09/08/2026
Love the way this person describes that, THIS is what i mean by giving a horse a job!👏
Give your horse a job.
To illustrate what I mean by "give your horse a job", I'm going to describe a client case of buddy, a patchy, solid, gypsy Vanner type horse who came to us for seven days for a bit of training.
He was fairly spooky and reactive and would lock his jaw and run off through the reins and was almost impossible to haul to a stop.
So we did what we always do and gave him a job.
I've got a few jobs that I give my horses which consists of various patterns at the horse can learn.
One basic pattern that I use is lunging, which is a very basic pattern indeed. Trot in a circle with one ear on me and one ear on the circle. Simples.
If you decide to look out of the arena instead of looking at me and produce that horrible counterbend then it'll be a little bit of signal and attention grabbing and till your attention is back on me.
And there you have it. Round and round you go.
The thing is, once the horse realises what it's expected to do, it knows that it's not going to do anything wrong or any kind of unexpected anything.
All it needs to do is go round and round going "I'm a good boy I'm a good boy I'm a good boy" and everything is peachy.
The horses can be proud of itself and show off what a lovely circle it can do and I'm proud of the horse.
Nice and easy.
Another pattern I employ, another job that we can do, is the initial quadrill from our years putting on jousting shows .
This pattern goes, and I hope I describe it well enough here, but it doesn't really matter if I don't describe it well enough the point is it's a pattern that you know, but anyway, it goes from the middle of the short side A facing into the arena. One horse goes up the left hand side, one horse goes up the right hand side, keep them perfectly opposite to each other at the same pace so that when they cross at the top short side at C they are crossing exactly there, so it's all looks neat and tidy.
Then you come halfway back down the opposing long side and turn into face each other ... and in the shows we would traditionally trade insults over the tilt.
Then you would walk down to A and C respectively turn around stand there while you salute the person you're jousting and then run a straight line, or walking is fine, or at a trot, passing left to left in the middle with an imaginary tilt between us.
Pass 3 times and that's the end of the pattern.
When we tried Buddy on a hack around the estate, and he was descending into spooky behaviour, myself and Zana decided to organise an arena with conveniently placed dandelions and nettles to indicate the corners and went through the jousting pattern...
..Which neatly reversed Buddy's increasing anxiety and allowed us to carry on the hack.
Neat!
Another job I can give the horse, I have small traffic cones which just conveniently fit a lance in the hole at the top, which is a piece of dowel from Wickes and just fits in nicely. The job is to take the lance from out of one cone and put it in another.
Another pattern that I often use to give the horse the job is the potholes in the drive between our gate and the road. This worked particularly well with Buddy because he was so spooky, but it's hard to be spooky AND to run a slalom around some potholes, then go firing off from one pot hole to another, past the gate in multiple directions as you head away from and to the next pothole.
Bend around the pothole and head to the next one.
As much as anything the point of giving the horse a job is to provide my own focus so that I have the discipline to supply the routine to the horse.
If the human doesn't know what he's doing how can you expect the horse to know what it's doing?
Giving the horse a job is 180 degrees different to the concept of walking about hoping that it doesn't spook.
After his seven days training with us, Buddy was much happier being told what to do because it meant he didn't have to think for himself.
They don't want to think for themselves, you know.
I don't really want to think for myself if I'm honest. If you'd just like to phone me up at the beginning of the day and tell me what I'm doing, I can then relax and get on with it.
If I was a horse being able to relax and get on with it means that I don't have to worry about a monster behind every tree and bush and whether to jump to a shadow or reacting in some way.
If I need to react in some way, I'll be told.
Anyway, Buddy duly went home to his owner, and about a month later I was booked to go and visit for a confidence lesson for the owner, and I wonder if you can guess what happened?
Yes that's right, any concept of giving the horse a job or having the discipline to stick to a pattern or a training program had gone out of the window and we were back to square one.
Ho hum. There's nothing much I can do about that if I suppose apart from supply the lesson again... And this time Buddy improved within a couple of hours rather than seven days and provided the owner a great plan for moving forward.
So yes, that's the message of today.
Give your horse a job.
As always put your thoughts in the comments
