Ground Schooling
Foal Training Part III

by Allen Pogue and Suzanne De Laurentis, all rights reserved2005

The next most important lesson is teaching a foal to calmly accept ground schooling.

This can best be accomplished in the confines of a stall. The dam should be in an adjacent stall and occupied eating her morning feed or perhaps in the aisle way of your barn because it may prove problematic when you try to school the foal more or less at Liberty if the mare is in the stall with you.

Instinctively the foal will try to hide behind her and so you cannot hold their attention.

First of all you practice walking side-by-side using the walls and corners to aid in maintaining order. To handle a very wiggly foal you encircle them front and rear with the embrace of your arms as you move them, more often than not, in a sideways fashion. As the foal is learning to walk forward on their own occasionally they will falter and hangs back (they all do) and so you lightly pat them behind using your hand or 'boink' them ever so gently with a flexible wand modified in such a way as to be 'foal friendly'. The foal will 'squirt' forward and you need to be quick to catch them in the crook of your arm and go with the flow. They are way too strong to halt quickly and so you swirl them around in a small circle as you slow them down. Only when the foal learns there is no easy escape will they become much quieter to handle.

Now comes a most innovative strategy. You teach a foal to step up onto low platform and to remain there as you step away. At first the foal will step off, so you walk them around and then back up. Within just a couple of short sessions the foal begins to learn patience and will remain in place. The best way to reward for this behavior is a gentle massage from your fingertips. You mimic the way a mother nuzzles a foal or in the fashion of two horses engaging in a mutual grooming session. The effect is remarkable and all foals respond positively. They love it and will look forward to your touch. After just a couple sessions the foal will no longer avoid your approach. Instead of running away they will often turn rump first towards you because you have taught them that when a human is behind them it is 'tickle time'. This lesson eradicates the instinctive kicking out from a frightened foal.

With a bit of practice these early training lessons become quite easy to repeat. The foal quickly adapts to the structure of your influence because the use of stage props' (the beanbag and platform) helps the foal to make sense out of your requests.

These two objects are like no other in the foal's environment and so by the process of 'association' the foal learns to accept and more importantly to enjoy them along with the benevolence of your attention. Equally important the foal begins to have a way to understand your intentions.

Horses are masterful 'mind readers'. As an instinctive skill learned ages ago when the species ran wild in hunted herds the ability to know when they were 'safe' allowed time for eating and socialization. Nowadays the domestic horse is still held captive and far too easily influenced by the primitive urges of this flight instinct and what trainers call 'resistance'. Our job as enlightened partners with the horse is to foster acceptance and willingness using techniques that have evolved with the times.

It has been said that, "If you do what you always have done, you will get what you always have got." And so as we embark on a journey with our horses in the new era it is time to apply innovative ideas and thus create new traditions for the next generation to experience and hopefully improve upon. Previous