The same theory holds for working with children. If you don’t give a child enough time for a new idea to penetrate and to be committed to memory, if you throw too much at him, you’ll overwhelm him and destroy his desire to try, too.
Choosing the right moment in time to let the horse soak is crucial to his development. But also remember that he will soak on the bad as well as the good. If you have been fighting with a horse because he wants to buck you off or run away and you become discouraged and turn him out to pasture, he’ll soak on this bad experience. He’ll build on it, so by the time you work with him again, he is likely to be a lot worse off than he was when you turned him out.
On the other hand, if you’ve done good things before you turn him out and he soaks on what is positive, he’ll be a better ride than he was before. The important thing is to make sure the last word you have with the horse is good for both of you.
Buck works a group of clinic horses with a flag after they’ve been saddled, getting them used to the feeling of moving with saddles touching them and stirrups flying.
If horses are going to survive in our world, someone must lay down rules and then be persevering and disciplined enough to follow through. The same is true for kids. As parents, we have a chance when our children are young to turn them into good citizens rather than wait for the government to raise them for us. Once the horse or the human has grown older, there’s much more danger in working with them. You must be much more disciplined and sometimes more forceful in order to provoke them to a point where they’re ready to change how they live.
It’s a matter of timing and of patience. Although it may seem nothing is happening on the surface, there may yet be profound changes occurring down a little deeper. Waiting isn’t bad.
For me, these principles are really about life, about living your life in a way that you’re not making war with horses or with other people. It’s about planning ahead, rather than looking back and doing something in a reactive way. You need to be proactive when you’re working with young horses. If a horse is inclined to kick or bite, you need to understand where that behavior comes from, what it’s about, and how to redirect it rather than just punishing him for doing something you think is wrong. The horse thinks he’s right, or he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.
We’re supposed to be the smart ones, but it’s amazing how people put little thought into working with their horses. They don’t understand that a horse reacts the way he does because to him it’s a matter of life and death. I often tell people in my clinics that the whole class could get on their horses and take off running, bucking and bouncing off the fences. That chaos wouldn’t influence the horse I’m sitting on because he and I have a good thing going on. He doesn’t go anywhere without me, and I don’t go anywhere without him. Other horses and riders have no influence on us because my horse is secure within himself.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could raise our kids with that sort of independence? As parents, that’s really what we’re looking for. You look at kids who get into gangs or hang around a bunch of punks who will lead them down the wrong path. If the kids had been better equipped mentally and psychologically before they got around the bad element, the bad element wouldn’t have had a chance.
You can’t blame many kids who end up in gangs, and you can’t blame it all on the kids who lead them into temptation. If their parents had given them a better background, they never would have ended up in trouble. Working with young horses is the same deal. In a sense we’re parents there, too. We have a responsibility to help the horses become comfortable in their lives and understand how to fit in.
Herdbound horses are insecure, too, but for different reasons. A herdbound horse is fine if you go where the group goes, but quite often if you try to take him away from his pals, he may buck you off, tip over on you, or jump sideways out from under you. That’s the kind of behavior that can get you hurt.
The horse doesn’t feel secure with you because he doesn’t feel secure within himself. As the rider, you can help him to stand alone and be by himself. Horses are very social animals that are meant to be in a herd, yet if you increase his sense of security with himself, your horse will be fine away from the herd as long as he has you with him.
A herdbound horse may have been left in the paddock for so long that he doesn’t want to leave home, or he may be so used to company that he doesn’t want to leave other horses and riders on the trail.
To start working on the problem, I’ll have a group of people on horseback in a big pasture. They’ll just be standing in a small group with room enough for a horse to move between them. I’ll then pick a goal for my herdbound horse: a spot under a shade tree at the end of the meadow or some distant corner. I might loosen my reins and put them up on my saddle horn, start asking the horse to move with my legs, and ride near the group. I don’t steer him with my reins or try to direct him with my legs. I simply cause movement. What I’m doing is making what he thought was a good place to be—the herd—a little difficult for him. I want him to understand that being alone with me in the corner of the pasture or under the shade tree is where he’ll find the most security and comfort.
