Here at Stable Horse Training and Rehabilitation, we work hard to identify any inconsistencies in your horse and help get them better. That’s our job whether it’s on the ground getting our hands dirty or using advanced technology to get it done for practical and detailed analysis. While this may require something as simple as just walking, more often it requires groundwork and riding to correct balance or strengthen certain parts of the body. Some horses are quite young and maybe haven’t been worked from the ground much, which makes our job harder as they don’t tend to “listen” to what we are asking. More accurately, they just don’t know yet and that’s where we step in a bit and help too.
If anybody were to watch us work with horses, our techniques would most closely represent a natural horsemanship way of dealing with them. We don’t use whips, chains or spurs on any horses, and in fact don’t even own any. Twitching, hitting and kicking horses is not in our toolbox for dealing with horses and instead we rely on the lead rope on a rope halter and a flag when on the ground. If we’re in the saddle then again, lead rope, flag and now reins with legs. It is to both our own and the horses benefit to have it understand and respect good communication where we get results quickly and positively. One of our case studies, Luke, is a great example of this.
One of the main concepts we keep in mind is to never get the horse to a troubled place where it might consider fleeing. A horse is a fight or flight animal and would flee first and only fight when cornered. We are always looking to keep them in a safe frame of mind and to hope they would hook on and join with us for the exercises and practice we do with them, rather than being dependent on telling them what to do. It’s a deep topic that we love talking about, so if you have any questions then please ask.
While it’s important to work with the horse, as the rehabilitation is primarily with the horse, we would always hope to be able to work close with all the owners of the horses we work with to make sure that what we are doing is ok and understandable. Consistency is a requirement for horses and as such we would all need to be on the same page and doing close to the same thing to properly get the horse along and keep it out of a troubled state of mind. So in turn, some rehab is working with owners to help have everybody understand why and how we do things.
Please see some of our articles below regarding both groundwork and riding.