Last month we looked at Leading and Stopping, the next stage in your youngsters training is teaching him to turn away from you.
To ask for a turn to the right: 1) Slip the rope so you are slightly in front and the left of the horse.
2) Keep a loop of loosely-coiled rope in your left hand.
3) Briefly and gently, raise your left hand to the side of the horse’s face, this will encourage a movement to the right and, at the same time, gently guide him round to right with your right hand.
4) Build on this until you can take more strides round to the right and progress to doing some serpentines across the field or arena. You can gradually progress to using subtler ids. Eventually you will reach the stage where your horse will stay behind you and move away politely when you turn. A left turn is easier for the horse to grasp as he can merely follow you around. Short lead ropes are ok but are not very useful when training your horse. An ideal rope length would be approx 12 foot. It is very important to remember that you do not want to make your horse one-sided therefore it is imperative to do leading, stopping, turning from both sides of him, in
fact anything you do with your horse you must do from both sides. This is because each eye makes an independent decision whether what you are doing is life threatening to him or not!. If you only do things from the left you may find that he will not accept you doing the same thing on his right side even though he has readily accepted and is totally relaxed with you on the other side. It does not matter that he puts it straight down again; your timing on the release is the most important thing. Eventually he will be happy to keep it in the air for longer periods balancing him on his three other legs. You then progress to holding the foot for a few seconds and then allowing him to put it down again. This way he works out that you do not want his foot in the air forever and will be happy and relaxed knowing you will give him is foot back. Eventually you will be able to put the leg in a comfortable position which your trimmer would use. (see pic 2). With the hind legs simply apply the squeeze on his hock to initiate the lift. (Pictures are of Casper my one year old colt) Asking for the legs at the chestnut and the hock puts less strain on your back and if your youngsters jump because something scared him your head will not be right in the firing line. Remember when a horse gives you its leg, it is in fact, giving you its life ( a horse can not run on three legs and being able to run is how it survives) I cannot stress enough the importance of this work at this age to have trouble free trimming/shoeing. In our next article we shall be looking at nutrition/feeding to avoid problems in later life. If you would like to know about training Youngsters or are interested in learning how to Barefoot Trim please contact Tracy James at the Natural Horse Centre 952 720 271 | 
Pool Care 
