Wild Horse Training

We had another riding school last night during which we gave our students their pre-evaluations to ensure they are ready for their final riding test next week. I again rode the Wonder Horse with the anticipation of being rocketed around the arena like the last time. However, without his arch nemesis Regent there to goad him on, he was very calm and controllable for the whole evening.

Unfortunately, our lead horse Monte was not having a good evening. Monte, in recent years, has developed a tendency to buck when transitioning to a gallop in the arena. He was recently assigned to a more experienced rider who we figured would have better luck with him. However, his new rider suffered the same fate as his predecessors and wound up eating arena dirt not once, but twice. When an experienced rider gets bucked off when he knows what's coming, its time to take the horse out of the lineup and re-educated him.

I took Monte to the round pen today to see what his personality was like. Monte is one of our best horses and has always been a solid performer. The bucking thing began gradually and has gotten steadily worse. I always considered Monte to be a lazy horse and an easy ride. Today, in the round pen, I came to know a different Monte. He leaped about the round pen making all kinds of what I call "homicide gestures". That is, he was aiming kicks and strikes at me every time I turned him. At one point he got so mad he cussed at me in horse language. I wasn't sure of the words, but I recognised the tone.

After about 15 minutes of this we managed to get things settled down enough so I could do some work with him. I began to work on teaching him the "hip-over" cue which the horse experts say is how you control a bucking horse. The theory is that if you compel the horse to disengage his hips, he can't power up and hurt you. I don't know how well this will work, but I think it's worth a try. I can't afford to lose riders to a bucking beast in the arena. Monte, to his credit, responded to this training well. I have a gradual training process in mind that I will implement in between other projects and will hopefully have him re-educated in a month or two. We will see.

I also began the process today of re-educating Duke in gun training. I screwed him up last year by putting him into the riding demonstration before he was fully gun trained. As a result, he is now terrified of gun fire. His primary rider finally got a schedule that permits her to help with this training during duty hours, so we began today. I had her ride Duke around a small arena while I fired a cap gun at the opposite end. I also tied up a veteran horse, Charlie, nearby so Duke could see there was nothing to get excited about. It worked pretty well and Duke progressively got less and less excited by the sound of the cap gun as we worked with him. This is another long-term project but one worth the effort. Duke has come a long way since we got him and he promises to be a good cavalry horse.

Since I am not a professional horse trainer and have only limited time to spend on training, I don't know how well all this will work out. All I can do is try and hope nobody, especially me, gets hurt in the process.