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t January 2008 • VOLUME 29 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Retraining the Ex-Racehorse: An ongoing series from Horses For LIFE on the concerns and opportunities involved with retraining the ex-racehorse. We began our series of retraining the ex-racehorse discussing the reasons why or why not you may want to work with a horse from the track and those special considerations that you may want to look at in the decision-making process of picking out which horse will more likely be able to succeed in the transition from racetrack to working off the track. The final message is that buying a horse off the racetrack is always a risk. Definitely “a buyer beware situation.” There are many difficulties in transitioning a horse off the track, one of the most difficult can be how differently he has been trained and handled. “Your expectations are going to be completely different. Which is only going to confuse your horse and you.” In the second part of the series, we focused on behaviour and what tools are available to us, to changing established behaviour. Animal behaviourists know so much more today then they did fifty years ago. Handling any animal can be so much more different. At one time, if an animal behaved the way we didn’t want, there was only one answer, training was all about reward and punishment. Nowadays we look at alternatives to the concept of punishment, realizing that we need to focus more on what reinforces behaviour and what training practices truly do work to extinguish behaviour. Remembering that you are going to be dealing with a horse in the full prime of his physical capabilities that has learned that his behaviour, as it is, is completely acceptable. Or at least it has worked for him so far in his life. Remember, any of the behaviours that your horse comes to you with has literally already been trained into him. As far as he is concerned, he is not bad, he is just doing what he always has done. You don’t want to start your relationship in an adversarial position, and you don’t want to lose the trust of this very sensitive creature early in the relationship. Last time, we keyed into one of the primal elements of your relationship with your horse and how one of the initial problems you are going to run into when you first start training, is basic leading. “One might think this most basic of training requirements would be the one you WOULD expect to be well established. Especially since these horses are constantly being led. Led from the barn to the saddling area, led out to the racetrack, led out for farrier work, led to go in and out of the trailer from one racetrack to the next. How can leading be a problem? "But leading often is very much a problem. These high-spirited horses, high on feed and racing, jib and jibe, prance and more often than not charge ahead, rarely watching those who are handling them. This creates chaos and dangerous conditions for anyone leading them. There is nothing worse than a horse that barges ahead, paying you absolutely no attention, rushing to where he wants to go! "Leading can be and should be the base of all of the training that you will be establishing with your horse. It is your opportunity to establish the relationship between the two of you, first on the ground and then later when you are in the saddle. The first step is that your horse learn to respect and look to you! "Any method that you choose, it is important to spend the time establishing this new behaviour. "It is difficult to find the words to express just how important the training of leading the horse is. Not only can you retrain to safer behaviour, you will be retraining your horse to learn to watch to you as a leader throughout the rest of your relationship. Even more than that, you can begin to train your horse to the reins through the lead rope!” This is a very important aspect of retraining your ex-racehorse. A horse that has learned to lean on the bit, and that the more he leaned, the more weight the jockey held him with, then the faster he was to go!!! Yikes! You have a horse that thinks the harder you pull the faster you should go – in this article we begin to discuss how maybe we can convince our horses otherwise. It is very important to realize that there are no easy answers, though. You have purchased a full-grown animal with established behaviours. He will be coming to you with many problems. He is probably in the prime of his life and strong. You are asking him to change everything he has ever learned. Where to start?
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