Falling upon collective COTH wisdom here. I’ve owned my 6-year-old wb/tb mare for about nine months. About a month ago, she started to periodically balk. She stops out of the blue, sometimes rears or bucks a little, and refuses to go forward. She doesn’t keep it up for more than two or three strides, and will settle back into work.
I’m very troubled with behavior as I know it is an issue with ‘forward’ aids from the leg. I called my very experienced coach, whose seen her do this, and I was in tears (there’s a lot of other stuff going on atm, extremely ill parent, money, and depths of a wet and utterly miserable Antipodean winter). Long story short, coach said, ‘its a stage that young and green horses go through ;- you are able to ride through it – what about two lessons a week and I get on first?’ Yes. I thought. Ok.
The mare gets 3-4 rides a week for 30-40 mins each. She is on meadow hay and a small grain-free feed of complete style pellets, a little oil, and pre-biotic/mycotoxin binder. She’s turned out 24/7 in a field on her own in sight and touch of other horses. She’s had her teeth done in February and a saddle check/fit just before Xmas. No health or soundness issues, very good confirmation.
For the first six months we had lessons once a week or so, attended riding club, I did some competition ground de-sensitising, we rode our first test [Training Level] … I was trailering her around to a number of [to her] new environments and she was always good - has a look and think. Then in Feb I had a fall, partly because I was so surprised when coming around the short side on the right rein from C in canter, on a busy arena, she spooked and bronc’ed two or three times. I got back on, unhurt and we finished the session on a better note.
I was in a bad position, [too forward] and didn’t have her in front of the leg or ‘with me’ enough. My previous horse, now retired, my schoolmaster, was easily distracted and spooky so I have developed the tools to keep the focus through years of his much more impressive spooks and spins … The mare and I also recently had a scary incident, the barn owner’s aggressive dog had a go at us while I was leading her past his fenced enclosure. She went up, and while I managed to keep going past she got an arena light post between us, snagging the lead rope which I had to then let go of. Caught her back pretty easily, but it was a really unfortunate event at that stage.
Coach says my seat’s stable, hands ok, calf though is often off when it needs to be on, I need to be quicker and better with the leg aids. I didn’t necessarily want to transition from a schoolmaster albeit a quirky one, to a young horse, and back in Sept was looking for something with a bit more mileage, but tried endless older horses with serious issues of one kind or another. And the mare, then rising six, vet checked perfectly and had/has a generally quiet, and willing to please temperament. I’d seen too many people buy horses too young for them, or too much, and didn’t want to go down that road myself, but this mare was kind of really nice.
Anyway, this current phase is just knocking the stuffing out me, and some collective wisdom at this point would really help.
