Faraway Farm LLC

03/11/2025

02/19/2025

02/15/2025

Work with what you have - but be willing to WORK with it. The details will fall into place.

No need to get stuck measuring progress against someone else's journey.

"Or, as the great Walt Gervais said about taking too much to heart the opinions of others, "F%^$ 'em.""

02/13/2025

The real problem with leverage devices is that they force a horse to stretch its muscles so far that they can tear, causing intense pain and long-term physical and emotional damage.

So why do so many people strap their horses into tight side reins, German martingales, bitting rigs, draw reins (like in the photo), or any other device that works like a pulley to magnify the rider’s strength?

First, there’s a lack of empathy. The rider doesn’t feel it. If someone put them into the same muscle-tearing stretches like the Spanish Inquisition’s rack they might finally understand what they’re doing to the horse.

Then, there’s the fact that it’s a shortcut. You can teach a horse to bend and stretch properly by taking it slow, allowing its muscles to lengthen over time. But that takes patience, and many riders don’t want to wait. It’s easier to force the result.

And of course, some big-name riders and trainers use these methods, so others copy them without question. Monkey see, monkey do.

But maybe the saddest part is that so many riders have never been taught how to develop a horse with quiet, classical methods,the kind based on pressure and release, building trust and responsiveness over time. The irony is that these techniques are more accessible than ever, with thousands of videos and resources available at the click of a button. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore

Yet here we are. Today, February 12, 2025 all over the world, horses are being cranked into these devices. And if you were to question the people doing it, they’d have a hundred excuses insisting, all the while, that they’re not being abusive.

We posted this in 2016 with no credit name. I’ve been informed very kindly this original post was written by famous Denny at great Tamarack Hill Farm. A brilliant man of wise words 👏🏼

02/08/2025

Head carriage should always be a by-product of a correct base and fitness, and acceptance (not fear) of the hands and bit. Going at it in reverse brings nothing positive to the equation.

When a horse is forced into some shape, whether by strong hands, strong bits, leverage devices like draw reins and bitting rigs, side reins, anything too powerful for the horse to respond in any way but to submit, the head and neck position is only part of what is affected by the coercion.

The head and neck are attached to all the rest of the horse, and so every part of the horse moves in a more restricted way. But worse than the physical response to force is what happens mentally and emotionally to the horse, fear of pain, fear of restriction, the long lasting post traumatic stress disorder of anticipating pain even if the horse isn’t still being ridden incorrectly.

This is why it can be so hard to gain a horse’s trust after it has been lost. That anxiety lasts a long time, even with more kind and gentle handling.

The point here? Don’t use force. As in be a better trainer. It is not a hard concept to understand.

01/26/2025

Time. Time. And MORE TIME.

01/15/2025

“The goal of our training is to build the horse’s mind and his muscles. Suppleness and relaxation require adequate muscle strength. Strengthening requires both contraction and relaxation. Blood flow and oxygenation occur when the muscle relaxes. If the muscle is kept in a constant state of contraction, it loses power and strength, and actually becomes smaller. Frequent rest periods, especially for a young horse, at a free walk on a long rein are necessary. The rest periods are not for the rider’s fatigue, but to allow the horse to relax and stretch his muscles. The rest breaks will give you a completely new horse. This is the systematic gymnasitcising of the horse.”
~Klaus Blakenhol

01/14/2025

"Why do we want contact? Because we want the horse to improve the lateral flexibility. In other words, because we want the horse to become permeable (French: perméable, German: durchlässing). This means that the horse lets the impulsion, created by the driving aids of the rider, go from the hindquarters through the back and neck muscles, causing flexion of the poll, and causing the horse to accept the bit, without stiffening of the jaw. The acceptance of the bit means that the driving aids and the guiding aids have met. At this point the process reverses itself: the guiding aids regulating the impulsion, taking care of the longitudinal and the lateral flexions and also of the different gaits and movements."

