Last month reader Mary Jankowski, who rides Western, sent me an email asking for “a trainer’s view of training.”
Mary said that she had removed her 5-year-old Quarter Horse from the barn of a Western trainer “who feels that horses need a ‘mental meltdown’ by tying them to the arena wall and leaving them alone to work out their problems. He withholds feed and water and rides them in a very narrow twisted-wire bit under the age of 5. I disagree with these practices, and he feels that I am pampering my mare.”
Mary’s email raises quite a few questions, some of which are directly related to her situation and some of which go far beyond it.
Let me begin by saying that tying horses to the arena wall (or to just about anything else) for hours is not something I’d do. Now, that’s largely because of the high- to medium-octane Thoroughbred and Thoroughbred-cross horses I’ve always had, horses who would fight their way out of such a confining situation (and likely break their halter, lead rope, whatever they were tied to or their neck in the process).
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with the Quarter Horse mare, Alba, I have now or with the Quarter Horse mare we retrained and sold two years ago. I’m not sure what either would have stood tied for hours, but it’s an interesting cross-discipline question as we ended up with both mares because their trainers or owners considered them too opinionated or too difficult. (The trainer of the mare we sold absolutely hated her, and we bought her for $700. I often said it was a case of one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.) I think they’re both fantastic...
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