Handling horses and understanding a horse's mentality

Handling horses and understanding the horse's mentality is the key to success.

The horse is a creature of habit and you will greatly reap the benefits of your horse if you keep to the same thing; being done in the same way, at more or less the same time every day.

It is adviseable to stick to the same procedures when grooming for instance, even simple things like picking the feet should be carried out in the same rotation foot to foot.

This probably sounds quite ridiculous; but is the foothold ('scuse the pun!) of your horse handling success and of course will help you bond more easliy with your horse.

RULES FOR HANDLING HORSES

(PARTICULARLY NEWLY OWNED HORSES)

HANDLE GENTLY, SPEAK SOFTLY, AVOID AGGRESSIVENESS OR SUDDEN MOVEMENTS

REMEMBER! THERE IS NO ROOM FOR THE ROUGH LOUD-MOUTHED INDIVIDUAL WHEN IT COMES TO HANDLING YOUR HORSE!!

Horses also love the company of other horses, they are sociable and gregarious, with their inquisitiveness to the outside world being highly developed. Having other horses around may prove difficult for the private owner, but a horse at livery will have stable companions within sight and hearing of each other.

Of course, it is horse sense and well known within the horsey world that horses can also become quite 'cliquey' with each other..If they spend too much time with one horse in particular, this can lead to some trouble when leaving the other horse in the field or yard, thus possibly causing some 'napping' out on your ride, where your horse tries to turn back home to its mate, causing difficult horse handling behaviour; ie. rearing or spinning.

One of the ways to solve this problem is by rotating the horses from field to field, so they are socialising with others. Of course this is only possible if there is more than one field to do this.

Strictly speaking there should be one acre to one horse, so if there is enough pasture to enable fields to be sectioned off, the rotating shouldn't be too difficult, as each pair of horses maybe swapped around, so they all get their fair share of each other's company, and no cliqueyness emerges! This makes life easier when handling horses.

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