Horseback Riding 101

Lesson 5: Where Do I Go From Here?

How to work in the open, without a fence line

If you are working in a field at home or other place without a fence line, these exercises are a bit more difficult. But you can still do them by using imaginary fence lines. You will probably find landmarks you can use as corner boundaries: a big tree, the sightlines for the edge of the barn and your neighbor’s silo, or whatever. You can also prepare the field by setting out 55-gallon drums at selected corners; make sure they are weighted and won’t fall or blow over while your are working, especially if they are the plastic kind. Be sure to introduce your horse to these freestanding objects that may look strange to him. You can walk him on a lead rope into a field where you have put a couple of them before mounting. Then mount and walk him in the same field, not necessarily as close to them as you will when you ride them as arena corners, but increasingly near them to be sure he understands they are just stuff he doesn’t have to worry abut, and not horse-eating monsters. When you’re sure he regards them as ‘natural,’ begin to work the exercises.

(For corner markers, you can use any object you can easily see as sightlines, but the drums are particularly good; later, you can make them into jumps! Sawhorses are another possibility, although set up just normally, they look jumpable—or scary—to a horse, and you don’t want that yet. Don't use old chairs; while most horses are quite used to seeing people sitting in chairs, a great many of them are unnerved by empty chairs. Flagpoles with flapping flags also might upset some horses. In short, you want a solid object that the horse has seen before, or that he won't think is anything that might eat him. Even if they haven’t seen them before, most horses tolerate traffic cones very well, and those can be another good choice, as long as they are weighted not to blow down. Plus, they can be useful later for exercises in which you are marking and riding a very specific path.)

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