Blindfolding your Horse

Many years ago I wrote about blindfold training and what prompted me to do so was two incidents (each time a different horse) where I was stuck in a hail storm without any cover and I took off my long sleeve Wrangler shirt off to drap over my horses' heads, with my forearm on their brow and nose in a kind of tenting the shirt fashion, to reduce the impact of the hail hitting them. Another reason to get your horses used to blindfolds is in case you have to lead them through smoke and fire as in evacuation from a wildlands fire.

And yet one more reason to blindfold train your horse is to just add to all the gentling you done on them and add another drop of sand in the trust bucket the horse has for you. For this reason, I drapped a bandana over one of my horse's heads, covering his eyes, and led him around on the ground with the lead end of my mecate reins. It was pretty anti-climatic. The first time, both horses I did this on the other day, was not a big deal. One horse is coming 12 or 13 years that I had been riding for 2 years and the other a green horse coming 4 that I have had about 6 or 8 rides on. Both initially hesitated for a second or two as I asked them to follow a soft feel, but led out quiet and following the direction of the lead. Because it's windy almost year round here in West Texas, I didn't want the bandana blowing off so I tucked the middle or short triangle end under the browband headstall then each of the long tails underneath the headstall check pieces.

And I didn't just wrap the bandana over their eyes and get to leading. I started with covering one eye then the other, then both while standing quiet. Then I started over again and asked for the horse to keep the bandana covering both eyes for a longer period, maybe 15 seconds. Since both were good and conformable with that, I covered one eye and asked for a step forward, and repeated on the other eye. Then both eyes. But the idea is to take the bandana away, in a slow, quiet way, before the horse gets anxious. Petting on them on their neck while the bandana is covering an eye or both is a good idea as well.

When asking the horse to follow a guiding or directional feel of the lead rope, give the horse more time to react to that signal as they no longer can see or read your body language. Ask for one step or even a leaning forward, stop, then ask again building on each progress. Sometimes even on a horse that is not blindfolded, the horse may not react to the soft guiding feel of the lead rope, even if they have been routinely leading and following the lead. It may help to change the angle of the ask of the lead rope, stepping out to the horse's frontal oblique before quietly drawing the lead rope up.

Finally, horses are going to be much better about things moving around and over their heads if you get them used to this early on, such as flipping the lead rope over their heads until there is no response, brushing the sweaty, matted hair behind their ears after a ride, sitting in the saddle and rubbing on their neck and checks with the coils of your lariat, and things like that. I think that all makes better, more accepting horse and safer too.