Differences in starting Young Horses and Restarting Old Horses: Jasper, Part 1

A friend of mine stopped by a few days ago and asked what I had been doing. I replied "in the process of starting a 4 year old and just picked up an older horse and will be re-starting him." My friend asked "what's the difference,....starting a horse and re-starting a horse?"

Good question! It's really nothing I have thought about defining or differentiating before. So off the top of my head, as I recall, I said "from my perspective, young green horses are most often a clean slate with less human baggage attached to them, and seem to be trying to understand what you want from them in order to get peace, a break from pressure and feel good and feel safe. Older horses, also want peace and safety, but it seems to me that these older horses, some of them, not all, can be a bit more defensive or appear resistant, based on what they have come to expect from humans. Sometimes they can tell you where they have been. However, I can only get fleeting glimpses of that,...I suspect there is much more to learn about that."

Something bothered me about my reply, so later on I started to unravel that and figure it out. I think most of us accept that horses live in the moment and we have all seen horses that have been handled pretty rough that are still good minded. But we have also seen horses who have been pulled on by their reins, perhaps being ridden for years in a long shanked bit, seated too deep in their mouth and being jerked and pulled on by their rider. And then a rider with soft hands, maybe using a snaffle bit seated just at the corners of the mouth, begins to pick up on the reins and the horse's head jerks up in reaction to a learned memory that a sharp pull or jerk is coming next. So I'm thinking both can be true, the horse can be a product of it's less than refined handling but also live in the moment, and its in that moment that measured asks, good timing on the release, and building that good responses with softness can be built. I am the farthest person from and knowledge about psychotherapy, but maybe this is something learned people call building new neural pathways?

Well, I'm not going to let things I don't understand like that get in the way of starting/re-starting/developing (whatever term best describes it) an older horse. I had just brought the older horse in. He's a 16 year old, solid sorrel gelding, 15.1 hands high. What I was told about him was: he doesn't come to you, but easy to get a halter on; can't hard tie him as he pulls back; doesn't like to be petted or rubbed on; but puts up with humans and is very rideable, but difficult to get into a canter.

This horse, whose name is Jasper, had plenty of old scars on his face, chest and hip. The ranch I bought him from did not know much about him, and nothing about the origin of the scars, but that bodily roadmap made me like him immediately as his face and body are pretty much the same. Another thing that stuck out about him was he had the most intense side eye.....it seemed to be that he was looking at you with distrust. So home he came with me. He walked right into the trailer and I did not hard tie him, instead just fed the lead rope through one of my Functional Tie Rings and closed him in the slant load. An hour later I got him home and he had pushed so hard on the slant load gate latch mechanism that he jammed it up pretty good - and yes, I had put WD-40 on it before I left to pick him up. So, I had to fetch a hammer and piece of wood to free it. The noise gave him some trouble and once the gate freed up, he felt the lack of resistance on his hip and came flying backwards out of the trailer. I was ready for it, stepped aside and grabbed the lead rope feeding out of the tie ring as it dragged past me. Okay got it. That's all fixable or at least getting him much better.

Anyway, so what am I doing different with him than I would a basically untouched 3 or 4 year old? Nothing really. Pretty much left him alone in his pen for the first two weeks as I transitioned him over to my feed program, put him on Platinum Performance CJ supplement, and worked on him giving to pressure on his poll and his nose with my hands. It seemed to me that he hadn't ever been asked to give to pressure, let alone present any softness, but I was going to need that as I began two days of ground work. I'll continue Jasper's progress in a article in a few days.

New Horses and Good Rope Halters

Before I write about rope halters, I wanted to just note briefly that along with my 4 year old who had a delayed start, I am also re-starting an older horse that I picked up from a ranch in Southern New Mexico. The ranch manager and head wrangler is a young woman who asked to shadow me starting and re-starting horses at my ranch, so of course I said yes, by all means. Anything I can do to help, directly or indirectly, someone who is serious about a life with horses is a no brainer. For the past three weeks, working one day a week with her, I have not had the time to write about that, nor takes very many pictures and virtually no video yet. That will be coming in the near future. So,....about those rope halters.

A good rope halter is a necessity for me. While I have had many different halters from various makers, the 'go to' halter has always been from Double Diamond Halter Company. They still make and offer great halters and lead ropes for that matter, but you have to buy them from a distributor such as saddle shops and tack stores that offer quality gear. Other sources of good halters,...Craig Cameron comes to mind, offer very good rope halters as well. However, if you purchase a rope halter and lead rope for $15, you are very likely not getting a real good quality item there.

Lead ropes usually last longer than rope halters, so sometimes you can buy the halter without a lead rope and just use your old lead rope, especially if it's good quality. I use tied on lead ropes, so I never have the potential problems of a metal snap, such as dirt impinging the spring loaded mechanism, or the snap breaking. I like a 14 foot lead rope, however about half of my halters have 12 foot leads. Some people don't like that much rope to handle but I'd rather want more length than I need in the moment, than not enough. And just the other day, I used a 18 foot lead on a very reactive horse that I was asked to work with.

About a year ago I discovered 310 Ranch Life Halters and Leads. They offer 12 foot lead ropes, which are great quality, albeit without a leather poppers on the running end. But the halters have a long tail (that goes over the bridle path also called a poll latch) to tie through the loop on the end of the throat latch. These tails are longer than all of the other rope halters I have which make them easier to feed through the tie loop, fits horses with bigger heads, and allows a overhand knot at the very end of the poll latch so you can slip it over a horse's head one handed if you are putting a halter on another horse while you are horseback.

310 Ranch Life also offers other products as well as instructional videos on roping and such. And as usually, I do not get paid not otherwise compensated for advertising anything, just passing along gear, equipment and information that I think is good quality and useful.