Bad Moods
But what about those days when your horse is just in a bad mood? Maybe he didn't get as much breakfast as he thought he should. Or he spent all night talking to the new horse in the barn.
Why he's cranky doesn't matter, assuming that he's healthy and not sore.
"There are two emotions involved when you're working a horse," Josh said. "There's the horse's emotion and your emotion. You can't let the horse's emotions become yours. Somebody's going to move, no matter what. Either I'm going to pick up the horse's attitude, or the horse is going to adopt mine."
The key, of course, is to convince the horse to do the moving. As Josh puts it, we, in effect, tell the horse, "I can see you're having a bad day. But that doesn't mean I'm going to have a bad day."
Realize that while it's okay for your horse to have a bad day, you're not going to give into his emotions and lose your temper. Instead, work on maneuvers, such as serpentines, that give you better control over your horse.
"We think that one exercise has to be for barn sour, another exercise has to be for ring sour and another exercise has to be for horses in a bad mood," Josh said. "But it's not that way. You can do any exercise you want. It doesn't make a difference. Working on any exercise improves the horse's performance, which earns him a reward, and that improves his attitude."
Ironically, once you've successfully worked through your horse's bad day, you'll often find that the two of you work better than ever together the next day.
"The next day the horse may be amazingly better, but you don't know why," Josh said. "Well, it's because of the day before. Even though you thought you had a bad day, you really got a lot accomplished and you got a lot better control of your horse. So those bad days are really good days because you get more accomplished than you think. It might not feel that way that day, but it will feel that way tomorrow."
Bottom Line
Josh's three-step lesson can help you solve many problems with your horse.
1. Focus on the horse's thought and correct the thought before it becomes an incorrect action.
2. Offer your horse enough incentive so that he'll come to work for you instead of against you.
3. Apply those two principles to your "sour" problems by anticipating his thought and giving him enough work to do that he will focus on the work and not the problem.
These three steps will keep your horse's blue Mondays down to a minimum so that the two of you can enjoy your time together.
