Horse Training

Man has worked with horses for thousands of years, and in order to work with what is essentially a wild animal, some training is necessary.

The horse must learn to trust its handler and, to an extent humans in general, and it must also learn what behavior is generally acceptable and how to respond to specific commands from a handler. There are numerous methods of training horses, some of which are considered quite cruel today. Today, it is generally accepted that positive training techniques are the best way to train any animal.

This essentially means training without the use of harsh methods, force, punishment, or threats, only by communicating what the animal needs to do and rewarding it when it does it. If creatures like killer whales can be trained using such techniques, there is no reason why animals like dogs and horses cannot be trained in a similar way, instead of using harsh, inhumane, and ultimately less effective techniques.

Horse training is a vast and complex field, and one of the reasons for this is that there is so much that the animal must learn – and in fact so much that it can learn.

This is therefore something that can really only be learned from a professional. However, there are some basic horse training tips that will help anyone who plans to get into horse training. First of all, patience is absolutely essential – if you do not naturally have patience, you must either learn it or not attempt to train. Losing your temper, or simply conducting the training at an excessively quick pace will get you nowhere, and could in fact backfire. If your horse does not respond or persistently gets things wrong, you need to try to understand why this is happening, and then take a step back to fix it and start again. Very often, no matter what you do, training will proceed slowly, and there is nothing that will hurry it up. Of course, two essential things in horse training are communication and motivation. You must make it clear what the horse it is supposed to do, or else your training will get nowhere. In addition, the horse must be motivated to work, and this is also where rewards come in. Besides all of this, it is important that you understand horse behavior and psychology.

In fact, there is a training method that is entirely built upon working with a horse’s natural instincts. This is known as natural horse training or natural horsemanship, and it is possibly the most effective method of training horses.

Submitted on August 5, 2010