Anyone have this issue? How did you fix ? I am talking full on bolt and bucking, not just a few spooky steps. Want to get some ideas.
Is the saddle causing the horse pain?
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Warwick Schiller has a great video on teaching a horse to stand still when mounting. First, make sure the saddle isn’t bothering them, and someone gets on and takes a light seat and doesn’t flop down. Have you tried having someone mounting while he is on a lead rope getting some grain/candy? Make it a positive experience, it might have been painful prior.
https://youtu.be/cfuRH383Lio
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I think we need more info on what is happening. Is it while the rider is still on the block? While rider is midway in the air? Or is rider fully in the saddle before it happens? Each scenario points to a different problem.
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Is the horse in pain or anticipating pain?
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I just solved a mounting problem with my new horse. It was not pain related with him.
Does the tack fit this horse? Is he back sore? Potential Kissing Spines? Just with the mounting block?
Can you give us a detailed play by play of the event?
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Its as you swing your leg over. Horse is fine once under saddle, very relaxed and works well. Just a mounting issue. I have been patient and I have done a lot of just standing in arena with saddle on and just putting my foot and weight in stirrup. There are other factors (grain high and not been in work ) but I’m looking for a long term plan.
Have you checked the horse’s back to see if it is painful? Run your thumbnail alongside the horse’s spine (both sides) along the big muscles. Does the horse dip his back? Snap his teeth or shoot you angry looks? If so, his back hurts and when you mount it will increase the pain.
If the back does hurt then you need to give him a week or so off, and investigate why the back hurts: poor saddle fit, arthritis in the hocks, etc.
If the back doesn’t hurt, then look at the way you’re mounting. Are you doing it from a block? Are you settling lightly into the saddle?
If none of those are problems, then re-teach how to be mounted as though he were a youngster. Clicker training is really helpful for this, but you can do it just by being really positive, and going incrementally step by step, praising him for every step that he gets right.
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you might have one of those horses that you always have to take care when mounting. Not that that’s ever a bad idea anyway, since the most dangerous time you are on a horse is when one foot it’s in the stirrup. If you have to have a grounds person hold the bridle, spend a million years yanking and slapping a stirrup, , wiggling the saddle, playing up-down, up-down WITH a helper. . . .i don’t like dealing with mounting issues by letting the horse walk off or circle, and feel sometimes even backing a horse up can be counter productive. Unfortunately, fixing issues takes as long as it takes, and sensitivity and feel towards if a given exercise is making it worse or helping is hard to do without laying eyes on the critter.
Are you mounting from the ground?
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Another thing to consider if it’s not pain related - mount in corner or facing a fence or wall. It often helps if there is no where for them to jump.
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This is what I did with my horse. We broke it down step by step and kept it very basic. It took two people, one practicing stages of mounting, and one holding him using a lunge line.
​​​​​​At one point I just had to put my foot in the stirrup, lay across him, take my foot out of the stirrup and ask him to walk. This is typically when he’d go flying sideways. I hung onto the saddle and just stayed with him, when he settled, he was rewarded and we repeated again and again until he was comfortable.
I touched him behind the saddle, on his off side, I snapped the Stirrups loudly, I let them bump him on his side, I treated him like he knew nothing!
​​​​​​It took about 2 weeks for him to be solid. He went from not being able to be approached with a mounting block, or losing it when I swung over to being able to “self park” at the block, get in position, wait, I mount, he walks when I signal. Just took consistency and basics. And my guy was new to me, I think he was sensitive to that.
When did this horse start this? Out of nowhere? Coming back to work? Change of rider?
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Not a lot of background information to go by, age, how long its been under saddle, what has been his “job”, what’s being asked and how often? Steady in training, ridden or the occasional rider etc.
Without pretty hard to give any sound advise. A video may speak a 1000 words. Body language of the horse, rider and or handler can and does speak volumes.
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Do some in hand training. Do lots of walk and halt. Make sure the horse stands still and waits for you. Make your commands precise and clear. If the horse tries to walk off with you then you need to reinforce submission. And no that doesn’t mean beating on it or screaming. It just means you correct fairly so the horse understands he is to submit to you.
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Make sure you aren’t jabbing the horse in the ribs with your toe.
A horse instinctively wants to move away especially when you are at their side. So you have to train him to stand and wait for you.
peppermint are great for this,
my horse would sometimes walk off with me. It wasn’t dangerous per se ; just disrespectful.
After he realized he got a peppermint for standing still he stands like a rock.
As a matter of fact he won’t move until he gets his peppermint,
hope this helps.
good luck
OP, you underscored the fact that this is a real-- he’s breaking all kinds of laws and doesn’t care about the consequences-- kind of bolt?
IMO, that has just two causes:
- Pain that sharp and surprising… or he knows about it and it’s intense.
- A huge hole in his work ethic and a bit of an opportunist/criminal mind. That is to say, this horse was looking for a loophole that would get him out of work and he found it.
