Learning to Tie

Horsemanship thoughts for the day...

One of the most valuable lessons a horse can learn... To wait. To be patient. To feel comfortable and secure while tied. This skill (and it is a skill that must be learned/taught) will do more for your horse than you might think. You never know when your horse will need to be tied somewhere, be it just over lunch at a clinic or show or for an extended period of time in an emergency or during a natural disaster.

Unpracticed, this experience could be quite distressing or even become traumatic for your horse and others but with it, being tied to a familiar trailer or even being high-lined in a strange place can be a source of security, a source of comfort even, to a horse who has learned to have positive associations with standing tied.

Young Cuervo (17 month old Kiger gelding) is in the early stages of learning this valuable skill and we are using a high-line to help him learn in order to reduce bad habits like wood chewing or pulling back. He's never left alone, I am always close by to support him and at this stage, with his young mind, his sessions are not long. As his attention span grows, so will the length of time he is asked to stand patiently for and as his skill develops and his understanding of the task grows, we will begin to teach him this skill in a variety of places.

His young mind is building learning pathways and these pathways will be relevant to more tasks than just standing patiently while tied as he matures. Learning this skill now will relate to being patient with his feet for hoof care, learning self control while tolerating vet examinations that require him to give a vet more time than he'd like to and for things a little farther down the trail like waiting for direction under saddle when he'd really rather be doing something else.

Being able to connect the dots between one skill and another helps us to see the value in something that might seem un-necessary or "old fashioned" when it comes to educating horses with life skills. There are quite a few multi-layered skills which can help the horse build useful learning pathways that can apply to more than one skill.