Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Helping out a Therapeutic Riding Center

Tonight I spent about 90 mins helping a head trainer at a therapeutic riding center. The owner of the center has asked me to come work for her and it's not a great fit for me, but I said I could give some training time. I think she's interested in me riding and training the horses, but I feel pretty strongly that I'd be much more help training the people that train the horses. There's just no sense in training horses if the people riding and handling them don't follow suit. Horses are too easy to untrain.

I helped with a hippo-therapy horse. He was sometimes giving trouble by being very mouth with the handles and sometimes leading out ahead of his handler. I taught a couple of the handlers a few things that would help them manage the horse by giving the horse the choice. They were interested in this way of doing things and they seemed to really understand. I hope they will adopt the methods I showed them, but I don't know. People are habitual. If they don't have someone there helping them do things a better way, they'll resort to habit.

Kendall came with me and got to ride the horse while I did some teaching. She was pretty tickled! Good for her.

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