Make a Horse’s Stubbornness Disappear like Magic
One of the tricks that Sandy Collier stressed in her DVD, “Bag of Magic Tricks,” is to work on convincing the horse that what HE wants to do is going to be a lot more effort than what YOU want him to do. I had heard before that if you have a horse that doesn’t want to slow down into an easy canter, but instead wants to race around, you let him race around until he wants to stop, and then make him race around some more. After a few lessons like that, theoretically, the horse will begin to think, “hey, I should just listen to what she wants me to do cause it’ll be way less effort on my part in the end.” Well, I’ve recently discovered that this technique can be applied to many ornery situations.
After about a half an hour’s work in the arena, Leo’s owner showed up to chat, so I asked Leo to whoa and hold still. But normally when “dad” gets home, it’s feeding time and Leo wanted to hit the road back to the barn. So, he began dancing to the left and dancing to the right, acting like he had ants in his pant (if he had pants). I asked him a few more times to whoa and then looked at Jim (the owner) and said, “well, lets just let him do what he wants to do.” We’ll try some Sandy magic. So I had him side pass to the left and then to the right and then to the left and then to the right and then once more to the left (I’ve never been on a horse that is that fast going sideways). Finally I asked him to whoa. And, like magic, he became the definition of “whoa,” the picture of “hold still.”
Nice trick. Les Vogt says that you don’t want things to become an argument. That’s what was so nice about it: there was no argument, just a short, logical, negotiation of sorts.
