Following E.F.Seidler’s good advice, we usually don’t train other people’s problem horses for a variety of reasons. However, we made an exception for the gorgeous Spanish stallion Encantador de lo Brioso. “Brio” is a stunning, gray S/P stallion who stands 16.1hh tall. He is the epitome of the Spanish horse, full of fire and sparkle, quick on his feet like a bullfighting horse, with a full, long mane and tail. Everything about him is round. His arched neck forms a quarter of a circle when the rider takes up the reins, just like the Old Masters described it. It grows smoothly out of the withers, firm and strong at the base, supple at the top. His back is wide and comfortable, filling the rider’s seat and legs. His croup is as round as a water melon – exactly as a baroque horse’s hindquarters should be shaped.
But Brio was not always as impressive as he is today. When his owner rescued him in the fall of 2000, Brio was significantly underweight, neglected, intimidated, and lethargic for lack of strength. From what his owner was able to find out about his history, it appears that Brio spent some time with an Arab halter trainer when he was young. Then he was in reining training for a while. There also was a period of five years during which he was locked in a stall without getting any turnout or exercise. This imprisonment made him agoraphobic. He gets nervous in wide open spaces. He is improving steadily in this respect, but in the first weeks after his rescue, he did not even dare to go into the paddock behind his stall. He would stand in the doorway, looking out, instead. He even seemed to be afraid of light.
As far as the training was concerned, Brio’s previous experiences had left a devastating legacy. He was afraid, yet at the same time angry and defensive, which can be a very dangerous combination. He had learned to unseat and intimidate his riders by rearing, followed by a quick spin-bolt. Since handling on the ground and behavior under saddle always form an inseparable whole, I was not surprised to find him unfocused, disrespectful, distrustful, and a little unpredictable. These are typical symptoms for horses who have been poorly trained.
So, where do you start with a horse like that? A horse who has never learned anything correctly at all, a horse who has not even made it to “square one”? A horse who has only learned bad habits?
The answer is: you start at the very beginning – not under saddle, not even at the longe line, but by revisiting ground manners. In other words, we had to take an eleven year old breeding stallion and teach him things he should have learned as a baby. Again, this is quite typical for correction horses. Even if they lead and tie, they generally have no concept of personal space. They pay attention to everything else except the human. They push, and they nip, especially if they are stallions or geldings. They usually have no idea that they have to yield to pressure. They either ignore the ground person or rider altogether, or they actually go against the pressure, which is even worse.
So this is where the retraining process starts. You build a relationship with the horse that is based on mutual trust and respect. But whereas a well-raised green horse is quick to give you his trust and respect, the retraining horse has been let down, exploited, disappointed, and taken advantage of too many times. It takes at least three times as long to win his trust and respect, because you have to prove yourself to him. You have to establish a structure – for the first time in his life – that consists in certain responsibilities and rights that form the framework and the foundation for his relationship with you. This takes time, because horses learn essentially by statistics. They recognize patterns that occur with a certain frequency and regularity. In this respect horses are far more perceptive than most humans. If negative patterns have established distrust, cynicism, and bad habits in the horse, it will take many repetitions of fair handling and correct training to build new, better habits. That is why one of my teachers used to say: “If it took somebody else three years to instill a bad habit in a horse, it will take you another three years to undo it again.” To build this relationship is absolutely essential for any good quality training, but when it comes to correction horses, the successful outcome of the rehabilitation hinges on it. It is necessary for the trainer to spend time with the horse, e.g. cleaning his stall, feeding, grooming, etc. Every second spent together is training, because the human has to lay out and enforce the ground rules of respect and attentiveness with the utmost consistency. That means that undesirable, counterproductive, rude or dangerous behavior has to be nipped in the bud by an instantaneous warning or reprimand that matches the horse’s transgression precisely. Not too much, not too little. On the other hand, we have to be just as quick to reward any attempts at good behavior.
In the early weeks and months we turned Brio out in the arena every day before work, so he had a chance to exercise himself and run off any pent up energy on his own. At the same time, he had time to become familiar and comfortable with his new work environment. When he had settled down and seemed relaxed enough to work, we tacked him up with a surcingle, snaffle bridle, and longeing cavesson. We had side reins attached to the surcingle and experimented with the length and height of their attachment on the surcingle quite a bit before we found a setup that worked well.
Like all correction horses, Brio’s longeing skills were worse than that of a green horse. He fell onto the inside shoulder, coming in on one side of the circle while speeding up. On the opposite side of the circle the centrifugal force swept him out and the increasing tension of the longe line slowed him down at the same time. This is to be expected, since many halter trainers chase their horses like crazy at the end of a longe line to “condition” them, so they take off like a bat out of hell, if you try to longe them. The best way of dealing with this problem is by using an assistant. One person stands in the middle of the circle holding the end of the longe line to anchor both horse and trainer, and to give them an orientation in space. The second person handwalks the horse along the perimeter of the circle in order to familiarize him with his workspace. If you have a second assistant, you can have a separate person carry the longe whip, walking behind and slightly to the inside of the horse. Otherwise the person handwalking the horse can carry the whip. The whip is pointed back and down relatively out of sight for the horse, yet close enough, in case the horse should refuse to go forward. After a few rounds on the circle at the walk, the trainer moves away from the horse and encourages him to continue on his own. At this point many horses will break into the trot, which we accept, unless it is too wild and out of control. If the horse should start racing around, we return to handwalking until he settles down. Eventually they all lose their nervousness and give in.
