Starting young horses naturally with Parelli and clickers - Part 2

May 8, 5:08 PMClicker Training ExaminerEve Alexander

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Clicker Training Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

This is Part 2 of the my interview with Maxine Easey.

Is there anything different about working with young horses as opposed to adult horses?
I would say the one big thing is to never overestimate your own ability with a young horse. I know one or two people who having passed Level 2 Parelli and maybe having started horses prior to doing Parelli then decide to go about starting a young horse naturally. We took advice ourselves about whether to do this from a number of Parelli professionals. Not one of them said "don't do it" - they would never give a direct answer like that anyway! Some might say "well there is a good reason why Pat does not teach colt starting in the home study material" and others said "the best thing is to get your level 3 then you can do a colt start course". One instructor who knew us well said "well you could always give it a go because the horse will let you know when you need help". That remark alone was enough to make us give up all vague notions we'd had about maybe starting our young horse ourselves.

We were pretty confident we understood the process that we'd need to go through but we just decided it was too big a thing and too important to the life of a young and otherwise perfect horse for us to risk making any mistakes. As it was we came across a Parelli colt start professional who was just getting established in the UK then - James Roberts - and made the very wise decision to send Harley to him to be started professionally. Starting a young horse is the most important thing a person can do with horses in my opinion. The start is EVERYTHING and will affect the kind of life that horse has with humans - for the rest of his life. Harley was with James for 3 weeks, I spent a week there watching and listening and Bryan had two days with James at the end for hand-over of his newly started horse. We both learnt a huge amount from James that we've since applied to both our horses.

A year later and by following the foundation training programme he was given by James to the letter, Harley is my husband's super horse now and at 4 years of age is the best horse he has ever ridden. It makes such a difference having seen many friends horses re-educated using Parelli and how much longer that takes than starting a horse from scratch and having that done professionally.

My views now about this are so strong that if a new horse came into my life tomorrow the first thing I would do - whether he was unstarted or had been started normally - would be to make the investment to get that horse started or re-started by a Parelli colt start professional like James as soon as I possibly could. Bryan has never ridden Harley in a bit, he is light and responsive as a feather and Bryan has become a great leader for him and he's playing in Level 3 and 4 after only a year.

How has (or will) clicker training and Parelli help you get your young horse started under saddle?
Harley is mostly Left Brain Introvert / Extrovert. He is very motivated by food and we have used clicker training to reinforce the timing of his responses and keep him motivated. They've been doing foundation riding patterns in our arena - follow the rail, circles, transitions. If I tell you that it took two short sessions of doing ridden circles for them to achieve perfect circles with Bryan riding with his arms folded then you can see how fast they are moving! I still haven't mastered that with my horse and we've been at it quite a while. We used point to point between barrels when he first wore the saddle to give him somewhere to go and a reason to move his feet using treats and clicker when the got to the barrel.

We use treats and the clicker both in the saddle and on the ground. We've used clicker to reinforce all kinds of every day things - picking up feet, standing still, haltering ... you name it. If the horse looks like he needs a precise indication of the moment when he's done the right thing we use the click.

Back to Part 1 || On to Part 3

More Information
Maxine Easey's Blog
James Roberts Foundation Station
James Roberts Parelli Instructor
Parelli Natural Horsemanship
Karen Pryor Clicker Training