Much of the time, pets are bought in the interests of companionship. Some pets could be expected to perform certain duties, like guard dogs are. Mostly, though, pets are brought in as playmates for kids. The responsible dog lover may take his pet to obedience coaching faculties, so that it can learn good habits like going outside on calls of nature and eating just when ordered to do it.

Some pets love to be near their human owners at most times, like the dog. This proximity makes it easier to teach them once you have gone thru some classes letting you know what to train your pets in and the way to do it. The feeling among animal owners seems to be that it can take one class a week over 6 or 8 weeks for training to show effect, whether in the pet owners or the pets. It also takes at least 2 training courses to get the pets to respond constantly to commands and maybe 4 training courses to establish reasonably complete command over them. It might be rather nieve to take your new pet to an obedience trainer and expect to get back a totally unquestioning instantly obeying animal in 6 weeks or so.

Yet, horses appear to be the exception. Folk expect miracles of their pony and the horses’ trainers. I’ve seen a large amount of newbie pony owners with little understanding of riding and even less knowledge of training taking on the task of coaching their horses themselves. Unsurprisingly, all of these folk with no exceptions run into problems. Instead of getting tamed, their pony appear to become uncontrolled and pick up all sorts of unwished-for behaviour patterns. When these horse owners eventually give up and follow the advice of their chums to send the animals to a professional coach, they expect the trainer to reverse all of the training gone wrong and get the horses to become models of perfect behaviour. A good coach can work a good deal of magic with the animals, but is it truly only the animals that need the training?

Horse owners expect trainers to complete the coaching of their horses within so many days or weeks. In all their anxiety, they ignore one major element of successful animal training: the training of the animal owners themselves. Good trainers can get a pony to do practically everything reasonable the owners expect, however it will all come to nothing if the owners are also not trained on what’s expected of them and the way to re-enforce the coaching.

An awful owner can undo a month of good pro coaching in a week.

Think of this: It takes something similar to 2000 repetitions of a command and its enforcement to remove a set habit and another 2000 repetitions to condition a new habit. It can take up to 10,000 repetitions to make unconscious acts of habits. Once you know this, you would be terribly foolish indeed not to realize and accept the owner needs coaching in keeping the pony trained equally as much as the pony wants training in the first place. You should also appreciate that it can take a lot of time and effort to coordinate your responses to that of your horse.

Dog keepers typically appear to have no problem in committing 20 minutes or so a day to helping their dogs absorb their coaching better. Unfortunately, it would appear to be exceedingly tricky to get pony owners to make the same kind of commitment. One understandable reason is probably that the dog can be kept indoors for the period of time necessary, but the owner has to go outside to the horse. Further, a lot of pony owners are bored by ‘basic’ coaching routines, which can often be more complicated than getting a dog to sit or come to heel or beg.

Unless they’re well experienced, pony owners generally do not grasp quite how much success they’d achieve with the right disposition and the right focus. They should learn how to take it a lesson at a time, without unjustified expectations of miracles. They must commence with the fundamentals, like following without pulling away while on the lead. It is hard to train the pony to sit, but without too much effort, it can be made to do stuff like stop and stand in the right position, release to pressure, stand when tied and lead the right way. These lessons will build the type of bond between owner and pony that will later enable excellent rapport while riding or doing any other jobs together. Persistence will soon create a point in time when the owner simply doesn’t want to stay inside, but would prefer to be out there doing something or the other with his horse.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about professional choice

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