Compliance II

While my own experience has been primarily "ship in" I have also for a full year been stabled at a race track. These two experiences--training horses off a farm and training from the race track produce contrasting results in horse behavior.

For the few of us that do ship in, we can only watch with envy as horses stabled at the race track, one after another, calmly go through their paces. There's the occasional miscreant of course, but in general most of the track work goes off like clock work. The farm horses, and certainly those that are pastured, many of these become conscientious objectors over time. Why the difference in behavior?

The answer is fairly easy to discern. The track horses are so happy to get out of their stalls they look forward to their track work. The farmers in contrast are hardly all that happy having the boss arrive at 5:30 a.m. and interrupt the "grazing". And so, the farm boys and girls are grouchy going in, and when they get to the destination work an unfamiliar routine that to them is chaotic and frightening, at least initially. My experiences have been that it takes about 30 days of shipping in before the protestors settle into the experience. Confide again that as a rider, dealing with a protesting horse is often far from easy. Many riders simply refuse the problem. Occasionally there's the extremely skilled or fearless rider with the patience and knowledge to quickly solve such problems.

Once we get the horse on track the relevant to racing animal training problems begin. The skilled rider, generally a jock if u can get one, takes care of "most" of this for you. It's the rare rider that gets everything right in morning training. If you can get one of those you'll have a better race horse and much less likely to produce an injury.

What are we about here? Been a while since I've been up and going round and round, but in no particular order here are some of the things that come to mind in terms of rider skills:

1. lead changes
2. getting the over-enthusiast under control or stopped after the run.
2a. In contrast, dealing with the lazy horse or refuser.
2b. In general dealing with "antics" particularly when there's a crowd.
3. creating a push button horse on the race track--slowing, speeding up, trotting, galloping.
4. approaching the gate without protest.
5. gate work in general.
6. manipulating the horse in company--often tricky and dangerous.
7. On track turn arounds--e.g. back tracking and keeping horse calm in the turn around that often takes place amid oncoming traffic, getting the desired lead at the start of the gallop.
8. Keeping the horse under control and close to the rail in the trot off.

Many of the above are critical in injury avoidance and important in creating a competitive race horse. Continue next post.

Training:
Thurs. 7/28: will continue tonight 36 hrs. after the last one. Inj. to rider leg healing faster than expected. Will get back on tonight to see if there's enough strength for control.