Assuming it’s not pain, I think you have to address the training issue. IMO, it has two parts:
- Does he know what the right answer is? And there is only one: He stands with all four feet planted until asked to move.
- Does he think that “getting his head in the game” and doing as he is asked is worth his while? If not, if this horse thinks work is option and he’s willing to find and exploit your physical vulnerability when mounting, then I think you need to fix that Mother Of All Training Issues.
2a. Even worse: This horse had someone correct a smaller infraction about mounting before, but they only did it half way (they didn’t really fix the work ethic problem), so now this horse knows the right answer, knows we won’t correct him while swinging a leg over, knows he doesn’t want to work and knows that he’ll have to do something even bigger to get what he wants. And that’s how he got to full on bolting and bucking. If this is your horse, proceed with caution. You will need to become a smarter, braver, more committed and athletic trainer than you have been in the past in order to fix it.
There is a bit of a third option-- this horse isn’t a thug looking to hurt you or scare you into not riding him. Rather, he stumbled across a strategy that earned him time off once and, being smart, he’s going to do it again. But usually, this kind of horse’s form of resistance isn’t as quick and aggressive as bolting.
If he were mine and I knew that he knew he was doing something that was designed to intimidate is rider, I’d really re-focus on obedience in all I did with him, from the minute I caught him up to the minute I let him back out after work. This is the kind of horse that should be in the habit of saying “Yes, ma’am” so that they don’t think that saying no (by galloping hard when I have one foot in the stirrup) is an option. With respect to mounting, there are a lot of ways to train that stillness while you are at any stage in mounting. It takes a bit of skill and athleticism from the rider, but it can be done. If you want to go there, I can explain how I have been taught to do this. But that’s a whole other long post and it might not be applicable to your situation or taste in training.
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I would make sure the horse is in the right frame of mind before attempting to mount. Do some intense round pen work, or free lunge in the arena first.
I hate to even go here, but do you mount well? If a person is heavy or not strong enough to spring up fairly lightly from the ground when mounting, it can cause major discomfort to the horse.
Do you plop down heavily once your leg is over? Again this is extremely unpleasant for the horse.
Lastly does the saddle fit? It might pinch or cause pressure at a certain point in the mounting process.
If someone is standing at his head while you mount, is he more controllable? Or does he try to drag them off?
We really need more info . Like age of horse, is he well broke, etc…
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Argh this description is so perfect it’s giving me flashbacks
I bought a young horse last year. I’ve had youngsters before. I’ve always been one to give the horse the benefit of the doubt – fear, pain, feed, turnout, workload etc. Issue first showed up less than 2 days into ownership. First pro thought he might have a screw loose, second pro thought he’d fixed it . . . but horse found a different opportunity with me. Horse went back to seller in the end. I lost quite a bit of money but am so grateful I wasn’t hurt.
I suspect this horse was a textbook case of 2b – that he kind of went along with it when being broken but didn’t ever get pushed enough to have to work through stuff-he-didn’t-like.
No advice OP but stay safe & good luck.
Mounting problems: We had one this year that would not stand for mounting at all. He was bad enough that I gave the riders leg-up on him while he was walking, and that worked initially to get a rider on. Once he was getting a little less tense about the whole mounting thing, we were able to retrain him (initially he couldn’t even focus so we couldn’t even do that). We led him to the mounting block, gave him a treat while the rider was mounting, and then the rider gave him a treat after he was mounted. That way he stayed still after mounting looking for the treat. It worked.
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I’d go all the way back to the beginning with this horse - now that he knows this response, he is likely to use it in other situations. If you do some desensitizing with him, I’d not be surprised to find that he is either touchy on his sides or reacts to something coming into his field of vision from up and behind. And you MUST let him make the wrong decision - run away - so he can eventually make the right decision - stand still. So having someone hang onto him or bribing him with carrots does not solve the basic problem of anxiety.
Someone else mentioned W Schiller - he has a series on a bucking quarter horse that is really good. The horse is already broke and been showing, but has increasingly started bucking off the rider and trainer. Schiller shows how to find the root of the problem and fix it.
Yikes! So glad you didn’t get hurt, too.
Don’t feel bad about finding one who chose you to use as the person who would answer the question about whether the rules of being ridden “really applied… in all times… and all places…” That’s a natural question for horses to ask. IMO, it we don’t get to raise it (though we do/should put some pressure on them so that they decide to ask it while we can successfully answer it). And! There are different ways that horses show they will do the job in the short term or for one person, but that they aren’t yet convinced that they will have to punch that time card and really to the job for whoever else rides them.
The way my very kind, nice hunter did this when he was being started was just to hump his back. I had him started by a very good western trainer who read him right and who rode him right. I was cool with her taking the time he needed and we both thought that was 60 days. It was, and he had WTC, steering, even when I rode him. But she called me up and said “Yanno… he’ll do it all, but he hasn’t really accepted that he has to do it all.” So I left him for another 30 days so that she could finish the work ethic conversation with him that she had started. I think that was money well spent.
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