When I moved home to Australia, I rather thought I'd semi-retire, enjoy my horses and see the children through high school.
Umm, it didn't go quite according to plan.
You know how it happens, you visit a mate and they ask you to help them with their horse. Goodo. They tell their friend, who rings you and your answer is "sure, can do". When this got to the ridiculous stage, 'can do' became Kandoo and I was back to training horses for people.
But, this time, with a difference for the following reasons:
- England is quaint. The traffic's terrible but you can get everywhere in a day. Australia, not so much. The place is huge, the population and its horses, widely dispersed. Getting to people was going to be hard.
- After training, horses revert to the level of the rider or handler and they repeat the most well-established of their behavioural patterns. Maintaining training was going to be hard.
So, my mission became to teach YOU to train your horse and my 'can do' became your KANDOO.
Have you ever seen a trainer or coach make your horse look amazing, even experienced that feeling for a while after they rode it, only to find that, in time (and often not much), it seemed to evaporate? There is no substitute for training your own horse. You will know exactly how the horse learned everything so if things go a bit pear-shaped you know exactly how to go about re-training it.
Trailer loading is a great example because it's so obvious - the horse won't load! If you decide to go out and teach that yourself, if one day at the show it's all terribly exciting and your horse doesn't want to load, you simply go back to the lesson. You know exactly what to do, when to exert and release pressure, when to praise and what to be watching and checking. Of course, trailer loading is just an example, the same applies for flying changes or simply picking up the correct canter lead.
If you've had this experience of not being able to get your horse to perform as well as someone else, leave me a comment below and tell me what the situation was.
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