Horse Training in New Zealand
From Wild Stallion to Mild Gelding
At the end of the month of February I spent two months training a bush bred, rising three year old stallion. I’m going to condense our time together into several small posts, 60 days of training is a lot of repetition and tedium, what follows is his story.
Part I
When I first arrived at the property in Northland New Zealand, I noticed a young horse had been separated into a side paddock away from the rest of the herd. Once a few days had gone by and I had had the chance to settle in and visit with most of the horses, I decided I need a project horse to train. I asked my host if he had any plans for “the bay” in the electric fence paddock and was told his name was Johnny and no, he didn’t have any plans, he was put in there because he didn’t respect the normal fences.
That afternoon, I grabbed a small bucket of sweet feed and walked to his pen, climbed under the fence and sat down in the grass about 30 meters away from him. He had been alone for at least a month and I knew that after so long by himself he was probably bored and ready to interact. As I sat in the grass, with no expectations concerning him, he “causally” wandered up behind me and sniffed/rubbed my arm, when enjoying the lovely summer weather. After 3 days of paddock visit in which I sat with him for less than a hour and left the bucket of feed for him after each visit, he was addicted to the feed. I could touch him on his face while he ate on my visit to the paddock the third day. He had so many ticks on his face, that he did not really enjoy it when I started rubbing his face.
Once I could start touching him a little, and he was comfortable walking up to me, I judged that it was time to start proper training.
I needed him in a smaller spaced area, and with the help of my friend Sandrine, we moved him into a smaller working pen. I worked with him in a very small space attached to the working pen, about 100 square feet (8’X15′), and was able to touch his withers and set a rope on his neck. Then I lured him with a bucket of sweet feed into a squeeze shoot and slowly started working with his head.
He was very reactive to me being near his head or trying to touch it. Over the span of 2 days working for 1 hour each day, I began slowly building his trust by brushing his mane and tail, scratching his hard to reach places and letting him get used to seeing me with only one eye (his right eye the bad side, we worked more on). When I am working with horses to build trust, I try to clear my mind and focus just on them, this keeps my emotions true to the moment. So often, when we are interacting with our horses, we are thinking about what needs to be done at work or what happened earlier, that we forget to just “be”. I like to start each training session with the verbal statement to my horse of “I see you”, to me this means I will forget my other concerns and just focus on them.
It was during our work in the shoot that I changed his name. With his classic confirmation and the white down his face, I did not think he fit the name Johnny. He has an irregular blaze on the right side that has caused the right eye to show a more distinctive white ring around his iris, removing the “soft” look that his left eye gives him. His right side, with its “hard” eye and wild warrior mane, made me think of Roman, and it felt right.
