Crazy? or not?

I have see this with jumper they want to go go

I just watched a video of a champion barrel racer who said that the only time her champion horse sees a barrel is during his run! (& she wasn't kidding)

Could you share this video? I'd really like to see it :) I'm doing my barrel training research cause I'm going to be starting my 4 year old on them.

People ruin barrel horses. The horses don't ruin themselves.

My 2012 mount is a 1D mare, she's calm as can be at shows, standing at the trailer, warming up, riding around. As soon as she gets in the ally or close to the ring, it's on. She know she's supposed to run, and absolutely loves her job. It's what she was bred for. She goes in, runs, prances out of the arena and she's back to being a childs horse. Calm as can be.

It's all about training techniques. Once my horse is solid on patterns, I do NOT run them at home. Ever. You run them too much, they get hot-headed and it's no fun to ride a horse that just wants to go, go, go every time you saddle up. I trail ride my horses so much it's not even funny. I do jumping work with them, pleasure work with them, dressage, reining. Running barrels can bore any horse if you do it too much. After every exercise and practice I do with my horses, I go for a 15 minute to an hour trail ride afterwards to calm them down and realize they don't always have to run.

I know one girl that I see at shows. She never does anything with her horses besides running the pattern. She has to fight with her horse every time the horse gets within 50 feet of the arena. She is only interested in running and winning. She goes through horses every single year because the horses get so hot, she hates to ride them. She created the monster, blames them, and sells them. Then buys another $10,000+ horse thinking it will be her perfect mount.

There's no excuse to have an uncontrollable barrel horse. It's all about the proper training.

You should try it, but, it's very addicting. ;)

I agree with everyone about keeping plenty of slow work in a barrel horse's training routine, not just for the horse's mental state, but also because barrel racing is a very physically strenuous sport. Any sport that asks a horse to "go all out" a lot can wreck a horse physically, a horse's stamina, muscular, and skeletal strength needs to be built slowly with plenty of walk, trot, lope work and relatively little full gallop.

As someone with a former barrel horse who I'm retraining into an eventer and all around horse, I'll admit to being biased against the sport. My horse was fast and won money so he was run, run, run until there was nothing they could do to get him into that arena. He bolted around the arena in his first dressage schooling show. Zero warning. I completely blame the former owner. Like others have said, people ruin barrel horses. Please don't be one of them. Keeping a horse's training diverse creates a happy, confident horse, not a psycho neurotic one.
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