Channel Archives: Learn

The Deeper Lessons

In Horse Brain, Human Brain, and in all my columns and posts, I allude to layers of lessons for horses. Too often, we think of only the surface aspect of what...

Quoth the Raven: Arena Wildlife

We all have our quirks, right? One of mine is the belief that arenas are for horses and riders. Period. Well, all right, ground handlers or instructors are tolerated if they don’t...

Ghost Noises

“Ghost noises” is my term for sounds caused by agents that horses can’t see. For example, the other day someone was stacking pallets next to the outer walls of the...

Turnout Turmoil

Turnout is a risky proposition for performance horses: it’s great when everything goes well, but it can lead to serious injuries when there are problems. I insist on it for...

The Butter Canter

True is progressing nicely in many ways and is still sticky in others. I’ll write a full assessment for you soon, and we will go back to the topics of...

Indoor Arenas

So much of brain-based horsemanship depends on forming a bond of mutual trust between horse and rider. Every day, I am reminded that my methods of teaching a horse a...

Dapples!

A friend and I were walking along the other day with our horses. I had just rinsed True with water and a jelly scrubber—I rarely use soap because it strips...

Reducing Separation Anxiety

True fell in love with the little bay mare in an adjacent turnout about six months ago. “Fell in love” is a human phrase, of course. True stood as near her...

“Hey! She Belongs to Me!”

My own horses watch closely when they see me riding a horse in training. One of my former horses ran the fenceline whinnying for an hour the first time he...

Transcending Time Pressure

Brain-based horsemanship offers a thousand reasons to slow down with horses, to give them more time to assimilate new knowledge. But every now and then, my human prefrontal cortex tells...

The Foundations of All Training

Too often, we forget to consider the basic building blocks of a horse’s training. I’m not referring to signals for “whoa” and “go” or to direct reining left and right....

True Sorts Cows

I’ve been training True to observe, approach, and accept cows as described in my last few Horse Network articles. The sequence offers a concrete example of training a young horse...

Let’s Watch a Calf Sorting

Twice so far I have shared True’s experiences with cows. In my first article about it a couple of weeks ago, he produced a spectacular display of equine fear upon...

The Sneaky Instructor

The following is an excerpt from Never Trust a Sneaky Pony, and Other Things They Did Not Teach Me in Vet School, by Dr. Madison Seamans, DVM. College for most...

Ninja Cows Redux

Last week, I described True’s first experience with cows. That event actually happened about a year ago. Three had escaped from a neighbor’s pasture and came within a few hundred...

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