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Rambunctious Trail Horses by Judi Daly I have recently been
reminded about a lesson I learned long ago through an experience that
my sister and I went through in the last year. The lesson is if a horse
changes his behavior, he does it for a reason. Sometimes we have trouble
figuring out the reason, and sometimes we never figure it out, but there
is always a reason. They don't just decide to change randomly. Our job
is to find the reason, and if the change is negative, try to fix the problem. Come April, Mingo
apparently got so bad when they were cleaning his stall, that we were
told we had to move him. Of course, we decided to move all the horses.
A week before we were going to move, I checked the barn owner's feeding
chart to see exactly what they were getting. They had all put on a little
weight, and I even had to switch saddles on Cruiser because the one I
was using started to leave rub marks. We figured we would tell the new
barn owner to feed them a little less. Much to our surprise, they were
getting 50% more food than we originally told the old barn owner to give
them1 ½ years before when we first moved there! We never made the
connection between that and their new personalities. Everything fell into
place. Our theory was that when she saw how much we rode the summer before,
she decided our horses needed more food, and increased it late last summer
when we first noticed they were getting hyper. Here is a different
story on a related note I heard from talking to a woman I was riding with
a few days ago. She has a very nice Thoroughbred mare that she rides nearly
every day. Gradually, her mare started to get fractious. On the way home,
she would dance about. She was reluctant to leave the barn; even balking
in the driveway. It kept getting worse and worse. Knowing that the change
in behavior had to be caused by something, her owner spent some time thinking
about what could possibly be causing it. Since she rides so much, she
had decided to give her mare some extra oats each day she rode to supplement
her feed the she normally received. Her mistake was giving her the oats
when she got back from her ride. Her mare was so fixated on the oats that
she would receive when her trail ride was over, that it made her reluctant
to leave and eager to get home. Her owner decided to give her the oats
before the ride (with ample time to digest, of course.) Within a few days,
her horse started acting like her old self.
Please visit Judi
Daly's website at: www.trailtraining.bigstep.com
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Updated: October 2005.