Benefits of basic training: an example! (or two)

I was riding Chief on this trail when a strand of wire from a whole roll of it got caught on Chief's hind leg.

Thought I’d show a perfect example of a time when having a horse trained to not panic when he gets caught in something can be a lifesaver.

A couple of years ago I was riding Chief at the Grand Canyon XP.  We had just come up a steep climb and were starting to level out.  I was riding behind a small group of horses ahead of me.

That’s when I realized all of a sudden that Chief was dragging something!  We had been in heavy tree cover and no one saw the wire.  All it took was one strand of it to get caught, dragging the roll with it.   Here is what I wrote about it at the time:

On one of the days of the ride I was riding up a new trail when Chief suddenly became entangled in barbed wire.  Rusty old, nasty stuff.  Chief wasn’t the first horse to get caught in it–Cheryl Johnson’s horse ahead of us got caught and got a puncture.  Fortunately Chief stopped and stood perfectly still as soon as he realized he was caught and dragging a whole roll of the stuff.  I quickly hopped off, told him to stay (which he did) and went to his hind legs to get it off of him.  He was perfectly behaved about it and didn’t even lift a leg up until I picked it up.  Good boy!

The best part was that Chief stood perfectly still – I flipped his reins over his head so that he was ground tied.  There was nobody available quickly to ‘hold him’ for me.  This is where a rider could get into a big bind as many horses might have tried to run off with the wire still attached to them – the rider would have to choose whether to hold the horse or to try and rescue the horse from being tangled.  In my case, since I know Chief has had this training and how he would react I felt safe enough dropping the reins and going to his hind end in order to get the wire undone from his back leg.

One other time I was riding down my own street when I felt Chief’s hind leg get yanked behind us.  We quickly backed up to allow for some slack and I hopped off – realizing that it was a thin strand of hot-wire that had come undone from the neighbors fence.   I’d ridden along that fence line a thousand times before.  Another instance where a wreck was averted by the horse knowing instinctively to stand and not struggle.

Then there was the time on Tigger’s very first endurance ride that he managed to end up right smack dab in the middle of some downed barbed wire that was on the side of the trail.   By some miracle we managed to get out of that without a scratch as well.  Had I not already done some hobble training work with Tigger it wouldn’t have ended so well.  He reacted strongly to the training and the first time or two he had hobbles put on, he hopped, jumped and bucked like a crazy man for a bit!!  Then he realized that wasn’t doing any good and it really was much easier to just stand quietly.  If a horse named Tigger (named that for a reason) can learn these lessons then I have hope that they all can.

When we do a lot of stuff with our horses they are sure to get into trouble at some point.  Whether they are getting a leg over a lead rope, putting a hoof into a hay bag or getting themselves hooked to or snagged on something it is quite a relief, believe me, when you know they have had some of this basic training and that their reactions will be much more manageable than had they not had this training.

I hope these lessons that I’ve done and am about to share will help some that have either new horses, or horses that need a bit more training.  It never hurts to do reinforcement training on an already trained horse.  I like to refresh these lessons with my own horses once a year or so.  I would love it if more endurance riders would take the time to do some of these basics with their horses as I am certain it will result in less accidents and wrecks both in camp and on the trail.

For every lesson I write about in the coming weeks, I will have examples of times where those lessons paid off big time.  Over and over – I can’t count the number of times that my horses and I have been saved because of these lessons.  I’ve been using Bo as the model (he is fairly photogenic <g>)  for most of the video I’ve been taking because he tends to be the most reactive (compared to Chief, anyway).  If anybody wants to see some of the videos ahead of the articles (since I haven’t written them all yet), some have already been uploaded to FB.