away from you to test that your horse is well squared up and balanced for you to mount. Then, when you do mount, get up and on promptly. Don’t lollygag with your weight hanging off the side. He talked about how it’s a bit harder for women to mount from the ground due to the shape of the hips and how it makes it hard for them to bend the leg and get really close to the horse when one foot is crooked up in the stirrup .
At this point, I think I do not have coherent enough notes to try to approach this in a horse by horse report on what was done for each. I’m going to just write down important points he made. .
Tying to saddle/groom
Never saddle or groom a green or troubled horse while it is tied. When you ‘tie’ a horse, you take away his self-preservation, and he could feel more troubled about that. Just keep his lead rope draped over your elbow (never over your shoulder), and work. That way, you can also keep him connected to you when he’s mentally drifting away. And, the horse becomes mentally connected to the post, not to us, when he is tied. Of course, once they are well trained, you can tie. For convenience. But, having him stand loose, on a lead line, gives many training opportunities. You require him to stay looking at you or straight ahead, NOT way out somewhere else. You develop his connection to you.
Charlie demonstrated how to bridle a horse, but I won’t’ describe that now. It’s more something you need to see
Forward cue
Riding the horse, the cue to go is NOT digging your heels into his side. It’s taking the WHOLE leg off his side and bumping against his side, rhythmically. If he doesn’t go, you don’t get harder, you just stay there in that thumping rhythm, until he moves, and you stop. Eventually, he will know the cue. Eventually, he will get good at it, and he will move from feeling you take your leg OFF of him (as you lift it in preparation to thump him). But, not heels digging into his side, and definitely not further back. He said he sees too many people, women, leaning forward onto their forks, with lower legs back, digging into the horse’s side, and how the horse really hates that.
positions in the saddle;
1 is way forward, like at a fast gallop or over jumps
2 is sitting vertical, for forward movement
3 is more back on your pockets, for halt and for just standing in neutral
Halting; rein and seat
Regarding halting: Get your seat into position 3, then use reins. Charlie talked about how a horse needs to be taught first to stop off the reins. Then you add in the seat. He demonstrated how people that try to stop their horses with seat alone end up with a horse that will often throw his head up and hollow out his back. The horse needs the rein support to help teach it to stop soft and rounded. He also said, if you can get a little bend in the horse, just an inward flexion of the head, it makes it easier for the horse to stop , because he can step under his belly a bit better when he is bent (thus the value of circles in training)
3 stride transitions
In the transitions, he said it is good to think of them happening within 3 strides, and he says he even counts it out. So, from trot to walk in 3 strides, walk to trot, 3 strides. I assume that means 3 strides from the time you ask , and the time they comply.
Starting off with the inside hind
Also, when you are standing around on your horse, and you ask them to start off walking, another good exercise is to have the horse step under themselves with the inside hind right before stepping forward. The idea is to get the ‘step off’ to be originating from the inside hind. So, before allowing the horse to move forward, you do whatever it takes to get a slight inward step with that inside hind, then immediately ask for a forward push off. I found this idea intriguing and think I would like to try that.
Charlie talked a lot about rein positions. He said that he is often criticized for having too busy hands, but that he feels a ‘static hand creates a stiff horse’. He showed the different positions for asking the horse to step to right or left, or to flex its head , bend into a hip disengagement. He talked about making sure that the outside rein does not interfere with things when you are asking a horse to bend and look inward. And, he really worked with the students on making sure that when they ask for an inward ‘look’, that they wait to see if that is really happening, or if the horse is tipping head in, but still looking outward to NOT release at this place. This can manifest by a sort of ‘tilting ‘of the head, with ears pointing one way, and muzzle the other. Charlie reminded folks of the cardinal sin of bringing the reins across the wither line, and how it puts the horse in a bind. He asked that if you take up a shorter inside rein, that you advance your outside rein equally, so that it does not say one thing, while the other rein says something else. Or, drop the outside rein, to avoid any conflicts with inside rein. He kept emphasizing how the snaffle is meant to be used one rein at a time.
