Horseback riding is a relaxing form of sport, but it is a form of sport that lets you embrace the cognitive abilities of horses and their natural behavior. It's important that you learn how to use signaling and rewards to enhance and establish a relationship with the horse you'll be utilizing for horseback riding lessons. Definitely use the process of equitation in the habit of training your horses. What you get from this relationship is horse welfare and rider safety that minimizes risk to humans and horses.
What Is Equitation?
Equitation is the sport of sitting on a horse's back while you're controlling the horse's movement. The science of equitation involves more than just sitting on the horse's back and begin riding the horse. Your horseback training lessons should embrace ethical and effective training practices and the impact ethical training has for practice needs. So how do you use ethical training in the business of horseback training lessons?
Understand Horseback Training
Should ethical equitation include positive punishment? Well yes it should. You must correct a negative reaction displayed by a horse that will put the training rider or student at risk. The use of a baneful stimulus to suppress the horse's behavior is acceptable as long as it does not harm the horse. After a while, the horse gets the message and understands that the negative behavior on its part must end.
Understand Cognitive Differences
You can stand all day bleating at a horse and repeating the phrase "respect me" to the animal. You won't get any respect because the horse doesn't understand what the word respect means. Your way of correcting a horse's aggressive behavior should be to recognize the horse's different cognitive abilities. It means that you can't assign human values and intentions to a horse's limited cognitive abilities. So you find a way to make that communication by offering rewards to the horse.
Forget Aggression On Your Part
If you try to forge ahead in anger to have the horse comply, the horse will eventually become as frustrated as you are. Now the risk is that you'll begin to misinterpret the animal's frustration. You might even think the animal is being deliberately challenging and in fact woefully disobedient. So you compound the situation by adopting harsher punishment. That's a wrong decision. It prepares the horse for flight.
Establish Trust To Prevent Injury
Horses are fleet-footed, and they will charge anything in their way that hinders an escape route. They will accelerate their speed to charge a fence or even charge you if you are standing in the way. Bear in mind that re-training a horse to behave properly is difficult. Use rewards to re-establish trust between you and the horse.
