THE GRANDVIEW RANCH HORSE TRAINING CHECKLIST
By Gary Hubbell
email: grandviewranch AT gmail.com
970 921 5588
At Grandview Ranch, we sell well-broke horses that know their jobs. When buyers contact us, they often ask the same set of questions about our horses—questions that I’m going to answer now. So that we’re all “on the same page”, you can expect our horses to come with the same “standard equipment”, just like the list on the window sticker of a new car.
Unless we tell you otherwise, our horses will know how to handle a variety of basic situations. Please, don’t send us emails asking if the horse you’re interested in will stand still for the farrier, load in a trailer, etc. Of course our horses will do these things. If they won’t, or if they’re still learning, we will note the horse’s shortcomings in the horse description.
We train our horses using a “gentling” technique. We’ve taken methods from trainers that you’ve heard about, including Monty Roberts, Buck Brannaman, Ray Hunt—heck, even Pat Pirelli. If you cut through all the self-congratulation, even he has something important to say. We’ve also taken methods from trainers you have never heard of, and we’ve devised quite a few strategies ourselves.
However, our main horse training mentor is Clinton Anderson. Clinton’s Down Under Horsemanship methods make the most sense to us. Doris has completed a 10-day clinic with Clinton in Texas, and we’re going for another three-day clinic in 2008. If you’re thinking about buying one of our horses, we strongly suggest that you purchase and view at least a select few of his videos so that you know what your horse should know. In learning from Clinton Anderson, we’ve learned a wealth of new material, but we also confirmed that we were doing quite a lot of things right without knowing it.
HERE’S WHAT OUR HORSES CAN DO:
- EASY TO CATCH, HALTER, AND LEAD Our horses are not spooky, flighty, and nervous. They’re used to being handled by people. They’re calm and relaxed. Almost all of them will walk right up to you in a 50-acre pasture. You can put a halter on any one of our horses for sale and walk away with the horse.
- STAND TIED Our horses are trained to calmly stand tied to a hitching rail or horse trailer. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but the nervous horse standing there pawing a hole to China or pulling back, falling over, and snapping the lead rope—that isn’t our horse.
- PICK UP HIS FEET You can handle our horses’ feet with no problem. Your farrier will enjoy working with a horse that we have owned. Most of our horses will let you pick up their feet while you’re visiting with them in the field, with no halter or lead rope.
- EASY TO BRIDLE AND RELAXED ABOUT CONTACT WITH HIS HEAD None of our horses is head-shy or nervous about being bridled. If you don’t know the proper technique to bridle a horse (and most of you don’t, even if you think you do), we’ll teach you.
- LOAD INTO A HORSE TRAILER We teach our horses to load in a 6’8” wide stock trailer. They’ll jump right in. If you have a narrow two-horse bumper pull trailer or a slant load with a narrow entry, we may have to take a few minutes to train the horse to your trailer. Our horses will back out of a trailer.
- STAND CALMLY WHILE BEING SADDLED Have you ever tried to throw a 42-pound stock saddle on a tall horse that’s prancing around, throwing a fit? What a pain in the ass. Not with our horses. They’ll stand there like a statue while you tack ‘em up.
- MOUNT OR DISMOUNT FROM EITHER SIDE We’re selling trail horses. If you’ve ever ridden our steep trails, you’ll know how impossible it is to mount or dismount on the left when the mountainside falls off below you. This is simply basic training, folks. When we break our colts, we mount and dismount from either side right from the beginning.
- LEAD or “pony” A PACKHORSE OR PACK MULE Most of our horses have led pack strings into the mountains and are very familiar with the job.
- CROSS WATER This is a big one. Many horses have been raised in flat paddocks or pastures with a water tank. Horses don’t have the depth perception to know if a mud puddle is two inches deep or twenty feet deep. We teach them the difference, and teach our horses how to trust the rider when we ask them to go into water. Many of our horses have forded the Crystal River in Marble day after day, week after week, flood stage and drought phase, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
- WORK AS A PACKHORSE This is one of the best ways to train colts—put a packsaddle on them and lead them up the mountain. Most of our horses for sale have packed loads into the high country, and quite a few of them have packed elk and deer. We’ll let you know what your horse has done.
