How To Ride A Spooky Horse 🐎

Hey guys, it's a beautiful day here in Ohio and today I'm going to be sharing with you how to work with a spooky horse. So if you've ever been riding along and having a wonderful ride and all of a sudden your horse spooks seemingly out of nowhere, you know how this can be such a frustrating and potentially scary situation. So today I'm going to be talking about why your horse may be spooking, what are some things you can do to help get their attention on you, and then lastly we're going to talk about how to ride a spooky horse. So let's get started. Here with Scarlett and you saw Scarlett at the beginning of this video spooking. So I'm going to be taking her through an exercise to help her out with this today. If you have a horse that is spooking, let's first talk about what are some reasons why they are doing this. You might be having a horse that's going into a new environment for the first time and that can often cause some anxiety or have a horse spook a little bit more if they're seeing things they've never seen before. Or you could have a young horse that's just lacking experience. Or you might have a horse like Scarlett who has a learned behavior of spooking. Whatever the reason, it's important to recognize that a horse that's spooking, their focus is not on you, it's on the environment and they're not, you know, in a relaxed confident state. So we want to be doing exercises that help improve their relaxation and their focus on us. So here's a few exercises that I like to do with horses that are a little bit spooky or nervous. The first exercise I like to do is working my horse on the ground. This helps me to build a connection with them and really get to know them better and for them to get to know me better before moving to under saddle. There's many different groundwork exercises you can do with your horse. Here I'm side passing my horse and I love doing this work because it really helps me to build a strong relationship. Desensitizing is another exercise that I like to do which increases my horse's confidence and relaxation by simulating a pressured situation. Stretching while changing directions is a great way to improve your horse's relaxation. Getting a horse to stretch down helps them to become softer over their back and more relaxed. Transitions are a great way to enhance your horse's focus and responsiveness. Here I'm doing simple walk to trot transitions. Each time Scarlett goes up she's having to think more about me and bring her attention back to me. So we've talked about some things that we can do to help our horses get more focused and relaxed. Now let's talk about riding our horse in the instance of a spook. How do we ride through a spook and help to stay safer with our horses? So it's important to recognize that any horse can spook regardless of how quiet they are. Horses have a natural flight response when they see something that scares them. So it's important for us as the rider to be able to support the horse and work them appropriately in the instance where they do spook. So I've got an exercise set up out here that I'm going to be taking Scarlett through and I'm going to walk you through the steps of how I ride her in this exercise. Our horses can feel our tension. When we're riding them and they get a little bit nervous it's important that we relax and make sure we're really breathing deeply to help us relax. We also want to be sitting into that saddle relaxing into it and hugging our horse with our legs riding out to our hands to nice giving hands and encouraging the horse to be forward. So here's Scarlett walked in nice and confident. As we approach a scary object we want to be instilling confidence into our horse. So you notice that I'm being nice and patient. I'm rewarding Scarlett when she starts to approach that obstacle and I'm not chasing or kicking her. I'm letting her investigate it and move up to it a little at a time. So I'm keeping my legs on to encourage her to go forward here. Curiosity leads to confidence. So you can see as Scarlett checks out this cowboy curtain and starts to investigate it a little bit she gets more confident with it and is more willing to walk through it. So right here you can see her build up her courage and walk through it nicely. After going through it a few times Scarlett got to this place where she could walk through the cowboy curtain with no hesitation. Once she got to this place I went ahead and brought her up to the trot. It's not always what you think. Sometimes the obstacle that you think is not going to be a big deal is the one that's the scariest for your horse. Scarlett was more concerned about this little tarp on the ground than the cowboy curtain but I'm handling it the same way. Keeping my legs on, sitting back and encouraging her forward. Here she goes over a little bit quick so I bend her back around and we're going to just go over it again. So I always want to end on a good note and make sure that I'm instilling that confidence in my horse. Here I'm going to give her the reins, keep my legs on, let her check out the tarp and then redirect her to walk over it. Good girl. So Scarlett did an awesome job today working with me. It's a really windy day out here and she was so brave going through these obstacles. I'm really proud of her. If you have a horse like Scarlett that has a lot of worry and tends to be a spooker the more that you can expand your knowledge, put them in different environments and expose them to different things the more confident they're going to become and the more that you you know take the time to work with them in a quiet environment to get their focus on you the more successful you're going to be as a team. So I hope these tips were a help to you. I hope you have a wonderful week and I'll see you in the next video.