09/08/2026
Part three:
The little paint mare had gotten pretty good in the round pen, so we ventured outside, she had quite a bit of exposure to things, so she wasn’t spooky at all, but riding around her pasture wasn’t exactly on her agenda. Not having usual horse reactions to things made her interesting. When she wanted to communicate that she was done, she would go down onto her knees. I wasn’t sure if she was going to roll, or if this would blow up into something worse, so I stopped riding for a bit, got the driving lines back out and drove her all over the pasture. When she would do the drop to her knees, I could get after her with the lines without feeling like I was in a dangerous position, and it turns out she was also over kicking at me if she got a little pop on the butt. The driving lines are great for something like this though , because I have control over both sides of her body and can move her butt away from me.
I talked her owner into boarding her at the 2000 acre ranch where my friends and I kept our horses, so I could work with her more than just a couple days per week. I did have a demanding day job at this point in my life, and I didn’t want to neglect my own horse. The ranch was great, because it had covered and uncovered arenas, covered round pens, polo fields, and lots of other places to ride. My friend Nancy came out to see the mare and work with her, she had quite a lot of knowledge of Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt principles. After doing a bit of work in the round pen (the mare had not yet gotten over refusing to do things), she turned to me and said ‘you can’t train this horse, she is untrainable’. I just said that I would continue with the driving lines, it was working. I drove her all over that 2000 acre ranch, great exercise for me 😁. We had been pretty successful driving, so I started riding her around pretty successfully, but I still felt like we weren’t quite there, and then one day, it was like a switch flipped and she decided that having a job was actually kind of fun. At this point her training progressed in leaps and bounds, side passing, turns on the forehand and haunches, leg yields, roll backs, and even really good reining type spins, pretty fast, she became kind of an overachiever, seemingly excited to learn new things, and she wasn’t even very athletically built, but she sure had a lot of try. All of that refusal was now channeled into try. I have to commend her owner for being patient and letting me get all the way through a very challenging process, she ended up being a really nice recreational riding horse for her.
I guess this is why, though I’ve learned a lot from certain clinicians of what I call ‘packaged’ horsemanship programs, I’ve always wanted to keep the doors open to many ways of training, because sometimes you just have to think outside of the box.
