Horses have thresholds. What is a threshold? It’s the end of the horses comfort zone. If he goes beyond it, he is going to get scared. For some horses their comfort zone is just their corral or stall for others it is their whole pasture, it depends on the individual horse and how confident he is.
Now if you are walking your horse out to the arena and at first he is just walking with you, his head is down and he is calm and relaxed, he is still in his comfort zone. But when you are walking along and he starts walking a little faster and his head gets a little higher, you have just hit the end of his comfort zone! So should you just keep walking like nothing happened and forget that your horse thinks he is going to die? NO! You should stop when you first start seeing this in your horse. Stop and stay there until his head comes back down and he relaxes. Maybe even do a little bit of playing at that spot until he is calm. When you become aware of this change in your horse and you stop and let him calm down (which may only take a few minutes) he will then trust you and respect you for understanding him and building his confidence and then he will start looking to YOU as his comfort zone and not the other horses or the barn. Instead of him being afraid of you (because when he got scared you made him go on anyway) he is now going to trust you. You are now telling him, if you are afraid we are going to stop here until you are confidant enough to continue on with me.There may be many thresholds between his corral and the arena, stop at every one. The next time you take him out of his corral you will notice that there are fewer thresholds than there were the day before, and so on. There may be MANY thresholds on a trail ride, but if you teach your horse that he is going to be OK and you are going to wait on him until he is confidant then there won’t be as many on the next trail ride. Put your horse first, before your fun trail ride or before your friends saying they just want to ride. Your horse and his confidence in you is more important then anything else!