Rather than force my idea to become his idea, I allow it to become his over a period of time by making it difficult for him to stay with the herd. We simply walk and trot with nothing abusive happening. I tell the horse through my actions, “If you want to stay here with your pals, that’s okay with me. I have no problem with that, but the conditions I’m putting on your staying with them is that you have to be in motion. They might get to stand comfortably, but you have to be in motion.”
After a few minutes the horse may make a small circle away from the herd. When he does, my body becomes one with him. I pet him and rub him and am as soothing as I can be. Be still, and he’ll go a little way and come right back to the herd—the herd is like a magnet, and he’ll be drawn back with more force than I’ve been able to exert riding him off by himself.
After a few more minutes of keeping him in motion and thus making the herd an uncomfortable place to be, his circle will become a little larger. On the way out away from the herd, I pet him and rub him and praise him. When the herd draws him back, I keep a constant energy flowing through him. I turn the energy up in volume as we get closer to the herd, and I turn it down as we get farther away. It’s kind of like the “hotter-colder” game.
With a horse that has a light feel to your leg, you may need only to ride him with a little faster rhythm to encourage him to step out and be more alive. But typically, a herdbound horse has a tendency to pay more attention to the other horses and what they’re doing than to listen to you. He tunes you out, so you may have to keep a firm leg on him in order to initiate and then maintain his energy. Sometimes, you can tap him with the tail of your reins to get his “life up.”
Once you get the horse to respond, don’t allow him to stop moving at the wrong time. If you do, he’ll perceive stopping as a reward. Be careful not to let the energy diminish until the horse is in a place where you want him to be mentally and physically; that is, somewhere away from the herd or the barn.
Over a period of time, the horse’s circles grow larger and larger. At first, he may move a hundred yards from the herd and stop. When he’s in the general vicinity of the goal I’ve chosen, I pet him and rub him. He may not yet be sitting under the tree I’ve chosen in the corner, but he’s closer to it than he was a while ago. I’ll sit there for a while and I’ll rub him, and we’ll take a little break.
Then I’ll ask him to move his feet again with my legs. I don’t care where he goes. Typically he’ll turn around and hotfoot it right back to the herd, looking for that secure place. But again, as always, when he returns to the herd, I make it difficult for him to be there. Soon he starts looking again for that place where things were more peaceful, so he moves a little farther out away from the herd, maybe toward the place he was resting before or even a little beyond it. When he gets there, I’ll let him res
t again.
The horse will build on what we’re doing because I’m allowing his mind to search. I’m allowing him to change, to make changes within himself, without treating change like a life-threatening emergency. Even a real problem horse doesn’t need more than an hour or two before I can comfortably ride with my arms folded to the tree in the corner of the pasture. There we’ll sit for long periods of time. I’ll pet him and rub him, let him enjoy the shade, and we’ll just be together.
When I ask him to move again, he may turn around and lope back to his pals, but when we get there and he tries to stop, I keep him working at moving. That reaffirms that being with the herd isn’t as secure or as comfortable as he thought it was. He’ll look for his “comfort” tree in the corner of the pasture.
At the end of the lesson, I’ll know that I’ve finished when the horse sits under “our” tree for a few minutes. Then when I ask him to move his feet, he’ll take a step or two and offer to stop again. At that point, my idea and the horse’s idea are one and the same. I’ll step off him, take my saddle off, and rub him down with my hands (hands are a lot better than a brush right then because of the physical touch from a human being). And then I’ll lead him home, maybe the long way. I’ll take him back to the house and put him up, maybe give him a bite of grain, and put him away for the day.
Over three or four days, I’ll set this exercise up the same way. When we’re in the herd, I’ll fold my arms with my reins looped over the horn and let the horse simply walk off with his ears forward, open to anywhere I’d like to ride him, knowing full well that the place he’s going to be most comfortable is with me.
Buck puts the first ride on a horse that an hour before had never been ridden.
