How To Teach A Horse To Come When Called 🐴

Today we're going to be talking about teaching your horse how to come to you on command. This is a wonderful skill to be able to teach your horse, whether you are working them at Liberty or you're going out to the pasture and you want them to come up to you. So I'm going to be working with Harley, who's right over here, and Harley has not been taught how to come to me. So I'm going to walk up and call him and we're going to see what he does. Harley, come here Harley. Harley, come on buddy. Come on Harley. So you can see how Harley's pretty disinterested and is not coming over. So I'm going to be working with him a little bit and then I'm going to bring him back and show you guys the progress that he's made. So I've worked with Harley a little bit on coming to me. I'm going to call him, we're going to see how he does. Harley, come here boy. Good boy. Hi handsome. How are you today? Good job buddy. So now I'm going to walk you through the steps of what I did with Harley to teach him to come to me like this. So the skills that I used during this process were lunging, round penning, and lastly liberty work in a bigger area. In all of these skills I was focusing on making sure Harley was relaxed and focused on me. I did this through reading his body language. Reading his body language allows me to be able to recognize the signs of when he is focused and when he's not and to use my body appropriately. So now let's look at an overview of me working with Harley. In my first session with Harley I worked on drawing him in on the lunge line by backing in a circle and gathering the line into my right hand. So I'm using my left hand to gather the line up and as he came into me I would just stop and reward him. So I worked on this with Harley until he could come up to me on a loose line. So I'm backing up as he comes up on this loose line I'm going to introduce a hand cue which is going to be my cue to come to me. In the second session I increased the speed to a trot. So I'm doing the same thing gathering up that line backing in a circle and when Harley trots up to me I'm going to reward him. I end this session where Harley could trot up to me on a nice loose line. So I give him the cue with my hand and he comes right up to me. Once we got to this stage in the third session I worked Harley in the round pen. So here I'm working on asking him to come in again with my hand signal and here he comes up you can see how he's kind of looking off to his right and thinking about leaving and right there he acts on that thought and leaves me. So I went ahead and corrected him and just worked him around a little bit asked him to refocus on me. So right here he's focused so I'm going to ask him to come in you can see how his ears go forward to me and he walks nice and confidently. So we ended our session by the fourth session we got to this place where I could cue Harley to come in and he would just walk straight up to me and then at this point I gave him a treat to make the cue more positive. So in our fifth session we worked on going into the indoor arena it's a bigger space and you can see how Harley is staying nice and close to me he's very focused on me and this is the stage where I know he can work in this bigger space and I can bring him back to me. And here he's responding really nice by trotting up to me when I ask him to and did a great job. So I hope these tips are a help to you if you're teaching your horse to come to you. Harley did an awesome job working with me such a smart handsome guy so really did a wonderful job learning this skill and remember if you're teaching this to your horse at home to just be patient every horse is different they all learn differently so go through your steps keep looking for the little tries and enjoy your horses. I'll see you in the next video.