May the horse be with you, literally

It’s been a while since I’ve broke a horse, but it’s time for my youngster to learn to be responsible grownup. I am reminded that progress in training horses isn’t linear.

For the first time ever, I’m going to outsource the actual first 30 rides — to a cowboy in the Bear Paws — but I do feel the responsibility to get some of the nonriding parts of the training done before the horse gets shipped out.

My work is due, in part, to a sense of diligence and knowledge that the outsourced training will progress further, faster if I take care of this preliminary stuff and get the horse thinking like a student, if you will, rather than a feral urchin of the hinterlands. I also know that I won’t get her loaded for transport without some rudimentary training.

It’s a conundrum that the horse has to be trained before it can get trained.

To this end I’ve been training the youngster to perform all manner of tasks, which are useful but also require her to be compliant, like: standing tied, leading, getting her feet trimmed and getting saddled. The compliance aspect being: be patient, follow along respectfully, don’t kick my head off and don’t throw a fit when you get tacked up for work.

Let’s just say she’s a work in progress. Like most students, she has her areas of brilliance, a whole lot to be happy about and a few things she can look forward to excelling at after processing through a some character-building experiences.

I also am training her to longe — pronounced like “lunge.” It’s an exercise in which the horse moves in a wide circle at a given speed around the trainer. The horse is held to the circle either by a long rope attached to the horse’s halter or by the confines of a round-shaped corral — called a round corral.

Sorry for all the technical terms. Try to keep up.

Longing is a useful tool in many ways that I’ll be happy to tell you about the next time you are in need of a treatment for insomnia. In the meantime, I will say that at its basic level, longing teaches the horse that the human has control of its speed and direction of movement. I will eventually anyway.

I’ve been working with the horse on most of these skills since I got her as a yearling. For example, she’s known how to lead since the day after she was dropped off at my house with all the leading skills of a 700-pound dog fight on the end of a rope. And she’s long been past taking pot-shots at my head and sitting on me when I’m trying to pick her feet up.

But this is serious schooling, now, and we’re refining the things she knows and building on them to learn new skills.

She hadn’t been longed since I broke her to lead, but she remembered well enough and settled into the reality that when I asked her to move off to the left I really did mean trot and not buck and snort and race around like an idiot until you mistake my cues to settle down to mean stop and face me with a look that clearly says “Woohoo! That was fuuuun! We’re done right?”

She got it figured out. Then, with all the hubris of youth — that is, attitude of a teenager — decided on the fourth day of training everything was boring, and she knew everything about everything she ever needs to know, ever. Plus, I was the most unreasonable thing. Ever. In fact, all of the training was just dumb and pointless.

The fourth day started with longing: Walk. No actually walk out, this moseyin’ along pace won’t due. Good. And trot. Trot. Trot. I said trot, I mean trot. Yeah, nice racing gallop in this tight space. Just trot. No, trot. Good girl. Lope. Yes, you have to actually keep going for one full 50-foot circle. Gooood. Now walk. Walk. Waaalk. For crying in a bucket, now you want to lope?

Some days training horses feels like a long and winding path, with many pitfalls. On those days I dream of somehow stuffing the horse into a trailer and hauling her to the hills to let the next trainer deal with all the hijinx.

(Let’s make a toast to experience that tells me this, too, will be all good in the end at [email protected].)