Day sixteen
23 February 2009 17:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glenatronThe morning started bright but very cold with an icy wind coming in and the temperature dropping fast, so we declared it a classroom morning. We spent a while looking at saddles, with Martin explaining how they work and why he tends to choose the ones he does.
A western saddle is built on a tree that consists of two arches at the front and back of the saddle, one providing the pommel and the other the cantle and then two panels that go along the sides and make contact with the horse's back, which are the bars. The pommel can be divided up further into the swell, which is the broad bridge in front of the rider and the horn. The tree itself is traditionally made from wood with rawhide stretched over it, more modern saddles may use fibreglass, which is lighter and more resilient. The rawhide is what gives the tree it's strength. Ray Hunt had a saddle that he loved and seemed to fit most horses so after years of use he asked a saddler to rebuild it for him because the leather was very worn. The saddler found that the tree was broken in six or seven places, just being held together by the rawhide, which explained why it fitted so well...
We looked at some cutting saddles and he showed how the thin bars and the tall swell make for a saddle that is comfortable to sit in but would not be terribly good for roping off- when the rope tightens it will pull the front of the saddle forward and the leverage can be enough to snap the bars. If a horse rolls on the saddle ( always a risk when starting youngstock ) the amount of leverage is often enough to break the tree as well.
On a Wade tree saddle, which is the type a lot of ranch riders favour, the bars are six inches wide and two to three inches longer than a regular western saddle. The swell is also much thinner and the horn wider but less tall. The outcome of this is that tension on the rope applies less leverage to the saddle, meaning it is tipped forward less and because of the wider bars the pressure is dispersed over much more space making it a lot easier for the horse to wear.
When cinching up, it's important to make sure that your cinch is just behind the front legs, which is usually the narrowest point on the horse. If the cinch is further back then it will move to the narrowest point when the horse starts moving, with two likely outcomes- a loose cinch and the cinch having slipped against the direction of the horse's hair. If you put the cinch behind the leg and the narrowest point is a little further back then even if it does slip, it will be going with the horse's hair. Having their hair rubbed up the wrong way is likely to make a colt tighten up and get anxious. Also it puts you closer to the horse's centre of balance, which is the place where you are best equipped to ride them.
Martin showed us how to determine where on a saddle one will be sat as well, looking at the lowest point on the seat and how that relates to the dish of the cantle and the twist of the saddle. If the saddle has a long, flat, low point that will enable you to move around in the saddle a lot. You might need that for roping or cutting but you probably don't riding colts. Martin's regular working saddle has a small low-spot set quite well back and a dished cantle that means once you are sat in the saddle you are fairly hard to shift.
For riding young horses you want your legs to be quite well forward, as that allows you to absorb any unexpected movements- if your leg is too far back and the horse sucks back away from something you have a good chance of ending up on their neck. However, a more upright position with your leg directly below you is a much better position to be in if you are going to be riding all day because it is easier on your muscles and it places you more over the horse's centre of balance.
We then went on to a bit of a Q&A session with Martin for any topics that had come up and we hadn't had time to ask about yet.
Someone asked about the draw-reins someone was using yesterday and Martin talked a bit about his philosophy of not fixing the problem but identifying the cause. In this case the problem was that the horse wasn't carrying their head where you might want them to and Martin tries to look to himself first and work out if there is anything he could be doing as a rider to correct it. The rider yesterday was a reiner and were tending to lean in on their turns, which a lot of riders in that discipline do, and the correction Martin suggested was to move the rider's weight to the outside so that the horse could use their head and neck to counterbalance the rider's position naturally, which would probably have much the same effect.
If you can get your presentation right in any respect, the horse will almost certainly understand and offer the thing you are asking for. Martin spends a lot of time looking for the most efficient way of doing things, partly because he grew up on a ranch doing the jobs of a team of ranch hands with his brothers and if you have to get all your jobs done in time to get home and have any dinner or sleep, you need to be efficient about them.
How can you identify a correct head position? Martin suggests that the most important thing is that the horse can do the job we're asking them for. A lot of the time they know where they need to put their head in order to do that. Sometimes we may know a better way or have a different job from the one they think we are asking for and we may need to change things then. For example yesterday Martin's horse was thinking to trot around the arena rather than loping. This is because he's mostly worked as a ranch horse and trotting is a great way to cover long distances so that is the job he is accustomed to- he can trot faster than most horses canter anyways. Now it was a different situation and so you had a different request of the horse and then some adjustments needed to be made, especially as he could trot so fast that he thought he only needed to lope in order to go faster and so his lope departures began at around 35mph and the lope itself was consequently quick. I wish I had realised this was their first arena session yesterday because I would have seen more that way.
