Double Dans - Introducing your horse to a new environment

This article is from the February 2019 Horse Deals magazine.

Introducing a green or a young horse to competitions or events can be a little daunting and therefore cause your horse to feel anxious about performing away from home. To help you through this I have three helpful tips that will make it a smooth and confident transition for your horse. These hints are what has helped both Dan James and I introduce our horses to our arena performances, competitions also as clinic demo horses. Pictured above is our newest horse Chuck who won his first competition, the K Ranch Cowboy Christmas Reining Cow Horses Classic and the following weekend performed at his first major show, Equitana 2018, all using this same process.

1 - Warming up with the same routine that you would use at home when warming your horse up for a schooling session. One of the things that I try to do is ensure that I have an effective warm up and cool down portion of my teaching program when training my horse. When taking a young horse out whether it be to a clinic or a competition, I warm them up with the same warm up drills that I would do at home.

So I don’t confuse the horse, I only use three main drills in my warm up and transition through those main drills until my horse feels nice, relaxed and confident like he would do if he were at home prior to him starting his training. When doing this away at an event, this can be anywhere from five minutes to an hour of working on my warm up drills and only the horse will dictate to me when he is ready to continue his schooling. This to me makes it an easy transition for the horse when he is taken out and he knows the rider hasn’t changed and that the only thing that has changed is the location.

2 - Leave the schooling at home. The last thing I want to do when I am out, particularly with competing or taking a young horse out, is put pressure on a young horse to try and quickly learn anything new when taking him out.

What I mean by this is if I am going to a competition and lets say one manoeuvre for the competition is a flying lead change and I have never done one on my horse before, I am not going to go out and try and school my horse at the competition to learn how to do a flying lead change so I do better in the competition. If anything, I try and ride my horses 10% less than what they are giving me at home to ensure that I am not pushing my horses when I go out and having them resent competition. So, I will leave all schooling to when my horse is at his home environment and only look at maintaining my horse at a competition and ride to what he already knows.

3 - You will need to stay relaxed and be confident. When I take my horses out of their home environment, I ride them until they are happy and what I mean by happy is really relaxed and confident and if I find that the horse hits that desired state of mind then I will take them back and pack them up immediately. If in the first 10 to 15 minutes or 30 minutes my horses are feeling really relaxed and confident, I will then pack them up. Although it’s only a short amount of time, I do this so the horses know that there isn’t a means to an end and the quicker they start to feel good then the quicker that session will be over. It is a way of resetting your horses mentally, so he goes back and has a moment. This means I can go back and hop on him again and do this multiple times when taking a young horse out to the point that when I immediately hop on him and start my warm up drills, they are feeling relaxed, confident and happy so that they see going away from home to be a relaxing time rather than an anxious time.

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