Beginning Ground Work With Young Horses

Series Summary

Man enjoys a unique relationship with horses. Horses have bravely carried us into battle. They have helped us travel over long stretches of terrain. In some parts of the world they still pull farmers' plows and carry loads and are indispensable in herding and driving cattle. Regardless of the task, all horses must be trained. Learn how to start groundwork training with young horses in this free horse training video series featuring horse trainer and Hampshire College equestrian team coach Mara Keith-Hunter. Keith-Hunter will demonstrate a number of training skills. She will explain how to get a young horse out of the paddock, and how to lead a young horse from the left and right. Keith-Hunter will demonstrate how to introduce a young horse to tying, and other tying steps and strategies. Lastly she will be explain how to prepare and train a young horse for lunging, and how to put a sircingle on a young horse, how to circle a horse and how to make a horse go forward and come back.

Video Transcript

"Today we'll be talking about how to begin ground work for a young horse. It is important when doing ground work with a young horse that you have someone with experience with young horses. If not you can find yourself in dangerous situations that could be scarring for both you and your horse. I have a few things today that we'll be using to begin the work with a young horse. It's important that we have an assortment of lunge lines. You'll notice I have one that has a chain and a couple that don't. And we'll use these for leading as well as for beginning tying your horse and also cross tying your horse. The lunge line allows you to have some give if your horse gets scared and runs, whereas a regular leading line is short enough that your horse can get away from you. I also have yarn and we are going to use this to tie on to the horse's halter so that if you get into an emergency situation the tie will break rather than your horse getting scared and flipping out. I also have a towel and saddle pad and we use these to do what we call sacking out the horse and this will be just basically flapping on the horse to get them accustomed to things on their backs."