Getting the horse to ‘look’
He had riders practice a LOT of just lifting one rein and waiting until the horse just LOOKED that way, . . then the other side. It’s the same concept as working on the ground. He said, “every time you can lift a rein and get a horse to look that way, you’re putting money in the bank” . He emphasized that it doesn’t have to be much of a bend. The ‘looking’ is more important than the bending, and in fact, those folks that flex the horse ‘s head side to side, in so-called ‘suppling’ are only teaching the horse to do something on autopilot. The horse swings his head over real fast, since he knows that what is wanted. He isn’t ‘listening’. What if you only wanted him to move his head a little and ‘think over there, go over there’. The automatic ‘flexer’ just isn’t thinking , he’s just ‘doing’. You always want a thinking horse.
So, practice, practice, practice having the horse just bend a tiny bit and LOOK in the direction of the rein you lift.
Don’t bump or jerk or pull him when he resists the rein to one side
At one point, he also talked about a horse that resists the rein by taking his head the other direction. He said, you just ‘go with him’. Meaning, you have put some resistance on the rein, some ‘ask’, the horse reacts by actually pulling away to the other direction. You DON’T increase your pull, nor do you jerk or snap the rein. you just keep it the same. In order to keep it the same, you must follow his head with your hand, neither yanking, snapping, bumping NOR allowing slack. The horse puts himself in a bind. You don’t make it worse, you just wait for him to find the way out. The instant he gives, but very sure you don’t take the slack back. You give, infinitesimally, in your hand. Then return to asking softly for the inside bend.
Charlie said there is a difference between softness and lightness
Softness is a mental state, where lightness is having a hair trigger reactiveness.
The very forward horse
If you have a very forward horse, sometimes that horse, even when walking fast, is really ‘running away’ from you. To think about that, with regard to having a horse that wants to walk out a million miles an hour all the time, or need to be in front of the group. Asked how one would know if the horse were actually running away when it walks out so forward, he said the test is to ‘take the bridle off and see if he stays put’.
We got no takers on that one.
LIFE verse DIRECTION
We talked about how we are , when riding, doing two things; putting life into our horses, and directing our horses. Which one comes first? Why putting life into your horse, of course. Trouble happens when we are trying to do both at the same time. A skilled rider can, but the amature gets the horse mixed up, bound up, upset and things fall apart. Get life first, THEN direct it.
I stopped taking notes at this point. Ran out of paper and needed to stand and walk around due to mighty cold feet. Charlie worked with some riders mounted in the round pen, working on position and did quite a bit of work on how to get the leg yield, which is a very important thing to use in training.
I’m afraid I don’t remember enough detail to write it down. Notes are essential when you get this much information thrown at you in one day.
The long and the short of it is that it was a wonderful day. Charlie Snell is a delight to learn from. He knows of what he speaks, coming from a lifetime of real world experience. He teaches these ideas very well and shows a great deal of respect and compassion for his students and meets them at the place where they ARE at any one time. He’s kind, funny and patient. Just a wonderful teacher and great guy!
Charlie is a been there done that sort of guy. he even jockeyed as a young man, which doesn't surprise me as he's about 5' 4 and maybe 90 lbs or bone and muscle. his face shows the years out in the sun and the dust, and he has that way with horses where the animal just feels better standing next to him.
here are my notes. they are not elegantly arranged. may not make much sense at all. in fact, I'm wondering if I should even post them . . . . h m . m . m . . . . oh well.
Charlie Snell clinic, March 25th 2017- one day’s notes from auditing
First working with a nervous, sensitive fox trotter mare:
Petting horses, and ‘leaving’ horses
When you go to pet her, make sure she’s looking at you. Don’t pet her if she moves her head away to avoid you. Don’t go pet her shoulder if she’s still trying to move her head away. She’s saying she is still looking for a way out, and can barely tolerate your touching her. Get her looking right at you, pet her once or twice, then move away from her. Do not pet her so long that she leaves you.
This applies to unhaltering a horse when you are putting them back into their pasture/paddock after a work session: you get them to look right at you, pet them once or twice, then take the halter off and YOU leave THE HORSE, not the other way around. (I’m not 100% sure of the importance of this, but Charlies says it makes a huge difference to the horse) If you allow the horse to leave you, you are still ‘there’ and yet you are allowing the horse to take his thought away from you when you are still ‘there’. this sets him up into thinking that he can do this , here and in other situations.
