After 30, 60, 90, or more days of intense training, your horse comes home and you have high hopes and expectations. It can all be a very wonderful and rewarding experience. The bad news is that your horse is not a new, programmed machine. Your horse is still a horse. Even if your horse did become a machine, there may be a "lope button" but you have to know where the "lope button" is for example. Taking lessons on your newly trained horse is highly recommended, or better yet- attend a clinic so you can spend several hours over several days learning about your horse. Learn what your horse has learned so you can communicate easily.
When your horse gets home from training you may be tempted to let him rest after such a hard month of training. Think again! I completely and absolutely LOVE my job, however after an extended weekend it can be hard to get back into the routine. Why would we think it would be any different for our horses? To get the most out of training, maintain that training. When I took a Spanish class in high school I thought I was getting pretty good at it. I took three years of Spanish language. I could recognize words very well, but when it came to a sentence in Spanish, I had to ask the person speaking to say it very slowly to process it. I could understand when spoken slowly. A year after I graduated I forgot half the vocabulary I had learned. If I would have made a trip to Spain, I would may have been multilingual-I would have maintained that language!!!
Long story short.... please remember that you horse is a living being who is trying to learn something very different than what nature says. Invest the time into your horse after training and you will be amazed at what you can do!!!! Keep up the good work. Believe me, it is all worth it!
