So most people in this country can drive, and the vast majority of those people do it with absolutely no idea how the car works. Of course they know that the car starts when you turn the key, that it goes forward when you hit the gas and stops when you hit the break, and it turns side to side with a twist of the steering wheel. If they didn’t, they would hopefully have not passed their driving test, and would not have been issued a license. A car, after all, is a weapon and should not be driven by someone who can’t control it.
A lot of people in this country ‘ride’ horses. Yes, I put that in quotations, because for the most part, I believe that most people don’t actually ride horses. They drive them. For most people, they know that when you kick a horse’s sides, they go forward, when you pull on the reins they stop, and when you pull the reins to either side they turn.
They do all of this without any (or very little) understanding of a horse’s mentality, or inner workings, just like most of them don’t know how their car works. Why is this? A horse is a huge animal, capable of inflicting serious damage or death in the same way a car can, only added to that is the fact that a horse is a living, breathing creature with a mind of his own.
The reason that so many people can get away with knowing so little about the horse’s mind is because of how gracious the horse is. He is, by his very nature, a submissive creature, and when a person simply gets on his back and drives him around, he is perfectly happy to just go.
At Advantage Ranch in Blacksburg, VA, the riding instructors are intentional about teaching riding as opposed to driving. On the first lesson they may use a car analogy in order to present the basics of how to ask a horse to go forward, stop, and turn, but that very quickly (age appropriately) develops into understanding how a horse moves, and supporting him with legs and reins, helping him to bend and supple his body, and have rhythm when he moves forward.
I still remember the first time I learned what real riding was. I had gone to a few shows to help work out the ‘show nerves’. (It was a rather eye opening experience to see my gorgeous, steady-minded mare quite literally freak out when she sensed my show nerves, but that’s a story for another time.) I was doing a circle. Now I’ve done circles before, but this time I was focused on actually making a circle that was even on all sides of a cone.
The this requires supporting the outside of the horse (the side on the outside of the circle) with both legs and reins to keep him from falling, which makes the circle bigger. As well as supporting the inside of the horse with legs and reins to keep him from falling in and thus making the circle smaller. All while continuing to keep the proper bend in the horse. The trick is basically to feel when the horse is falling one way or the other (which is basically every step) and to help support them. For the longest time I had thought that a horse just went and it was really on that day that I feel I went from a driver to a rider when I finally understood just how much support and thus work it took to actually ride a horse.
Now I’ve learned a lot since the above, and now realize what more there is to making a circle. If finding out how to really ride a horse sounds interesting to you, then look us up at advantageranch.com.