So, don’t pet your horse a lot, don’t pet them when they are trying to avoid being petting (get them to give you two eyes), and YOU leave the horse, not the other way around.
Round penning that little mare, he noticed that she had a fixation on one side of the round pen, where she was wanting to look outward more. In all her moving around the pen, she had her neck bent so that she was always NOT looking inward, and Charlie didn’t do a whole lot to force her to look his way, but, eventually , he went and offset himself into the area she wanted to be in, saying, “this is mine now”, and she got more agitated and more willing to try looking at him. It was as if she had been ok in the round pen not giving the human any kind of real part of herself because she was mentally ‘in’ that area, even when actually circling the whole pen. But, when she could no longer own that side, she had to turn and look at him, (he was in HER space, and she HAD to look). Then he could start getting to consider looking that way more and more, and this lead to him being able to walk up to and pet her (two eyes). He was very soft on her, but very ‘on’ her. Meaning, as he approached her, if she moved the tiniest bit off to the side, he’d say, “she’s fixing things up to leave”. Meaning, she was getting ready to make the decision to run. Charlie would back up infinitesimally, and she’d be drawn back to looking at him.
Hard training = Hard horse
Eventually, he got her hooked on him enough to spin around and KEEP him in her two eyes, but she didn’t’ want to actually walk around behind him much. She had her hind legs stuck into that sand. Charlie said he could get ‘harder’ on her and MAKE her follow him, but she had probably had some hard training put on her in the past, and ‘the harder you put training on a horse, the harder will be their reactions. “ . He said, he sees horses who come from the training where they’ve been shown the choice is between “a rock and a hard place” (both HARD), instead of a “good place and a not so good place”, as he likes to train.
Moving the horse’s thought right then left
When she was standing next to him, after finally allowing him to come up to her and pet her a bit, he asked her to ‘look right, . . . look left”. I asked about this, and its value. He said it helps the horse ‘turn loose’ and pointed out how as he did this, her head got lower and lower. And, he said, it’s not that you want the horse to ‘snap right, snap left, as they might do if they are avoiding you” No! You want the horse to THINK left, THINK right, so you really want to see where their eye is going.
All this is part of the foundation of this training and that is:
CAN YOU GET YOUR HORSE TO LET GO OF ONE THOUGHT AND TAKE UP ANOTHER.
There are many ways to do this, no ‘right’ one, just what works. Practice it because it might save your life.
The more you practice getting your horse to do this, the more accessible their mind will be to you in ANY circumstance. And that translates as being safer.
While we do repetition to cement training, in reality, if the horse is in the right frame of mind, all you have to do is show them something once or twice and they’ve got it. The repetition is in part for the human, and in part to be sure that you can get the response in any kind of situation.
Next horse:
Large, pinto Fresian mix mare. Green horse, heavy and resentful
One of the first things Charlie noticed was that the owner , when leading the horse, moved off before having the horse’s attention. He said, get the horse’s attention first, then walk off. If you move off while the horse’s mind is outside the pen (somewhere else), you can move the feet, but you’ve left the mind behind. Any time you separate a horse’s body/feet from his mind, you are looking for trouble.
Getting some life into the resistant horse
In lunging this horse, on a line, the horse had a lot of resentment at the handler’s way of applying too much constant ‘whirling and flipping’ of the line in the non-leading hand. Charlie said, use the line to put a forward feel (and he spent some time showing people the different hand positions that seem the same to us, but make a world of difference to the horse). Mainly, not to have our arm out in such a way that we are pulling the horse in front of us, onto us. Rather, you give a forward feel that is extending your arm out at about a 45 degree angle from your shoulder, instead of so much off to your side, more toward the horse.
Charlie wanted her to offer the feel, then if no change, use her rope, or slap her thigh, once or twice and look for a small change and be sure to do nothing for the times that the horse is making even the smallest try. You build on this, little by little , to get a horse that will become more willing to move out. It’s tempting to get harder and harder, to ‘insist’ that the horse go, but then you just get the horse coming back at you harder and harder with resistance and resentment.
