mvp–Have you worked this horse much in a round pen? Let me tell you a story that shows why I ask this.
Six years ago, I went shopping for a school horse for my college equestrian club to practice on. Was looking for cheap and tolerant. Now, I admit up front that I haven’t bought a lot of horses in my day, I tend to be a long-term owner and am no kind of professional; I was faculty/staff advisor for the team and did coaching out of necessity but I’m the first to admit it was, literally, pretty backyard. We’re a small school in an area of little developed horse activity. Anyhow, I was looking for cheap. I didn’t really need another horse, but the horse I was trying to develop my own horsemanship with was carrying too much of the load (like, all of it) and he needed help. I finally found a fellow in a very low-rent sale barn who looked sound and seemed to be tolerant. And, since shopping for cheap horses is one of the most depressing things one can spend time doing, I was ready to be done with it, and the horse needed to get out of where he was. Anyhow, he did well for the club for a while, but outside of a strict, rigid, insensitive management, the real horse inside began to come out. Turns out, he was pretty shut down, tolerating the crude riding he was getting, but suffering for it. Eventually, the equestrian club moved on to a professional coach, and I began working more with this little horse myself. Very much like the horse you describe, stiff, not athletic, resistant.
His exposure to horse-centric horsemanship allowed him to come out of his shell, and it wasn’t always pretty. I wasn’t the softest person in the world at that point myself, and kept getting into tussles with this horse. One day, my horsemanship guru, a good student of Buck’s, took the horse from me when we were doing ground work in a clinic situation. This guy has impecable timing and feel, and within seconds, the horse’s eyes got big as saucers, and you could clearly see him saying “Finally! It IS possible to communicate with these creatures!!”
My problem was that I needed to tone down everything I did with him–he was, it turned out, an incredibly sensitive horse, but he’d gone so far inside himself because of his life of unsensitive and unfair handling.
One of the things we did with our horses was to do some round pen work. Not to get ya-yas out, but to learn to operate our horses by feel, from a distance, without any physical contact. I found it easy to get upward transitions with this horse, but I struggled, and struggled, and struggled to get downward transitions. “Lower your energy” I was told. Okay, but HOW? Well, you have to figure that out. Try relaxing your body; think lower energy; walk slower; stand still. Nope; no fooling this horse. Finally, one day, working on my own, I said to myself, “I know it sounds hokey, it doesn’t seem possible, but I’ll try it. I’ll try it.” The horse was trotting nicely around the pen, pretty well hooked on to me, but I could NOT get a trot-walk transition without physically blocking him. Instead, I stopped, took a deep breath, let it out slowly, thinking of dropping my energy, letting my shoulders relax, sinking into the ground.
By the time I’d let the breath all the way out, he was walking.
To this day, I never use a voice cue when I’m in the roundpen or lunging (yes, I do both). For an upward transition, I raise my line hand and move it toward the front of the horse, pick up the energy in my walk; for downward transitions, it’s always my breathing.
Not only is the horse sensitive, he’s incredibly honest. I have to be careful what I think about when I’m riding him, or he’ll start doing what I’m thinking about. And he always tells me when I’m not being honest with myself. Always. But, today, all of the wrinkles are out of his face, he has a happy expression, he’s gained weight and condition. He will never be athletic, but he’s balanced, supple, forward, responsive. There are still demons in there, but generally he’s happy in his work. He is, quite literally, a different horse.
Don’t overlook the possibility that you don’t need to be firmer with your leg to teach him what the lighter aid means. Perhaps you need to be softer. And perhaps you need to try a different venue to get in touch with this horse.
