Sheer Chance Stable LLC

🗣️👂Communication is Key 👂🗣️

Are you listening to your horse and speaking calmly and clearly back? At SCS each horse is treated as the individual they are. We try to communicate with them in a language they understand. Proper communication comes from the ground first. Something as simple as leading correctly, up to adding more complicated communication tasks are all important to creating a good working relationship.

The horse in the video below has been slowly working up to this successful free lunge. All his groundwork has been transitioning beautifully to him having even more fine tuned understanding and trust under saddle. We have worked diligently for him to focus, trust, and quietly think through what we are asking. Currently our cues are a bit exaggerated to make them quite clear visually to him, as well as, still incorporating the lunge in hand to bring in a familiar item for some association of what he already fully understands. When a miscommunication happens (like our first try at the halt), we try to speak more clearly. He didn’t fully understand the way we asked for the halt, but he does understand if we step a different direction from him, he follows; so we changed a communication for that moment to something he knew and he came right back to focus.

Next time your horse is being “bad”, remember, it may be a miscommunication. Take the time to build a language together!