You cannot really expect your horse to never get scared, but you can give him more confidence so he gets scared less often, and you can also teach him to listen to you after he gets scared instead of panicking.
The first step is to get your horse to respect your space. If your horse doesn’t respect your space and doesn’t really care about what you want when he is calm, you cannot expect him to listen to you when he gets scared.
You don’t have any issues 90% of the time
I have seen it many times and I also get a lot of questions regarding these issues.
You don’t really have any issues with your horse 90% of the time, but when there is an issue when your horse gets scared or just doesn’t want to do something, he stops listening to you and it becomes very difficult to correct him.
You can’t properly tell how well your horse listens to you until you get into a stressful situation.
I have been working with a mare (you can see her in one of my videos in the Free Training Series, click here to claim it), she listens to her owner well when she is calm. She respects her owners’ space and does what the owner asks.
When she gets scared of something she has never seen before, it is not very difficult to handle the situation and show her that there is nothing to be afraid of.
What to do when your horse gets scared?
When your horse gets scared, the very first thing that you need to do is to immediately get his attention.
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You can do that by asking him to do simple things one after another. That will get your horse’s mind focused more on you, and less on the scary object.
If you just let your horse stare at the scary object and you don’t do anything, he is going to stop paying attention to you and he will start doing what he considers to be the best.
That can end up being very dangerous for you.
What to keep in mind
It is not very difficult to get your horse to pay attention to you when he gets scared if he is already used to paying attention to you when he is calm.
Also, try to stay calm. Your horse can always tell how you are feeling. If he sees that you are calm, he is likely to calm down as well. Seeing that you are calm will give him confidence that the scary object might not be so scary after all.
If he sees that you are getting stressed, he is going to get even more scared. Your horse is always able to tell when you get scared or stressed, however, he is not able to tell what are you stressed about. He can only tell whether you are calm, or whether you are relaxed. If he gets scared and sees that you got stressed he is going to assume that you are stressed because of the scary object.
So, get your horse to listen to you reliably when he is calm. He should always respect your space and back up in front of you. When he gets scared, stay calm. These two things will make a big difference.
To learn more, and to see an example of how can you get your horse to overcome his fear of a scary object claim my Free Training Series by clicking over here
