You are teaching yourself the power of rewarding baby steps that lead to a more complicated maneuver, which is the basis of animal training. This lesson alone is useful when you begin asking the mounted horse to move laterally away from your leg pressure. He is learning that humans use displacement just as horses do, causing them to shift their bodies as needed. Teaching your horse to lift his feet has many benefits: for one thing, your farrier will like you!īut also, you are teaching the horse to obey your cues and trust that you will not hurt him. Now, we’re transferring the knowledge to busy settings…and he’s getting better every day. After three months, he had it down pat in the quiet setting. At that point, I begin to hold each foot up for increasing lengths of time, starting at only one or two seconds and working up to 60 seconds or so.Īltogether, it took about a month of daily footwork-lifting all four feet once a day-before True became fairly reliable in lifting each foot in turn. With his weight shifted, it is much easier for him and me to lift the desired foot. I’m not even lifting his feet yet.Īfter True knows the cue to yield and shift his weight, I pair it with running my hand down each leg and squeezing between the tendons just above the fetlock-the typical cue to lift a foot. We go slowly so that the horse can succeed often, build trust and relaxation, and learn one step at a time.
The moment he shifts, I reward with strokes and praise.įor about a week, we work on yielding to my touch at each leg, always moving in a consistent pattern from one leg to the next.
At first, I have to “touch” pretty hard it’s actually more of a lean.
With True, I begin by touching his shoulder to encourage him to shift his weight to the other front leg. Most horses need yielding lessons before lifting lessons to overcome foot problems. Obviously, I need to break down the task and create a plan. He attempts to glue them to the floor, and when that doesn’t work, he lifts all four feet, dances a sideways jig, and plasters his whole leg to the side of the barn.
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