How To Teach Your Horse Reining
Training Ain’t Purty
My good friend and professional horse trainer Andy Curry filmed and interviewed the Hewletts a while back for one of his horse training videos.
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Some days I wonder what to write about because I’ve written so much over the years.
And then I was inspired.
While filming a husband and wife horse training team sometime ago, the wife said something I thought I should pass along.
She was telling me how one of her customers came to watch her work with a horse.
The customer noted how jerky, unresponsive, and ‘not so pretty’ the horse looked while working.
Then several months later at a show that same horse was shown. That same customer came up to her and said, ‘Boy, that horse looked a whole lot prettier now than when I saw you working with him.’
The trainer (her name is Danie) was taken back from that a little.
Danie said, ‘You know, when you’re first working with a horse, it aint’ purty. It takes time to ‘get the bugs out’ and get the horse looking good.’
That’s what I wanted to pass along today.
You see, a horse has to learn what to do just like when we first learn to crawl, walk, read, and write.
When we first learn it, it ain’t purty either.
Over time though, it becomes good.
Same with horses.
So when you’re teaching a horse something, realize it’s not going to be good right off the bat.
And you’ll be dang lucky if it is.
I think the fallacy comes from seeing a finished horse and thinking ‘My horse should be able to do that.’
Thus, don’t get excited when you ask your horse to do something and he can’t do it well or kind of stumbles through it.
That’s just part of the learning process.
Just keep at it.
But also, don’t drill, drill, drill.
And he’ll get better and better up to the point of his ability.
What I mean by that is this.
If you’re trying to teach a pleasure horse to be a reiner, you will struggle with it because it usually begins with the breeding.
When the horse is bred for something such as reining, a lot of the battle is already done.
A horse that’s not bred for reining won’t be a great reiner…although you can teach him to do it.
It’s sort of like a human athlete.
If you look at a pro football player, you can likely tell he’s an athlete, can run fast, he’d be hard to tackle, and so on.
Likewise, if you tried to make this pro football player into a pro golfer you’d never make it because he’s not built for it.
He’s probably so muscular with a big powerful chest that it would get in the way of a straight and powerful golf swing.
But…he could still play golf. He just wouldn’t be a pro at it.
That’s sort of like horses.
Anyway, this wisdom comes from our famous training team, Doug and Dani Hewlett. They train Reining horses.
Although they do Reining, you may be shocked how all training works together to benefit the horse (and rider).
To see more about them, click on the following:
How To Teach Your Horse Reining
So if the horse exhibits good ‘Cuttin’ traits, he’ll put the horse to doing just that.
Where is your horse likely to succeed?