The Importance of Contact with Dr H L M van Schaik:
“During the schooling period, in which we want the horse to come under with the hindquarter, there will be times that we need to apply a lot of contact. At this time the horse has to learn that when we create more impulsion and increase the resistance, the horse should not try to go faster and become longer, but he should try to get his hindquarters under.Once the horse has learned to do this, he will carry himself. The more he carries himself, the more he understands what the rider wants from him, the lighter the contact will become.” Pic is Rodrigo Torres.
https://www.horsemagazine.com/thm/2022/01/contact-or-no-contact-that-is-the-question/

01/12/2025

In any dealings with a worried horse one statement holds true---“Patience isn’t patience if you are only patient when you feel like it.”

As in having a not so great day with a horse and giving it a pi**ed off yank in the mouth because “I’ve lost my patience with you!”

NOPE---You didn’t have patience to lose. You only had YOUR definition of patience.

And one yank in the mouth of an already anxious horse can undo days, even weeks of trust building. Reschooling is an attitude game, and it isn’t something that all riders have enough emotional control to take on.

01/11/2025

Jack Le Goff’s theory about the two kinds of fear---

Jack was the enormously successful coach back in the day of the USET 3-day team, and he would give his riders little lectures from time to time, and one that I remember from way back when was about fear.

Jack claimed that the human brain had trouble distinguishing between fear of injury and fear of failure, He gave as an example of the first kind of fear that you are a passenger in a speeding car being driven by a drunk driver along a road next to a steep drop-off into the ocean.

It is the very realistic fear of being killed at any moment.

An example of the second kind of fear is riding around the outside of a dressage arena at a huge competition, being watched by thousands of spectators. Your body will have most of the same symptoms as in the first case, but while the chances of humiliation are high, the likelihood of injury is low.

Jack said that athletes in most sports will feel fear of failure as a natural result of competition, but that true fear of injury might mean that you are in over your head.

Thoughts on this?

12/20/2024

Trauma does not ever just "dissappear"

12/15/2024

Learning to ride with proper application of the aids -should- create something of a pretty picture.

12/10/2024

"The human will let the horse down by putting a time limit on it. Taking extra time is a shortcut in the long run." ~Ray Hunt

How long will X take? Students grappling with their horses' gait anomalies often want to know how long it will take to resolve. For instance, how long will it take to fix the horse traveling with his/her hips twisted to the left? Or when will that cross-canter finally resolve for good?

It depends how entrenched the pattern is. Some horses change quickly, developing new muscle patterns and strength within 6 weeks. Others continue reverting to poor or dysfunctional movement even after they've seemingly "fixed" the problem.

Each horse's body is incredibly unique. Some horses "fix" their misalignments and never revert. Others slip back into previous habits from time to time even when the training is good. It depends on their physiology, their character, their lifestyle, and perhaps many more things we're still learning.

11/19/2024

Cold November rainy days are made for learning to lunge that pony!!

10/24/2024

When you DO NOT let anyone into your axis/poll for soft tissue or chiropractic, but your massage lady is at the barn when you're konked out for the dentist 🤣🤗 Git 'er done!

10/16/2024

If you or your "trainer" can't find results without leverage, the answer is filling an education gap on the folks doing the riding.

I asked a friend in the hunter-jumper world why he thought there was so much reliance on draw reins, restrictive rigs, strong bits, and he had a one word answer---“FEAR.”

“Fear of what?” I asked.

“Mainly fear of loss of control,” was his answer. He went on to say that many of the riders that he watched were basically either unfit, or green, or over-mounted, and that they didn’t want a very high level of risk, and that one way to lower risk was to have sort of “automaton” horses.

Horses can be gotten to a state, he said, of what we call “learned helplessness.”
I Googled “learned helplessness” and here’s what I read---

“What is learned helplessness in simple terms?
In psychology, learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. They believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try, even when opportunities for change are available.”

While this definition pertains to humans, we can see how it can also apply to a horse which has been repeatedly forced into submission.

So there’s that, and we see it too often.