Someone asked about working with the black horse on Friday and whether when a horse is being turned loose and bucking Martin would stop them. He said that he does, but he doesn't move to stop them, he just waits where he was and lets the horse come around the pen to him. If you just let them keep bucking it can becomes a pattern. Martin also disagrees with the idea that if a horse is bucking you should get them to run. That leaves you with a horse that runs when things get anxious. He's had more injuries from horses that fall while running than from bucking. That is the safer and easier problem to fix as far as Martin is concerned.
There was a bit of talk about desensitising the horse as well- if you desensitise the horse ahead of saddling then you have to resensitise them afterwards to get them to move out, you've done a lot of unnecessary work. Much better to set things up so they can accept the saddle and not worry about doing anything you will need to undo later. You can also have a horse that is desensitsed but won't stand still, which is backwards for this work. You need them able to stand but also able to feel what is going on around them.
There was a question about using leg hobbles, which Martin does with some horses, tying up one front leg so the horse can't use it.
Martin observed that there might be several reasons to do this- it's much harder work moving with a leg hobbled so if you have a horse with a lot of energy you can do two minutes with that rather than twenty minutes of running them around without. Also it can be useful to show a horse that it can be more comfortable to stand than to run about. Some horses just get relief from moving their feet and it can be very difficult to set things up so that these horses want to slow down at all. The hobble can help with that.
He pointed out that it's very important how you first teach the horse about the hobble- you need to be able to move their hindquarters before the hobble goes on and then do the same after they go on so the horse immediately knows that they can move. A horse that is afraid to move is more likely to make a large movement and find they can't catch themselves- a horse can easily injure themselves seriously in this way, so the horse has to know they can move straight away.
As a general rule, if Martin can make it more work for the horse to do the thing he doesnt want it to do, he would prefer to do that than to inflict pain on the horse.
Horses will always seek comfort- if a horse is doing something we don't want them to it's because they have learned that they can get comfort from that and all we need to do in order to change it is to show them consistently that the thing we want is more comfortable.
A western saddle is built on a tree that consists of two arches at the front and back of the saddle, one providing the pommel and the other the cantle and then two panels that go along the sides and make contact with the horse's back, which are the bars. The pommel can be divided up further into the swell, which is the broad bridge in front of the rider and the horn. The tree itself is traditionally made from wood with rawhide stretched over it, more modern saddles may use fibreglass, which is lighter and more resilient. The rawhide is what gives the tree it's strength. Ray Hunt had a saddle that he loved and seemed to fit most horses so after years of use he asked a saddler to rebuild it for him because the leather was very worn. The saddler found that the tree was broken in six or seven places, just being held together by the rawhide, which explained why it fitted so well...
We looked at some cutting saddles and he showed how the thin bars and the tall swell make for a saddle that is comfortable to sit in but would not be terribly good for roping off- when the rope tightens it will pull the front of the saddle forward and the leverage can be enough to snap the bars. If a horse rolls on the saddle ( always a risk when starting youngstock ) the amount of leverage is often enough to break the tree as well.
On a Wade tree saddle, which is the type a lot of ranch riders favour, the bars are six inches wide and two to three inches longer than a regular western saddle. The swell is also much thinner and the horn wider but less tall. The outcome of this is that tension on the rope applies less leverage to the saddle, meaning it is tipped forward less and because of the wider bars the pressure is dispersed over much more space making it a lot easier for the horse to wear.
When cinching up, it's important to make sure that your cinch is just behind the front legs, which is usually the narrowest point on the horse. If the cinch is further back then it will move to the narrowest point when the horse starts moving, with two likely outcomes- a loose cinch and the cinch having slipped against the direction of the horse's hair. If you put the cinch behind the leg and the narrowest point is a little further back then even if it does slip, it will be going with the horse's hair. Having their hair rubbed up the wrong way is likely to make a colt tighten up and get anxious. Also it puts you closer to the horse's centre of balance, which is the place where you are best equipped to ride them.
