I’m starting to get excited about this reining clinic! I’m not sure if it is the chance to visit with other reiners, the opportunity to travel out of town, or the thought of getting somewhere with Tori again that has me the most excited, but it’s fun to be thinking about it anyway!

However excited I may be, I do have a few misgivings about going to a clinic with a different trainer. I used to take whatever clinics I could get into - I remember one year where Raime and I took ten clinics! That was five from one instructor, two from a another trainer, and three others from different coaches. When you consider how short our riding season is in northern BC, you can imagine how crowded our brains were getting!

I did enjoy that season immensely, but discovered that going to several different clinicians like that can be hard on a horse and rider’s mental capacity. For starters, each trainer uses their own lingo - certain words and phrases they use to describe things that are pertinent to their own discipline and way of teaching.

For example, J.P. Forget uses “rounding up” quite a bit. Joy Allen uses terms like “rate” and “pocket”. Lindy Barron and Greg McAllister talked about “rating” and “following” the cow. Some terms are similar, some are very different.

Photo credit: Chris Hassell

And then there are the variations in training methods. Greg would have you use your inside rein mainly, with a little bit of outside rein, to teach the spin. J.P. would use the outside rein solely. Joy would have you pick up your hands to ask the horse to slow down, Carole Walton might have you drop your hands. Some of the deviations are because of the different disciplines, as you are trying to achieve a completely different thing.

Other deviations are simply due to the various methods employed by the individual trainer - and remember, they get those terms from various other instructors from whom they have learned techniques!

So it can be difficult switching from one clinician to another, especially when - like me now - you have been riding with one coach for the past few years. There will be differences in the training and teaching methods that may or may not work for me and Tori.

Yet, it is always good to get a fresh perspective, another person’s view of the situation. Different people are better with various types of horses, and with various types of riders. As long as you can keep an open mind, chances are you will always learn something from a new clinician!

‘Til next week,
~ Kristi :)

Foal Announcements View the latest or...
If you have a Foal Announcement you wish to submit, click here

Would you like to Share a Trailer Ride? View the rides offered here... or submit your offer for a ride here

Once again, you can turn to the chain and leadrope to help retrain the pushy horse. You will also need a short whip or stick.

A few words of caution here - this whip is never to be used to hit the horse on the head, it is not to be used to hit the horse repeatedly, it is not to be used to hit the horse out of anger, and you should probably have at least one lesson with an experienced handler or professional trainer. A more experienced person will know how much pressure the horse will need and the right moment to back off the pressure in order to most successfully retrain the horse.

If your horse has already been taught to back off when you shank him with the chain, it may make your job easier to transfer the teaching to the whip cue. The whip is not to be used so much as a punishment (because pain will simply make him act either out of fear or retaliation) but as an annoyance and also a guide to where he may not place his body.

I place my lead rope in my left hand, and my whip in my right. I’ll ask the horse to walk out as usual. When he crowds me, I will use the whip to tap his shoulder, asking him to move away from me.

Several different things may happen at this point. Your horse may push further into you, he may pull back and away from you, he may ignore you altogether, or he may move respectfully out of your space. Hopefully the latter happens!

Here’s what to do if it doesn’t. If he ignores you, tap harder and more insistently until you get a reaction. If he pulls back and away from you, this is a start in the right direction and may mean you used too much cue. Quietly ask him again to move forward with you, keeping a close watch on how near to you he is. Be prepared to tap him again as soon as he moves in too close to you.

If he moves into you when you first apply the tapping cue, you have two options. One is to tap him harder with the whip, which may make him move even more into your space, and the other is to continue tapping the same and to shank him back with the leadshank or chain so that he gets the message that the whip cue actually means to back off.

There is also an exercise you can teach your horse that will help him to understand the whip cue means to move away. This is taught while the horse is standing still, and it is called a turn on the haunches. Refer to the article from December 13, 1999.

By teaching the horse to move his shoulders away on cue, you make it easier to understand your whip cue for not crowding.

Feel free to refer to other issues of ground training for your horse in the archives from the first year. Look for the articles from Nov 22, Nov 29, and Dec 6, 1999 for other various technique articles that can increase your horse’s responsiveness on the ground.

If you have comments or suggestions along the way, please share with me at kristi@hiway16.com

If your horse shows signs of neurological damage, work closely with your veterinarian to rule out EPM as a possibility. There are many other diseases that produce similar symptoms, but the asymmetry is usually a good clue that EPM is a suspect. A blood test may be done to rule out EPM, but if positive, it does not mean that your horse has it - instead it may mean that your horse has been exposed to the organism and has developed an immunity.

Instead, if the blood test for EPM is positive, then you can choose to test further for it by doing a spinal tap. This is the only way to be sure that the disease has attacked the nervous system.

In the case of a positive test for EPM, you will need to sit down and go over treatment options with your vet. Fighting EPM can be time consuming and costly, and not all horses will make a full recovery. Some horses will relapse even with what appeared to be successful treatment. For some horses, euthanasia may be a consideration due to severity of symptoms, length of infection, and budget of the horse owner. However, if you catch it early enough, there should be a fairly good prognosis.

The best way to prevent EPM is to remove the source - the opossum. For those of us in northern BC, this isn’t a problem, but some of our readers are from the southern part of the province. For those of you who live down south, hay is often trucked into BC from Washington, and there are opossums in that state as well as in some regions in southern BC. Consider purchasing your hay from other areas, or do your homework - find out if there are opossums on or near the farm where you buy your hay from.

Keep opossums from frequenting your horse’s area by removing all access to tempting feeds. Tightly cover your grain bins and whenever possible feed your horses grain off of the ground, preferably in feeders that are designed to prevent spillage. Consider feeding extruded feeds or other grains that have been heat-treated as the heat process seems to destroy the infective sporocysts.

Bring the cat food in at night (when the opossum does much of its scavenging), and don’t leave out dog food either (for some reason they seem to really like cat and dog food). Opossums also eat carrion, so be sure to remove carcasses of dead animals from the premises. If you have fruit trees, be sure to remove fallen fruit.

Those tips are also helpful for any rodent control, so consider taking those measures against rats and mice. Both can carry diseases harmful to humans so it’s wise to cut down on your rodent inhabitations.

As with any equine disease, you can help your horse guard against infection by keeping him healthy and in good shape. Work with your veterinarian and other equine care practitioners to ensure that your horse is in as good a shape as possible, and in as low stress an environment as possible.

Reference link
AAEP / Bayer Brochure (1998)

Northern BC Horse is sponsored by local businesses who support equine sports in our area including:

• Baerental Ranch
• Burns Lake Building Supplies
• Griffin Crick Ranch
• Hoskins Ford
• Northern Horse Supply
• Ridennoure Paint Horses
• The Tack Store

Do you have a horse or equipment to sell? Want to buy a horse or equipment? Check the Free Classified Ads