Step One: Work on it at Home
Before you even think about going out on a trail ride practice at home first. I recomand being comfortable at both walk and trot before hiting the trail. Why? Because spooky horses don’t care whether or not you are comfortable riding a walk or trot. They just spook. And some horses spook forward into faster gaits. The more comfortable you are going fast the easier it will be to handle a horse spooking on a trail ride. Its also a good idea to try and despook your horse at home. The more a horse sees and gets used to the less it will spook at on the trail. The other benfit of despooking your horse before the trail ride is that you can see what kind of spooker your horse is. Some horses jump forward, some jump sideways, some totally lose it and bolt a couple miles before they turn around. Each horse handles situtations differently, but if you pay attention you begin to see patterns in how they react. If you know what kind of spook your horse does it won’t make you so scared to experience it on the trail.
Step Two: Ride with a Buddy
If you have a young horse, or a horse you are unsure about, take your first couple trail rides with an experienced friend. Even here at West Wind, we take the babies out with another experienced horse for the first couple of trail rides. The experienced horses help keep the young one from flipping out. When the young horses get scared they look around to see if anyone else is nervous. Since the more experienced horses are used to the trail, they clamly keep on walking, which reasures the young ones. If you, as the rider, don’t think that you can reasure you horse, then riding with a experienced buddy should do the trick.
Step Three: Dealing with the Spook
Once you get on the trail realize that your horse will spook. You can’t completely prevent it. Experience and time will making spooking occur less, but even the most experienced of horse will spook. So how do we deal with spooks? As the spook is happening, do a one rein stop. A one rein stop is picking up on one rein, and asking your horse to bend his head and neck. You want to hold the contact on the rein until the horses feet stop moving, soften their jaw to the rein aid, and relax throughout their body. This rein aid will stop your horse from doing just about anything, once you’ve practiced it enough during non-spook moments to make the reaction a conditioned response. When done correctly, your horse can’t run off and can’t rear or buck, as it disables movement. This is a very useful rein aid in any emergency.
Once your horse is calm, evaluate the reason for the spook. If it was turkeys flying up directly in front of it, you can just continue on with the trail ride because they turkeys aren’t going to stick around for your horse to smell. If it is an object, let your horse approach it and check it out. If you don’t feel comfortable allowing your horse to approach it while in the saddle, just get off and approach it together on the ground. There is nothing wrong with hopping for your horse and staying within your comfort zone. Trail rides are supposed to be fun, so don’t put yourself in a situation were you are going to end up stressed out or hurt. Allow your horse to smell the object and get a good look at it. Take your time, you don’t want to make your horse feel rushed because that will only created a more stressful situation for your horse.
REALIZE that your horse wasn’t trying to be naughtly, he/she was scared. When a horse is scared or nervous you can’t push them. You have to keep the pressure at phase one. Pushing a horse will only create more problems. Once your horse has calmed down, go ahead and continue the ride.