If the horse holds his own at the trot on the circle, the whip bearer now tries to regulate the circle size and the tempo with the whip as well as his body position relative to the horse: further back if the horse loses impulsion, closer to the inside shoulder, if the horse cuts into the circle. The longe line holder adjusts the longe line so that it never touches the ground, which could be dangerous for the whip bearer and for the horse who could each get tangled up in it. On the other hand, the horse has to be allowed to travel on the largest circle possible. Half halts with the longe line help to slow down the tempo, if the horse loses balance and gets rushy. You will notice that the contact on the longe line improves and that simultaneously the radius of the circle increases to the extent that the horse slows down and adheres to the round circle line. This is also the moment in which the impulsion improves.
In Brio’s case we had additional problems to contend with. On the one hand, he was terrified of the short sides of the arena, so that we had to longe him in the middle for a while. He seemed to become increasingly claustrophobic the more we approached the end of the arena. I suspect that the reining trainer ran him into the wall to practice sliding stops – a common “training method” referred to as “fencing”.
On the other hand, Brio wanted nothing to do with the bit. His initial reaction was to curl up with his chin almost touching his chest, while pulling up his lips and opening his mouth. Later on we were told that pulling up the lips is a telltale sign of horses whose mouth has been wired shut – apparently another not uncommon “training practice” in reining.
With patient, methodical, quiet training, we overcame these difficulties and Brio learned how to longe correctly. When he was trotting calmly on a round circle in the middle of the arena, we started moving our circle, until we obtained the same quality of the gait everywhere in the arena. At this point the assistant had become superfluous.
We experimented with the double longe line, because it has the advantage of giving the trainer an outside rein and of rendering side reins unnecessary. However, during the first few weeks of training, Brio responded to the double longe line by curling up and opening his mouth even more, and we quickly abandoned the approach. Several months later the double longe line proved useful, and at that time I pursued this method for a while with good success.
Parallel with the early longeing training, I experimented with some very basic work in hand, Oliveira style, no side reins, one rein in each hand, and the dressage whip in the same hand as the outside rein. The purpose was to check Brio’s reaction and to teach him to move when I move and to stop when I stop. Work in hand begins as a mere extension of the basic ground handling. When it’s done correctly, it brings horse and rider closer and has the most positive effect on the horse’s mind. At first, though, the energy that emanated from Brio was the fear of an animal ready to fight and defend himself, because he felt trapped between me and the wall. So I quickly defused the situation by facing forward (instead of facing the horse) and simply handwalking him, while patting his neck and talking to him kindly. This immediately took the pressure off and Brio relaxed. So I did my halt-walk transitions as handwalking until he understood what I wanted and that there was no harm in it for him. He was still tense on the short side for a while, but within a matter of several days he relaxed more and more. As he settled into the work, I started to face him again, and he had gained enough confidence and trust to remain calm. Gradually we worked up to halt- trot transitions, then discontinued, because I had achieved everything I wanted. I suspect that the initial fear of the work in hand goes back to bad experiences in his halter training, since the setup is somewhat similar: the horse is framed by the wall on one side and the trainer on the other.
When I had made some progress in hand and we had begun to develop some mutual trust, I experimented with some long reining as well – at first out of reach of the hind legs – just in case. Later I “snuck” up on him so I could touch his croup. Not surprisingly, Brio liked the long rein work, because nobody had tried it with him before, so there was no emotional baggage attached to it. In almost twenty years I have never encountered a horse who did not like to be long reined. Brio turned out to be quite talented at this type of work. Over the years I have found that long reining always creates a closer bond between horse and rider, because the human is working just as hard as the horse.
After several weeks of longeing, the moment came when it was time to address the work under saddle again. I warmed Brio up at the longe line as usual. After approximately twenty to thirty minutes at the trot we “parked” him beside the mounting block. I stood in front of him and held him, while my wife Shana put her foot in the stirrup and began the whole procedure that we use for starting young horses: She puts her left foot in the stirrup. Then she presses down on it. She moves the saddle a little, while I pet the horse and feed him treats at the appropriate moments to make him comfortable and to “teach” him to like the work. The next step in the sequence is a layover, where both rider’s legs stay on the left side, while she is resting her torso across the saddle. If the horse shows any kind of nervousness during any of these steps, we stay at that level and repeat these basic steps, until the horse is completely relaxed. Finally, Shana swings her right leg across and carefully takes her seat in the saddle. I usually feed the horse treats again at that point and let the horse turn his neck right and left to make sure he sees the rider on his back, so that there are no surprises. This process can take two days or two weeks, depending on the horse. We repeat the mounting and dismounting several times each day to make sure the horse stays relaxed. Brio only took a couple of days to stand quietly and relax while Shana was climbing on and off.
The next phase is handwalking under the rider in both directions. We essentially retrace our steps. The horse is already familiar with the basic setup. So he knows what to expect. The only thing that’s new is the presence of the rider on his back. For safety reasons all the mounted work is done without side reins. A few days later we move on to riding at the longe line. The horse is confirmed at correct longeing at this point, so that he will listen to me, if necessary. The rider can now gradually make a transition from being baggage to influencing and communicating with the horse, while the ground person becomes more and more a passive safety net – just in case something goes wrong. We have always had excellent success with this method – Brio was no exception. Within a few more weeks Shana could ride him off the longe line, even past the scary part of the arena.
Over time, with more training, patience, and careful guideance Brio became a nice, capable dressage horse.
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Last Update: February 24, 2007