So, following Jay’s training programme, the first thing you have to do, is to establish yourself as a strong leader. To accomplish that, Jay has a number of exercises that you do from the ground, in a roundpen (a circular riding paddock with a high fence around, maybe fifteen meters in diameter). Doing these exercises and later on when you start riding, you should strive for Jay’s three basic principles: cause movement, yield to pressure and follow a feel.
The cause movement part is easy to understand, because that is what you see in the paddocks all day, horses chasing each other around, biting and kicking. What they are doing is pushing each others boundaries, trying to see who will fold first. The strong horse that can cause another horse to move, has the higher status. Eventually, no biting or kicking will be necessary, the low-status horse will move out of the way as soon as the high-status horse approaches, if the approach is made in a ‘move out of my way’ kind of way.
That is what a person working with horses should also try to accomplish. The horse should not be able to get you to move by taking a step closer to you – instead, the horse should move out of your way. If the horse comes into your space uninvited, he has to be sent away, for example with the end of a rope swung in a way that resembles the end of a swinging horse tail. In the roundpen, you practice this by getting the horse to run around you, and in a saddle the whole point is to get the horse moving. It is horse logic. Horses are all movement, and to the horse, the individual that can make it move has the power.
To get the horse to yield to pressure becomes necessary when you want to start riding. That is what riders do, putting pressure on the sides of the horse to get it to move foreward, putting pressure in the mouth to get it to stop or turn. What Jay wants is for the horse to listen to a pressure that is as light as possible. This you also start practicing from the ground in the roundpen, getting the horse to move around you in a small circle with you in the middle holding the halter rope, getting it to turn and change directions by only lifting your hand. And the trick is not to start using force. We don’t want to punish the horse if it doesn’t understand. Instead, we use the same amount of light pressure, but persistently, until the horse yields. Some horses are stubborn. What the horse trainer needs to be is even more stubborn.
The same principle applies when we ride. The rider should ask persistently, and be consistent and forgiving, not forceful and punishing. Eventually, most horses will cooperate. I’ve seen Jay do it, several times.
And all this seems easy, right, quite logical once you get into that way of thinking. The difficult thing is the last principle, follow a feel, that should actually be present from the very start. Because all of the exercises and all the work you do with horses has to be on the horses terms. You have to be able to read the horse and know when to be hard on it, when to just wait for it a little bit longer and when to be forgiving. Horses are instantaneous and you don’t get any second chances. So, you have to develop this feel, practice your timing to perfection. And that, my friends, requires more than a lifetime.
It’s hard work, this training programme of Jay’s. It requires much more from the trainer than from the horse. I will probably never have the time and opportunity to learn it properly. But watching Jay do it is amazing.
Katja Malmborg 