- HOBBLE It’s amazing how many people don’t train their horses to hobble. It’s actually very important when you’re on a pack trip in the high country, and having a horse that isn’t trained to hobble can be a big disaster. Some of our horses have not been trained to hobble, but most have. Check with us about the horse you like.
- EAT FROM A NOSE BAG Is this important? You bet. Many horses don’t know how to eat grain or complete feed from a nosebag. If that’s how you’re feeding your horse on a pack trip, he’d better know how.
- WALK, TROT, AND CANTER This seems like it should go without saying, but many people are so afraid of their horses that they never get them out of a walk.
You should be able to easily move our horses from a walk to a trot to a canter and back down. We sure can. Sometimes this depends on your experience as a rider. If you want to gallop, our horses can do that, too, but you’d better be a good rider. - STOP Yes, “Whoa!” is an important command, isn’t it? You can bring our horses to a stop from any gait.
- TAKE LEG CUES We use our legs to influence our horses to go where we want. If you don’t know what we mean, you’re an inexperienced rider and you need some lessons.
- RIDE WITH A LOOSE REIN All you English riders, pay attention. These horses are broke Western and are trained to do their job on a loose rein. If you’re tugging at their mouths with the “constant contact” training you’ve had, you’re going to seriously confuse our horses.
- NECK REIN Our more experienced horses all know how to neck rein. If you’re looking at a younger horse, he may be at an earlier stage in the process. Check with us.
- TOLERATE SLICKERS AND JACKETS You may be wondering what we mean by this—until you see a thunderstorm coming and try to untie your slicker from your saddle strings and shake it loose. If your horse jumps a mile high and tears off down the trail bucking, no one has trained him what slickers are all about. We train our horses to know what you’re doing when you want to put on a slicker.
- GUNFIRE Yes, gunfire. All our horses have been exposed to gunfire. That doesn’t mean they’ll stand stock still if you discharge a high-powered rifle right next to them. However, they’ve seen and heard firearms being discharged in relatively close proximity on many occasions.
- DOGS All our horses have extensive experience around dogs. They’re used to having dogs in very close proximity, and pay them little heed.
- FARM EQUIPMENT AND VEHICLES Our horses have all seen big farm tractors, balers, backhoes, skid steers, and all kinds of other equipment. They’re used to being around vehicles and tractors and noisy engines. Almost all our horses have been “ponied” off the tailgate of a moving truck at a fast trot.
- CATTLE Our neighbors run several hundred cattle, and they often call us to help them gather their herds in the high country. We love to go! What great experience it is for a young horse. Most of our horses for sale have been used for 10-hour days in the high country, busting through brush, crossing creeks, and chasing down stubborn cows. Awesome training!
- LIVE IN A HERD We mix our horses together in a big herd over the winter and let them be. They all get along, geldings and mares, and if they have their differences, they seem to sort them out. We don’t separate the geldings from the mares. We don’t recommend putting any of our horses in a stall. They’ll be miserable and will act out—we promise you. How would you feel if you were put in jail and hadn’t done anything wrong?
WHAT OUR HORSES DON’T KNOW
We have no reason to “clip” or shave our horses. We don’t go to horse shows—we use our horses and we ride them. They’ll probably stand still if you want to clip them, but it will be a new experience. We rarely, if ever, blanket our horses, so it will be a new experience for your horse—and we don’t recommend it, anyway. Your horses may or may not know how to do lead changes or sidepass. It depends on how far along we have them in their training. We also don’t spend much time bathing or washing them. Most of them have been sprayed down with a hose. These are not hunter/jumper horses. Some of them may have a natural talent to jump, and could be used for that purpose, but we don’t train them for it. We don’t ride English, either. All of our horses have been started with direct reining, so they’ll know what you want and can be ridden English, but they’d prefer if you rode them Western.
