Is Raising a Young Horse Right for You?

Of course, the better you get at understanding, communicating with and working with horses, the less actual physical contact you have to make. If you ever see a really good lead mare, she controls the movements of every horse around her with no more than a glance. She rarely needs to kick, or bite to get obedience from her herd. But a weaker mare, one defending a medium spot in the herd hierarchy, perhaps, often has to resort to kicking or biting to keep its dominance over the horses bellow it. Usually, we are those weaker mares. The experts named above are the top-notch lead mares who get total obedience even from strangers with little more than a look. We may be working towards being that, but we are usually not there yet. Because of that, we will need to employ more physical force in our dealing with young horses than the trainers we learn from ever seem to.

And here is the thing to keep in mind about that: That lead mare will bite or kick or employ whatever physical force is necessary if one of her charges doesn’t back down to her look. She’ll go after them without hesitation and clobber them so well they will never think of defying her again. She will, in fact, do whatever it takes physically to establish her strength and her dominance with each horse in the herd. She just rarely has to resort to anything more than a look because most horses are so hard-wired to recognize true strength and give way to it that substantial challenges rarely come.