Sharp Horsemanship

😂

Great explanation of the worry cup

TRIGGER STACKING

A very important concept for riders to understand. Many spooks, bolt, buck or rears are a result of trigger stacking.
Trigger stacking is seen when a number of stressors or stressful events occur at the same time.
It's up to the rider to read the horses body language. Gain focus and relax the horse before his threshold is reached.
An example below.

Sounds about right 😂

Love this! https://www.facebook.com/251545231695647/posts/1070912673092228/

Posting on behalf:
Expressions of interest welcome.

4 year old approximately 15hh Black Frame Overo mare with 2 beautiful blue eyes. Stationbred X.

Luna has only been broken in for about 2 months. She’s still green as grass but going VERY kindly. Took her to the beach with less than 10 rides under saddle and she was very brave and jumped the small logs & took the lead almost the entire time. Never says no! If she is unsure about something, she will stop, look, have a think, then carry on. Not a bad bone in her body.
This past weekend she went to a show as an observer and was better behaved than some of the experienced horses there. Is very sensible and has a great brain. My friend rode her for the very first time and fell in love. Decided to put her in the baby class (poles) and she went around perfectly.

With this being said, she’s GREEN! Only been lightly hacked. Experienced home only. Must have references. I will be very picky about where she goes and am in no rush to sell. $4k ono
Located in Feilding.

Sam had a great lesson today. Nice relaxed horse and rider. Today she was practicing not using her reins and just using her seat and legs and upper body to change speed and direction

Trainer: What day is it?

Student: Thursday

Trainer: What day is it?

Student: It’s the 6th

Trainer: What day is it?

Student: Frustrated, annoyed and confused

Trainer: I kept asking the question, you gave me the right answers, but I persisted with the question again, so you changed your answers.

You became frustrated and confused.

That’s how a horse feels when you miss the “release”.

Credit - Performance Horse Digest, issue 1, 2019

This 👌

❤

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HORSE WHISPERER. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died Tuesday (July 20, 1999) in California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero -- the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California -- he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.

There is no codifying what Bill Dorrance knew. Some of it, like how to braid a rawhide lariat, is relatively easy to teach, and some of it, thanks to the individuality of horses and humans, cannot be taught at all, only learned. His legacy is exceedingly complex and, in a sense, self-annulling. It is an internal legacy. The more a horseman says he has learned from Dorrance the less likely he is to have learned anything at all.

That sounds oblique, but it reflects the fact that what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

From an article by Verlyn Klinkenborg 'Death of a Legendary Horseman' - NY Times July 24, 1999 - http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/24/opinion/editorial-notebook-death-of-a-legendary-horseman.html

Image is of Bill on 'Alkali' at 'Rancho Tularcitos' back in 1968 and is care of Steven and Leslie Dorrance - http://www.billdorrance.com/about.htm