Gia - session 832 - natural horsemanship with Danielle

 

On Friday, Heather was feeling a bit under the weather so I took a turn at Gia's training for the day. Lately, in the field, Gia has been trying to "flex" her teenage attitude when people go out to get other horses. She is not mean, but wants all the attention, and becomes agitated when they ignore/walk away from her. Like all of us, sometimes horses need a little attitude adjustment. One way to do this is with a natural horsemanship exercise. I oftentimes tell my students that horses are not native English speakers, so we need to learn to communicate in "horse" to them. Natural horsemanship is a great way to communicate to them what we'd like them to know (that we are the bosses and they must respect our space, rules, etc) in a way that they instinctively understand (by speaking "horse"). 

The idea of Natural horsemanship is that you, as the human, set the same expectations of behavior of the horse in training that an alpha mare would in the wild (or in a domestic group setting). We begin by making the horse move around us at a trot in the round pen. They must stay moving and are pushed forward if they become distracted, or especially if they show any attitude or rudeness towards the person. The horse must remain moving until they show signs of submission. Some things we may look for are head down, licking and chewing, and general body language. Once the horse displays these, we will drop eye contact, become still and "allow" the horse to come to us.  Sometimes, this results in a horse getting distracted and ignoring the person, in which case they must move forward again and we start over. Ideally, the horse will stop moving and come deliberately, but respectfully, towards the human. Most of the time, they will not come all the way to the person but keep their attention and body facing us. We then begin moving in a wide half circle around the horse with the expectation that the horse will move their feet so that the person does not get to their back end (within striking range). After they have accomplished this, the horse will generally follow the person around submissively. If at any point, the horse drops their attention from the person, they go back on the rail to work. There is a lot of reasons why this works and mimics horses' naturally interactions that I find very interesting. 

In general, Gia loves natural horsemanship work. She sometimes gets a little headstrong and resists submission for awhile, but as a whole she is very good about it. She also knows that Heather and I are the boss mares so we usually do not have to work too hard to get her to submit despite her size! True to form, it took me very little time to get her to submit. She did not require any coaxing and walked immediately up to me and began following me around. I did not lose her attention at any point, and just had to send her away to do the exercise on repeat. We even worked on backing while she was near me, which is one of the hardest things for them to do. Since all of that went so well and she was so responsive, I had Gwen come up and give it a go, as well. Gia responded super to her requests, as well.  Hopefully, by doing this little reminder with Gia on her place in the hierarchy of humans, she will respect other people coming out in her field. Usually, though, horses need to establish their roles with people. As people go into the field, if they act like the boss mare, she will respect them accordingly! 

- Danielle Bryant