Martin showed us how to determine where on a saddle one will be sat as well, looking at the lowest point on the seat and how that relates to the dish of the cantle and the twist of the saddle. If the saddle has a long, flat, low point that will enable you to move around in the saddle a lot. You might need that for roping or cutting but you probably don't riding colts. Martin's regular working saddle has a small low-spot set quite well back and a dished cantle that means once you are sat in the saddle you are fairly hard to shift.
For riding young horses you want your legs to be quite well forward, as that allows you to absorb any unexpected movements- if your leg is too far back and the horse sucks back away from something you have a good chance of ending up on their neck. However, a more upright position with your leg directly below you is a much better position to be in if you are going to be riding all day because it is easier on your muscles and it places you more over the horse's centre of balance.
We then went on to a bit of a Q&A session with Martin for any topics that had come up and we hadn't had time to ask about yet.
Someone asked about the draw-reins someone was using yesterday and Martin talked a bit about his philosophy of not fixing the problem but identifying the cause. In this case the problem was that the horse wasn't carrying their head where you might want them to and Martin tries to look to himself first and work out if there is anything he could be doing as a rider to correct it. The rider yesterday was a reiner and were tending to lean in on their turns, which a lot of riders in that discipline do, and the correction Martin suggested was to move the rider's weight to the outside so that the horse could use their head and neck to counterbalance the rider's position naturally, which would probably have much the same effect.
If you can get your presentation right in any respect, the horse will almost certainly understand and offer the thing you are asking for. Martin spends a lot of time looking for the most efficient way of doing things, partly because he grew up on a ranch doing the jobs of a team of ranch hands with his brothers and if you have to get all your jobs done in time to get home and have any dinner or sleep, you need to be efficient about them.
How can you identify a correct head position? Martin suggests that the most important thing is that the horse can do the job we're asking them for. A lot of the time they know where they need to put their head in order to do that. Sometimes we may know a better way or have a different job from the one they think we are asking for and we may need to change things then. For example yesterday Martin's horse was thinking to trot around the arena rather than loping. This is because he's mostly worked as a ranch horse and trotting is a great way to cover long distances so that is the job he is accustomed to- he can trot faster than most horses canter anyways. Now it was a different situation and so you had a different request of the horse and then some adjustments needed to be made, especially as he could trot so fast that he thought he only needed to lope in order to go faster and so his lope departures began at around 35mph and the lope itself was consequently quick. I wish I had realised this was their first arena session yesterday because I would have seen more that way.
Someone asked about working with the black horse on Friday and whether when a horse is being turned loose and bucking Martin would stop them. He said that he does, but he doesn't move to stop them, he just waits where he was and lets the horse come around the pen to him. If you just let them keep bucking it can becomes a pattern. Martin also disagrees with the idea that if a horse is bucking you should get them to run. That leaves you with a horse that runs when things get anxious. He's had more injuries from horses that fall while running than from bucking. That is the safer and easier problem to fix as far as Martin is concerned.
There was a bit of talk about desensitising the horse as well- if you desensitise the horse ahead of saddling then you have to resensitise them afterwards to get them to move out, you've done a lot of unnecessary work. Much better to set things up so they can accept the saddle and not worry about doing anything you will need to undo later. You can also have a horse that is desensitsed but won't stand still, which is backwards for this work. You need them able to stand but also able to feel what is going on around them.
There was a question about using leg hobbles, which Martin does with some horses, tying up one front leg so the horse can't use it.
Martin observed that there might be several reasons to do this- it's much harder work moving with a leg hobbled so if you have a horse with a lot of energy you can do two minutes with that rather than twenty minutes of running them around without. Also it can be useful to show a horse that it can be more comfortable to stand than to run about. Some horses just get relief from moving their feet and it can be very difficult to set things up so that these horses want to slow down at all. The hobble can help with that.
He pointed out that it's very important how you first teach the horse about the hobble- you need to be able to move their hindquarters before the hobble goes on and then do the same after they go on so the horse immediately knows that they can move. A horse that is afraid to move is more likely to make a large movement and find they can't catch themselves- a horse can easily injure themselves seriously in this way, so the horse has to know they can move straight away.
As a general rule, if Martin can make it more work for the horse to do the thing he doesnt want it to do, he would prefer to do that than to inflict pain on the horse.
Horses will always seek comfort- if a horse is doing something we don't want them to it's because they have learned that they can get comfort from that and all we need to do in order to change it is to show them consistently that the thing we want is more comfortable.
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Date: 23 Feb 2009 04:01 (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Feb 2009 04:03 (UTC)