How To Gain A Horse's Trust 💕

Welcome. Today I'm going to be talking about building your horse's trust. This is something that is such an important topic. We love our horses. We enjoy being around them. We want them to enjoy being around us. So how do we build their trust? Well, today I'm going to be sharing with you some key things that have helped me to build my horse's trust, and hopefully they'll be a help to you as you work your horse at home. If you like what you see on this channel, you can subscribe so you never miss another video. So the first step to building your horse's trust is establishing a connection. How do we establish a connection with our horse? Well, to establish a connection, we need to have a clear, consistent form of communication. And in order to communicate with our horse, we need to understand how they communicate with one another. Horses communicate primarily through body language. Here I have a clip of a couple horses out in the pasture communicating with one another through body language. Now this differs a little bit from us in that we also use our body to communicate when we're talking to each other in conversation, but we do a lot of our responses are based on the verbal cues we're getting. So the tone of someone's voice, if it's excited or if it's, you know, sounds frustrated. And when we're working with our horses, because they are taking all their cues from our body and not from our voice, it's really important that we're present and that we're really providing clear direction with our body by being consistent in the way that we're using it and how we're asking our horse to do the different movements we're doing. This consistency is going to build confidence in the cue system we're using, and that's going to result in a horse that is much more trusting in the work and much more is enjoying the work a lot more because he understands it. So now we've talked about the importance of body language with our horses. We've talked about being present, providing direction, and being consistent. And you might be thinking, well, this is all great, but I already feel like I have a strong bond with my horse. I just feel like he doesn't trust me in certain situations that I go into. Well, next I'm going to be showing you a few examples and talking to you further about how you can continue to build your horse's trust. So when it comes to new situations, here I'm working over a scary obstacle with Legend. Personality plays a big role. Legend is very naturally bold and curious. You can see him checking out this obstacle, and it didn't take me too long of providing some direction with him and encouraging him for him to figure out that he could cross it confidently. Now here I am working with Jack, and Jack is a much more sensitive horse than Legend. He's a little bit more cautious by nature, and so it takes him longer to get comfortable and confident going over this obstacle. This is me working with him 20 minutes, and you can see now he's investigating the obstacle and getting ready to feel more comfortable going over it. So I reward him and take him around. Now during this process of working with Jack, I really focused on being clear in the way I was asking him to go forward. I worked on being consistent and keeping his attention where I wanted it to be and giving him some direction, and right here you can see him confidently go over it. So I hope this video is a help to you. If you're working on building your horse's trust, I would love to hear what has helped you to build more trust in your horse. You can let me know in the comments below. I hope you keep enjoying your horses over this next week, and I'll talk to you soon.