After doing some lunge work, the owner wanted to rider her. So, they spent quite a long time working at the mounting block.
“Lunging at the mounting block”
. Charlie said that you can do a ton of work at the mounting block to get your horse’s mind with you, maybe as much as you could do in a round pen session. Several of the horses at the clinic had issues lining up at the mounting block, with some of them coming in too close, and pushing into the rider. So Charlie had them get their horse positioned well. He had them work on what I call a ‘figure 8 exercise”. you send the horse one way, get the hips to disengage, the front to step back around, and then repeat going the other directs. It’s the commonly done exercise called ‘front end, back end’, but you do it from a static position, as if you were standing on or near the mounting block. He said, it’s as if you were sitting on a fence, getting the horse to line up to the fence. Charlie said this is a good exercise to practice anywhere, anytime; that of getting your horse to line up to you as if you were a mounting block.
The important thing about doing this, either for practice or for real mounting, is to do it slow. One step at a time. Get the horse to wait for instruction, and have him ‘thinking his way through it”.
Mounting up
At the mounting block, Charlie showed how to pull the saddle, slowly but firmly, no jerking, toward you and away from you to test that your horse is well squared up and balanced for you to mount. Then, when you do mount, get up and on promptly. Don’t lollygag with your weight hanging off the side. He talked about how it’s a bit harder for women to mount from the ground due to the shape of the hips and how it makes it hard for them to bend the leg and get really close to the horse when one foot is crooked up in the stirrup .
At this point, I think I do not have coherent enough notes to try to approach this in a horse by horse report on what was done for each. I’m going to just write down important points he made. .
Tying to saddle/groom
Never saddle or groom a green or troubled horse while it is tied. When you ‘tie’ a horse, you take away his self-preservation, and he could feel more troubled about that. Just keep his lead rope draped over your elbow (never over your shoulder), and work. That way, you can also keep him connected to you when he’s mentally drifting away. And, the horse becomes mentally connected to the post, not to us, when he is tied. Of course, once they are well trained, you can tie. For convenience. But, having him stand loose, on a lead line, gives many training opportunities. You require him to stay looking at you or straight ahead, NOT way out somewhere else. You develop his connection to you.
Charlie demonstrated how to bridle a horse, but I won’t’ describe that now. It’s more something you need to see
Forward cue
Riding the horse, the cue to go is NOT digging your heels into his side. It’s taking the WHOLE leg off his side and bumping against his side, rhythmically. If he doesn’t go, you don’t get harder, you just stay there in that thumping rhythm, until he moves, and you stop. Eventually, he will know the cue. Eventually, he will get good at it, and he will move from feeling you take your leg OFF of him (as you lift it in preparation to thump him). But, not heels digging into his side, and definitely not further back. He said he sees too many people, women, leaning forward onto their forks, with lower legs back, digging into the horse’s side, and how the horse really hates that.
positions in the saddle;
1 is way forward, like at a fast gallop or over jumps
2 is sitting vertical, for forward movement
3 is more back on your pockets, for halt and for just standing in neutral
Halting; rein and seat
Regarding halting: Get your seat into position 3, then use reins. Charlie talked about how a horse needs to be taught first to stop off the reins. Then you add in the seat. He demonstrated how people that try to stop their horses with seat alone end up with a horse that will often throw his head up and hollow out his back. The horse needs the rein support to help teach it to stop soft and rounded. He also said, if you can get a little bend in the horse, just an inward flexion of the head, it makes it easier for the horse to stop , because he can step under his belly a bit better when he is bent (thus the value of circles in training)
3 stride transitions
In the transitions, he said it is good to think of them happening within 3 strides, and he says he even counts it out. So, from trot to walk in 3 strides, walk to trot, 3 strides. I assume that means 3 strides from the time you ask , and the time they comply.
Starting off with the inside hind
Also, when you are standing around on your horse, and you ask them to start off walking, another good exercise is to have the horse step under themselves with the inside hind right before stepping forward. The idea is to get the ‘step off’ to be originating from the inside hind. So, before allowing the horse to move forward, you do whatever it takes to get a slight inward step with that inside hind, then immediately ask for a forward push off. I found this idea intriguing and think I would like to try that.
