Make a Better Riding Horse
Tips for Working with Your Yearlings and Two-Year-Old Sporthorses
Regularly handling yearlings and two-year-old sporthorses not only makes them safer to work with, it sets them up for success under saddle. A regular routine helps them develop confidence and basic manners, which is a huge help when you start them under saddle. Here’s how we help our youngsters learn the basics.
How do the yearlings and two-year-old horses live at the farm?
Our young horses live in stalls and get turned out all night or all day, seasonally. We strive for maximum turnout time, giving them the freedom to just be horses. Bringing them into stalls each day allows us to handle each horse daily and gives us a chance for a mini-training session in leading and ground manners on the way to and from the barn.
What is their daily routine?
During the summer months, the young horses are brought in for the day to give them a break from the sun and flies. They are fed in their stalls and usually nap most of the morning. A few days per week, we will do some additional handling to teach leading skills such as yielding the shoulders or the haunches away from the handler, dropping the poll to pressure, and desensitizing them to basic items like a saddle pad, girth, and bridle as they get older. The key to success for these sessions is to keep them short. We work with one new goal at a time and only for 5-10 minutes, always setting the horse up to end on a good note.
What are common misbehaviors? How do you handle them?
Biting and being mouthy are the most common misbehaviors with youngsters. Horses communicate with each other with their teeth—giving a nip to move another horse out of their space, or when grooming each other. Obviously we can’t tolerate this on us! Although it’s sweet and cute for the youngsters to want to groom humans, we can’t allow it because it leads to nipping.
Teaching your young horse to stay out of your space is the best deterrent to biting. Meaning, they aren’t allowed to bring their head close enough to bite. This is done fairly simply by correcting their head position with a halter and lead. When they move into your personal space, ask them to move back out of it. For a stubborn biter, you can deter them by using your fingertips to pinch their neck and mimic a nip to tell them to move away. The key is to be very quick, both to reprimand and to release, and also to be very consistent about what behavior is acceptable and what is not.
How does their training progress from one to two years of age?
Our horses will all be ridden one day, so our yearling and two-year-old training programs are designed with that progression in mind. When a weanling comes into the barn, despite being handled daily, they tend not to lead well, especially when they are taken away from their friends. So for yearlings we focus on teaching yielding to pressure, confidence when away from buddies, and desensitizing to basic tack items.
For example, if you put pressure on the halter, you want the horse to lower its head. This is a prerequisite for teaching the horse to tie, and also ultimately will help under saddle when the horse is asked to lower its frame and stretch. Yielding the haunches or shoulders away from the handler is another vital skill that the yearlings work on. This makes it easier and safer to lead them and will eventually transfer to under saddle training where they will move their body as directed by a rider.
When do they start their under saddle training?
At ISF, we back our young horses in the fall when they are coming three. It’s not strenuous. The riders familiarize the young horses with being tacked and having a rider sit on them in a stall. They have the winter off and are truly started as riding horses in the late spring the next year.
All of the training and handling they have as youngsters is designed to prepare them for this. Our goal is that the transition should be easy. They are familiarized with tack and equipment prior to the breaking period, and also to respond to cues from a handler in a relaxed manner, so it’s not too many new things at one time.
Why is regularly working with young horses so important?
The overall goal is always to make a calm, confident, willing horse. Starting early means we can take as much time as the horse needs. A relaxed horse will not be pushy, fidgety or dangerous to work around. They will have better focus and better behavior and these qualities will serve them their whole lives, no matter where life takes them.
Need a refresher for how to work with your weanlings? Check out this article.
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