Leading behind
Leading from behind
Leading a horse behind is relatively easy if he has begun to trust you.
You can invite him in and he has accepted you as his leader.
Because the horse is a herd animal to and wants to be in a group with those he trusts and we should strive to achive that role.
I will now go through a few exercises that can make this work easier for us, to make the horse lead well, to keep good balance in whatever we are working on, overall to work well in hand.
Reacts correctly and is sure that he is reacting correctly and according to his nature.
One exercise used to prepare for leading from behind, which as I said is easy to teach a horse if he has that already learned to trust and accept us.
The most inviting gesture is just to show him our back and walk ahead and he will follow.
But not all horses do this right away. There may be need for some disciplinary work first, to discipline a little bit and to put the horse in his place.
Some horses are quite pushy and overbearing and think themselves very important. We need to make them accept that we control things and they should obey.
The best exercise to teach a horse to be lead from behind, is to intermittently invite him in and then stop.
This mare was quite pushy, even as a foal and you can see in her behavior and demeanor, like for instance her tail, that she is having a little bit of a hard time stepping those steps back. But as soon as she does that I invite her back in.
When inviting a horse in like this, it is best to lead like this and back up.
Then we can see if the horse is focused on following us and is not trying to push past us on the left or right side, not trying to push on or up to close.
If we see that it is trying that it is best not to have the rein to short, we raise us up and thereby we warn him right away and just to strenghten the message we can let the rein vibrate just a little bit.
In some cases we may even need to touch a very pushy horse.
When the horse starts to understand, steps the step back and then allows us to invite him in, then we can try to see if he will follow us.
We actually need this type of leading more than by the side. We need to walk throuhg narrow walkways, through gaits and narrow spaces and we use leading from behind more than by the side.
We can reaffirm this exercise this if the horse starts to become overbearing and pushy again by stopping abruptly and make ourselves big and broad.