Being safe around your horse and your horse being safe is the most important thing to me. People seem to think that as long as the horse rides fine it doesn’t matter what their ground manners are like. It’s normal that horses push and pull you around and it’s something that you just have to put up with when you want to be around horses.
That’s definitely not the case. People can’t be bothered to teach them good ground manners or don’t know how to. Horses can easily injure you on the ground as well as they can when ridden.
To me, all the horse training starts from the ground. If I’ve got no control over the horse on the ground and the horse is spooky and nervous then why would I even want to get on that horse’s back!? And to be honest I wouldn’t!
Horses don’t know what’s right or wrong behaviour. They only know what you teach them or let them get away with. Let’s say if you lead your horse to the paddock and he is pulling all the way there and you never make a correction, he thinks that’s the right thing to do. If you don’t know how to correct him he will always pull.
Horses learn very quickly if you know how to speak their language. I’m not just talking about all the good behaviour. Horses learn bad behaviour just as quick as the good. People don’t usually correct the bad behaviour and over time it just gets worse and worse. Where at first they may be pulling a little and at the time it didn’t seem that bad but over time it just gets worse.
