Someone on one of our platforms recently requested a video of catching a Mustang with the neck rope, so here it is for everyone.
Butterfly, a 5yo palomino Mustang mare from Twin Peaks, CA was a lovely demo horse. Thank you Tay Martin for filming.
Caveats:
I’ve done this “once or twice” before.
I’m in a 25ish ft round pen with 7 1/2ft fences.
I can read the room. If I have a horse that’s extra skittish or might want to kick or spin, I take several steps before this one to prepare them and keep us both safe.
The most pressure I want on this rope is the feel of a single use plastic grocery bag full of bananas. So we’re not talking sacks of concrete here. Most of the time the rope will be slack.
I have a hook on a 6ft stick to get the rope off if need be.
When and why:
I don’t catch all of the new Mustangs at Wild Horse Outreach & Advocacy this way but 80-90% of them I do.
If they don’t approach me or let me approach them within the first session or two, I will.
There’s no sense in first (accidentally) teaching a wild horse to walk away and then going back and teaching them they need to come or stand to be caught every time the human shows up. Double standards make frustrated horses.
This step turns into leading, into directional control, moving hips and shoulders and putting the temporary halter on. The sooner the horse (safely) learns the human is nothing to be afraid of, the better.
From what she’s doing, over a few sessions they stand and face me while I put the rope over their head (that’s where Annie Oakley is currently at). After that, I can walk up to them and put the neck rope on before I turn it into the temporary halter (that’s where Zin is at).
Pretty soon I can catch and halter them like a domestic horse. The process and timeframe looks a little different from one wildie to the next.
The goal is that if it wasn’t for the freezebrand, you’d never know the horse I’m handling or riding is a Mustang.
We’ve got a whole world to impress with these horses and we can best do that when they’re acting every bit as well trained if not more so than those that have been handled from birth.
#horses#mustang#learning#teaching#horsetraining#wild#nonprofit#makingmountainmustangmemories
