01/01/2025
Anybody can hang out a sign saying they are a Horse Trainer today. Many of those trainers believe that training horses is based solely on an idea of a relationship or connection. Their human perception of training ignores equine perception. Relationship and connection are required but that must begin from the horse's point of view.
I think there are three very distinct areas or specialties of horse training. They are (1) starting colts and fillies, (2) retraining horses either from a former specialty like racing or retraining poorly trained horses, and (3) training a specialty for specific disciplines. I am mostly a (2) horse trainer because I retrained a lot of cast off horses that nobody wanted, many from kill pens. Additionally, I retrained a lot of Thoroughbred former racehorses for polo, fox hunting and eventing, as well as some for general riding.
Because there are so many "I'm a horse trainer" frauds out there today who don't understand difference between each of these three areas of horse training, I am going to share a few words on this. The pictures show one horse on the left that has obviously not been well trained. This horse is surprising a person with what is usually a defensive strike that says, "Get away from me." Facing such a horse eye to eye is their first mistake. The other image on the right shows a mare with her foal that, when that foal comes to training age, would be a very different horse to train than the horse on the left because that young horse is more or less a blank piece of paper, not a messed up like the defensive horse.
The important difference between the horse on the left and the foal on the right is that the left horse lives with a vast amount of ambiguity about humans resulting from human interactions that were threatening, painful, unclear, abusive or another way of interacting that ignores a horse's need for predictability and consistency. All these factors combined, in whatever mix, create a fearful horse lost in ambiguity. In other words, to them humans are an unsolvable riddle.
My work over the years as a (2) kind of trainer, was retraining horses either from a former specialty like racing or poorly trained horses. I chose this path because these horses are the most interesting to me. When you are retraining a horse, you are usually dealing not so much with the horse's authentic nature, but rather how someone else disrupted or destroyed the horse's authentic responses to stimuli. A trainer working with these horses has to first uncover or reveal the horse's core authenticity before any real training can begin. The great polo horse trainer Tommy Wayman said, a horse that must be retrained should begin with a year turned out in a herd with little human contact.
The role of the (2) re-trainer is a combination of detective and therapist, always asking each horse the question, "How the hell did you get this way?" After retraining many horses ranging between messed up to dangerous, I began to see patterns of their former training. Later in my career as a trainer I began to better understand the sequence of undoing former poor training and trauma, and then how to backfill that former mess with training that made sense to the horse.
Training that makes sense to the horse is the key. For example, one common flaw that must be retrained out of many horses is an imbalance that makes them heavy on the forehand. This sounds simple, but it is not. The trainer has to first understand why and how a horse got to be heavy on the forehand. Former racehorses come off the track this way because they were trained to pull with their forehand because this lengthens the stride and longer strides win races.
This kind of heavy on the forehand in a horse is there intentionally. Horses trained this way believe pulling with their forehand is correct and many resist a major change of their balance in motion. When you work to rebalance racehorses, you can almost hear them say to you, "Hey you are doing it the wrong way!" So, what I say back to them is, "OK we will do it your way", and I take them out on tricky footing and constantly changing terrain and I say as Dr. Phil would, "How's that working for you?" It doesn't work for them like it did on a groomed flat racetrack, and then I can begin to rebalance them with less resistance.
By contrast, a common backyard horse that is usually heavy on the forehand is different because their riders had no real intention except to "just ride" and those riders threw the horse's head around with the reins in a coarse attempt to steer the horse by pointing their head in a direction. These horses, after years of poor riding are either hard to retrain because they have given up, or easy to retrain because when ridden in a balanced manner say, "Thank you so much. I always knew pulling with my shoulders was wrong".
Many flaws in a horse's balance, motion or behavior might look the same, as in the heavy on the forehand problem, but how the horse got the way must be understood first. Only then can a specific process of undoing the flaw, based on how the flaw started, can be initiated.
Because horse trainers don't come with warning labels, I will provide some very useful advice that I received from a surgeon friend about hiring a surgeon. He said, "There is only one question to ask a surgeon when you need surgery. It is - how many surgeries a year, of the type you need, does the surgeon you are considering perform each year?" He went on to say, "If their answer is not 300 or more a year, find another surgeon." The same is true of horse trainers. If a prospective horse trainer does not do a lot of the kind of training or retraining that your horse needs, find another trainer because experience is everything in horse training just as it is in surgery.
