Q.
Hi Chelsie,
I have three horses on a small farm near Bonham, Texas. Two of them are mine and one belongs to my renter. The problem is with the renter’s horse, Blaze, a 4 yro quarter horse. Blaze has never been successfully ridden. She bucked off her owner the first time he tried and he hasn’t tried since. She has had limited ground work. I’ve been trying to do some work with her on the ground. She stands quietly for grooming, fly spray, bathing, etc. The problem is longeing. She will go to her left ok, but absolutely refuses to go to her right. She gets frantic when asked to move off to her right. She rears up, crow hops, and has actually struck out at me with her left rear foot on an occasion when I got to close to her. I don’t have a round pen, so I’m working with her in a small pasture with halter and lead rope. Under most situations, she in pretty relaxed except when asked to go to her right.
Any suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated.
-Rick F in Plano, Texas
A.
Hi Rick,
This is not uncommon, as a lot of horses are one sided. But we do need to get them to work well from both sides.
The horse could be doing this because she is afraid of seeing you out of that eye, or because of past training or a bad experience.
Either way she needs to get used to doing this both ways and be calm about it.
When you say you are longing her, are you sending her front end off or are you trying to chase her butt off?
What you should be doing is standing directly in front of her and asking her to move her shoulders over and go off on the circle. So you stand right in front of her and send her off to the side with the lead line, if she does not go off then you just lift your stick up and direct her nose and neck over until she moves her front end over and takes a step on the circle.
For a lot of horses, when they do not understand what we are asking, they will just start backing up or some, like her, will start striking.
You need to ask her to go off with you far enough away that if she does strike out at you she can not reach you.
Also you need to just hang in there asking softly, not getting harder, for her to move off. She just does not understand or she is afraid, either way you should not start hitting her, you should just hang in there lightly tapping her and moving with her till she moves off.
The next thing is, we need to see and reward the slightest try in our horses. Meaning that when you see her even look in that direction when asking her to do this, that was a try and what you should do is stop asking, stand there for a few seconds and then start asking her to do it again. Then you will build on that and when she takes a step in the right direction we would stop and let her know THAT is what we wanted. Next when she takes 3 steps in the direction we would stop and let her know that she did what was right. You will build on that until she can do it for a few circles and then more.
I would also suggest getting an equine chiropractor out and seeing if there is not a physical reason that she can not go to the right. And maybe even an equine dentist, the teeth have a lot more to do with how our horses move than we think.
Thanks for the question!
Chelsie Kallestad
