How To Stop Your Horse Spooking
Our horses mostly are prey animals, creatures of flight. Their instinct is to run first think later. To understand how the different breeds react to scary stimuli read our article … This is a survival mechanism bred into them over years of evolution and now we are trying to redirect that behaviour to make them safe for mounts for anyone to ride.
The old school method and train of thought is to shut them down, something akin to learned helplessness. Essentially we try to be bigger and scarier than anything else so they are more scared to react to their environment than they are of the scary thing in their environment. This can work for the more experienced riders but not for less experienced riders.
Just hold on and clock up the ks. Another way to desensitise and settle a spooky horse is to just expose them to a bunch of different environments and stimuli until the stop being scared. Again this requires an experienced professional rider. Done by a novice the horse can end up more scared because the rider is scared and so now it thinks it has a legitimate reason to be scared!!
What we teach at equestrian movement is getting the horse to be curious about what its scared of. This is helpful for a few different reasons.
We can’t desensitise a horse to everything. This means that each time our horse encounters something new we have to go through the whole desensitisation process with that object. However, if we teach them to be curious about things they are scared of, so that it doesn’t matter what they are scared of -they know how to approach it and deal with it.
Even the most beginner riders can work on teaching curiosity and create a calm, relaxed horse.
It creates a good relationship with the rider and establishes trust and confidence in their rider over the long term.
It can be a fun exercise to break up their training regime to keep them going sour on their work
Your horse becomes safe for trails and if you are unsure you know what to do to best handle your horse when it becomes nervy and spooky.
