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Pastured Horses.

1K views 9 replies 6 participants last post by  Iseul 
#1 ·
So..does anyone else's horse have a kind of melt down when horses in a pasture you're riding past take off and tear around the pasture?

ST had a jump forward, do a 180 and stare with her legs spread out kinda day yesterday..lol. She was so good yesterday and I didn't even expect it, lol.

So..how do you desensitize your horse to this? It's not really an issue for me as of now because I can stay on just fine, but I don't want to end up tearing up the neighbour's lawn that he lets us walk through, lol.

This is something I've never had experience with, so something I can learn from without thinking about what I would do, haha.
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#2 ·
lol oh yes. my mare was a hot, squealing, 3yo at one point in her life !

i just practiced with her riding in a group. having the other horses trot or canter off and making her walk or trot or whatever i wanted. there was sometimes bucking =D ! if she was really fighting me i would turn her and make her walk or trot in the other direction. the point being, that it doesnt matter what the other horses are doing, you have to listen to ME.

now she is much better when we ride past the fields of crazies =]
 
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#3 ·
This is instinctive. The horse under saddle thinks if the others are running, it should be running. In the wild. one horse is always on red alert watching for predators. When he gives the signal (running) the others don't question it but know to follow suit immediately. This is the way horses have survived all these years.
 
#4 ·
She's fine in a group though, she'll want to run if the others do, but she'll stay at a walk if I don't want to run (not normally the case..lol, but it does happen).

I know it's instinct, but how do I fix that to an extent?
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#6 ·
One thing I do on young or green horses is, I'll ride them to the middle of the riding area (warm up pen, round pen, areana, whatever.) and just make them stand as the other horses trot and lope around us. On my 5yr old gelding I've been working a lot on him not being so flighty. A few weeks ago my daughter was loping a new horse that was blowing out of ccw circles, said horse blew out and ran towards me n my gelding. My gelding just lifted his head and let the sqeek by in front of him. Never offered to move once, so what I'm doing seems to work. For me anyways. Side note, horse daughter was on had loosened a front shoe and that's what caused him to blow outta his circles. He's barfoot now.
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#7 ·
You need to bring the horse's focus back to you with turns, serpentines, go around trees if nearby, rocks. These movements cause the horse's hind leg to continually step at an angle under it's belly so they should be small or tight. The horse is built to travel straight so this causes it's muscles to tire more quickly, especially in the hind quarters.
 
#8 ·
This gives you a perfect opportunity to do some exercises to get their focus back on you & the job at hand. Try riding a stallion past trampy mares that back up to the fence & start peeing when you go past, within a week, that boy would only "furtively" give them a sideways glance as they charged about their pastures screaming at him.
 
#9 ·
You can never remove the instinct from them you just have to train them self control - that is 'They do not move their feet unless told' This applies to spooking too and works better than all the desensitising
I can remember ours getting really buzzed each time we rode down a certain pathway that had some little Dexter cattle alongside it that used to race alongside us - it was like an adrenaine rush to them but they learnt it was not OK to leap off after them even though they were excited
I use a lot of verbal cues in early training and I find they still respond to my voice in situations like this.
 
#10 ·
She'll stand perfectly fine with horses cantering around her in an arena/small pasture, riders or not.
If we're standing and facing the horses, she stands fine.
If she sees the horses next to her, she's fine.

The horses in this instance were about 50yds behind us. She saw them as we walked by, so I'm assuming it just spooked her since they took off out of nowhere. The few times she's spooked she has stopped and stood, looking at what spooked her. I'm assuming her spin was so that she could see. As soon as she realized it was the horses she was fine, just wanted to see if anyone knew how to desensitize a horse to something coming up behind them.
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