Charlie talked a lot about rein positions. He said that he is often criticized for having too busy hands, but that he feels a ‘static hand creates a stiff horse’. He showed the different positions for asking the horse to step to right or left, or to flex its head , bend into a hip disengagement. He talked about making sure that the outside rein does not interfere with things when you are asking a horse to bend and look inward. And, he really worked with the students on making sure that when they ask for an inward ‘look’, that they wait to see if that is really happening, or if the horse is tipping head in, but still looking outward to NOT release at this place. This can manifest by a sort of ‘tilting ‘of the head, with ears pointing one way, and muzzle the other. Charlie reminded folks of the cardinal sin of bringing the reins across the wither line, and how it puts the horse in a bind. He asked that if you take up a shorter inside rein, that you advance your outside rein equally, so that it does not say one thing, while the other rein says something else. Or, drop the outside rein, to avoid any conflicts with inside rein. He kept emphasizing how the snaffle is meant to be used one rein at a time.
Getting the horse to ‘look’
He had riders practice a LOT of just lifting one rein and waiting until the horse just LOOKED that way, . . then the other side. It’s the same concept as working on the ground. He said, “every time you can lift a rein and get a horse to look that way, you’re putting money in the bank” . He emphasized that it doesn’t have to be much of a bend. The ‘looking’ is more important than the bending, and in fact, those folks that flex the horse ‘s head side to side, in so-called ‘suppling’ are only teaching the horse to do something on autopilot. The horse swings his head over real fast, since he knows that what is wanted. He isn’t ‘listening’. What if you only wanted him to move his head a little and ‘think over there, go over there’. The automatic ‘flexer’ just isn’t thinking , he’s just ‘doing’. You always want a thinking horse.
So, practice, practice, practice having the horse just bend a tiny bit and LOOK in the direction of the rein you lift.
Don’t bump or jerk or pull him when he resists the rein to one side
At one point, he also talked about a horse that resists the rein by taking his head the other direction. He said, you just ‘go with him’. Meaning, you have put some resistance on the rein, some ‘ask’, the horse reacts by actually pulling away to the other direction. You DON’T increase your pull, nor do you jerk or snap the rein. you just keep it the same. In order to keep it the same, you must follow his head with your hand, neither yanking, snapping, bumping NOR allowing slack. The horse puts himself in a bind. You don’t make it worse, you just wait for him to find the way out. The instant he gives, but very sure you don’t take the slack back. You give, infinitesimally, in your hand. Then return to asking softly for the inside bend.
Charlie said there is a difference between softness and lightness
Softness is a mental state, where lightness is having a hair trigger reactiveness.
The very forward horse
If you have a very forward horse, sometimes that horse, even when walking fast, is really ‘running away’ from you. To think about that, with regard to having a horse that wants to walk out a million miles an hour all the time, or need to be in front of the group. Asked how one would know if the horse were actually running away when it walks out so forward, he said the test is to ‘take the bridle off and see if he stays put’.
We got no takers on that one.
LIFE verse DIRECTION
We talked about how we are , when riding, doing two things; putting life into our horses, and directing our horses. Which one comes first? Why putting life into your horse, of course. Trouble happens when we are trying to do both at the same time. A skilled rider can, but the amature gets the horse mixed up, bound up, upset and things fall apart. Get life first, THEN direct it.
I stopped taking notes at this point. Ran out of paper and needed to stand and walk around due to mighty cold feet. Charlie worked with some riders mounted in the round pen, working on position and did quite a bit of work on how to get the leg yield, which is a very important thing to use in training.
I’m afraid I don’t remember enough detail to write it down. Notes are essential when you get this much information thrown at you in one day.
The long and the short of it is that it was a wonderful day. Charlie Snell is a delight to learn from. He knows of what he speaks, coming from a lifetime of real world experience. He teaches these ideas very well and shows a great deal of respect and compassion for his students and meets them at the place where they ARE at any one time. He’s kind, funny and patient. Just a wonderful teacher and great guy!