Last week Monica wrote about riding different horses on the trail. This week I wanted to talk a little about riding non-trail horses on the trail. In my experience, a lot of people buy horses for a particular job like dressage, eventing, barrel racing, jumping, reining, skijoring, mounted shooting, or any number of other jobs. After a lot of discipline-specific training, they may want to take their horse out on a little trail ride to break up the routine. If the horse isn’t properly trained as a trail horse, this can sometimes be the opposite of a relaxing experience.
Not a relaxing experience…
However, if you take the time to properly prepare yourself and your horse, it can be the best!
The best.
Here are few things that I like to think about before taking a non-trail horse out for a hack:
- Horses have these things at the ends of their legs? Hooves?!
Horses have 4 (yes, 4!) feet, and they need to know this fact. I don’t really enjoy having my horse tripping over every root and rock, so having a horse who understands how to place their feet is pretty important to me. Some things that I do to help a horse with this is to walk over poles, around cones, and up and down hills. You can do this both mounted and on the ground. One exercise I like is to place poles scattered randomly around the arena and walk and trot random patterns around them. This helps them to understand how to place their feet, and I find this really does translate to the trail.
I has feet?
2. Chillax, man.
A good trail horse needs to be able to take in new things and not bolt for the hills. Your horse doesn’t need to be bombproof to enjoy a nice trail ride, but when they do spook, I prefer to have some brain left to work with instead of a bolting freight train. When my horse is scared of something on the trail, he now will check in with me like “hey, is this a horse eating thing or what?” and normally I can reply “Nope, that thing doesn’t eat big gray horses.” Some things that can help with this are exposing your horse to new things in a controlled setting and managing their fear with quiet confidence. These could be things like tarps, bridges (I have used a sheet of plywood if we didn’t have a bridge handy), cones, umbrellas, water, and whatever else you can imagine. And remember, to help your horse keep his cool, you need to keep yours. Horses are so sensitive to our energy. Sometimes when I am working with someone who has their own fear, I ask them to tell me what they had to eat that day or to sing me a song. This helps to keep them breathing and their brain engaged, which helps their horse to remain calm as well.
Prophet conquers the pool noodle and tarp tunnel!
3. KISS
Keep it short… silly. Trail riding can be hard work for your horse if he’s not properly conditioned or used to the terrain. Would you want to go out and run a 5K after spending the winter binge watching Netflix? Probably you’d regret it and not want to do it again any time soon. When getting a horse used to trail riding, I find that frequent short rides are best until your horse is used to the different stimuli on a trail and used to the physical strain of this different type of riding. We don’t want to teach them that every trail ride is going to be an exhausting ordeal.
Actual footage of Prophet when I told him he had to do a 15 mile trail ride our first time out this spring.
Don’t worry, then I told him I was just kidding and our first ride would be a walk down the road with a buddy. And then he got a cookie.
4. Praise!
Who doesn’t love being praised? I know I do. My life is largely driven by praise and the desire to ride and acquire coffee. Horses are just the same (maybe minus the coffee bit…). They learn through reward. For horses this reward is a release of pressure. If you don’t give them that release, they don’t understand if they got the right answer or not. Even if you’re nervous, you need to remember that release. Some may argue with me, but I am also a fan of a strategic peppermint! I usually keep a few in my pockets on a trail ride. My horse doesn’t love standing still and waiting for slowpokes, so when he stands calmly on a loose rein he gets his peppermint.
I noticed that you only put 2 peppermints in your pocket…
MOAR!
5. Friends make things better!
Horses are herd animals, and having other more confident horses with them lends them confidence as well. Having friends with me helps me in scary situations too. For example, I recently went to a Halloween theme park. Rationally, I understand that these people are actors and are not actually going to pull my teeth out one by one (as one demented surgeon in the nightmare hospital threatened to do), but forcing my boyfriend to walk before me helped my non-rational brain to understand that better. It’s the same principle with horses new to trail rides. How do they know that that lawn mower isn’t going to chop off their hooves? Well, it let their BFF walk by and he didn’t seem bothered, so maybe it is actually okay. If your horse is very nervous and makes you nervous too, ponying them from a calm experienced horse can often help.
The witches are not going to kill me.. probably…
Hope some of these tips can help to get your horse ready for trail riding!
Happy trails!
Kerrie
