How to Handle an Overreactive Horse

If you spend long enough in the horse training business, you will likely encounter some situations throughout your career that put you at risk. Any time a horse develops a severe reactive response—such as flipping over backwards or bucking excessively—your safety, as well as your horse’s safety, is compromised. An overreactive horse is not untrainable—training it properly will just take more time and patience. Overreactive horses need some confidence and consistency-building activities to focus on. Those horses need to learn trust and respect. A horse’s overreactive nature wasn’t made overnight, and the problem won’t be fixed overnight either. The first step is to attempt to understand why the overreactive horse behaves the way it does. What mannerisms does it exhibit? What situation did the horse come from? Why is it behaving this way? As crazy as it sounds, your horse has been conditioned to rear up. When a horse is put in a high-pressure situation, anxiety builds, resulting in an extreme reactive response. Horses learn by release, and in an overreactive horse, the release the horse is looking for happens when you, the rider, comes off of its back. Instead of finding a release on its own, you want to retrain your horse’s brain to look for the release when you provide it. As a rider who has been on a horse’s back during one of these extreme reactions, it is incredibly difficult to feel confident and secure about what is going to happen when you get on that horse. That, in turn, creates a lot of anxiety in us. When you have a frustrated horse, and then you add a frustrated rider into the equation, there is no good that will result from that scenario. If we aren’t relaxed, our horses won’t relax. One of the two bodies must constantly be using the thinking side of their brain. What you are training on any horse—especially overreactive ones—is their minds. You are training the horse to think and look for responses. This is achieved through a simple “ask, release, reward” routine. When a horse seems like it has “fallen apart” — meaning, with speed, it is not working very good anymore — what has happened is that they have gotten weak in one of their fundamentals. If you can identify the fundamental element that need work, you can almost always remedy the problem by solidifying that horse’s broken foundation. Often times, we can make more progress as a rider from the ground. The “boring stuff” you see people doing — such as making your horse soft, yielding the hindquarters, etc. — is the stuff that builds trust and respect. Building a foundation takes time. When you go to a clinic or training, it’s not all about what happens in those two days. It’s about how you use those two days to change your thinking process. When I host a clinic, I am much more concerned with your results 4 weeks, 4 months, 4 years from now as opposed to 4 hours from now. Knowledge is power. But, knowledge is only powerful if you apply it consistently.