The same approach with your own horse will build confidence in him. You’re apt to be safe: you won’t be bucked off or have your horse tip over on top of you as he fights you to get back to his pals. You’re allowing him to be with them, but you’re simply making it a little difficult for him when he’s there.
This is an approach in which nobody loses and everybody wins. Once you’ve fixed a herdbound horse, you can ride with other people and he’ll be content, not because other horses are with him, but because you are. It’s just you and your horse, and it doesn’t get much better than that.
Herdbound horses that can’t be taken away from a group, that are too insecure to live their own lives as individuals, can be dangerous. A lot of people have been hurt or killed on such horses. To try the hairy-chested horse-trainer approach—showing your horse who’s boss by sticking a spur in him or jerking his head off or whipping him when he wants to be around other horses—won’t work. Force and violence never do. All you’ll do is destroy what was potentially going to be a friendship between you and your horse. Plus, you’re likely to get hurt. The macho approach to problem solving is used in many areas of life, and it simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all.
* * *
Barn-sour horses are a lot like herdbound horses. Several years ago I did a clinic at the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch south of Livingston, Montana. The owner told me that he had a horse that his wranglers couldn’t get to leave the barn. The horse either wanted to stay around the barn or he wanted to stay around his pals in the barn—the owner wasn’t sure which, but both choices seemed pretty attractive to the horse. The wranglers had whipped and spurred him and jerked his head around, but rather than leave the barn lot, the horse bucked his rider off, rubbed him off against a fence, or flipped over backward.
When the owner asked if I would help work with the horse, I led the horse out of the barn, closed the door, and set things up so that he could move out through the barn lot gate and down the road if he chose to leave. I then asked one of the wranglers to step on and start moving him at the walk and trot.
I had the wrangler rub the horse and work his legs to keep moving. The wrangler rode the horse in figure eights and circles, all within twenty or thirty feet of the barn. I told the wrangler, “Make sure the horse understands that he can hang out at the barn with his pals as long as he’s willing to work at it. Don’t make things miserable for him, but don’t let him stop and rest.”
As I had done with the herdbound horse in the pasture, we were making the wrong choice difficult for the horse. It wasn’t long before things began to change. The horse’s ears went forward, and after years of being obstinately barn-sour, and generally miserable in attitude and expression, he trotted right out of the barn lot, through the gate, and down the road.
After he’d gone a couple of hundred yards, I asked the wrangler to get off, rub him, and let him stand. I asked him to pull his saddle off, leave it beside the road, and walk the horse the long way home. I then told the owner that if his wranglers repeated this process for a few days, they could turn the horse’s life around.
The horse was twenty-one years old. For most of his long life he had been trying to do the best he could with what he knew. No one had ever offered him the right deal or he would have taken it. It wasn’t as though he wanted to misbehave; he just didn’t know bad behavior from good. All he knew was what people had made easy for him to do. Now, after all those years, we were asking him to change. Imagine being sixty years old and discovering that everything you thought was right about your life was actually wrong and that you had to change your entire existence.
Change can be difficult for a horse if bad behavior has become a lifelong habit. Still, he can change. This is an important lesson for people to learn, especially since people have a much harder time changing their own behavior. For example, there was a mother-daughter combination taking part in a clinic in Agua Dulce, California. Their horses were herdbound because the mother and daughter couldn’t stay away from each other. The mother was spending too much time trying to help her daughter when, in fact, she was getting in her daughter’s way and keeping her from making progress.
The same mother and daughter then took part in a ten-day clinic at my ranch in Sheridan, Wyoming. They aren’t quite as bound together as they were, but the problem remains. I’m still working on weaning the daughter off the mother. They say it takes only twenty-one days to wean the colt off the mare. I’ve spent about six months with the mother-daughter combination, and we make a little progress every day of the clinic.
Every time I work with a horse—or a person—that’s troubled or scared, I think of how the problems and solutions relate to a human’s life, including my own. There are so many lessons, but it’s important to remember that they’re not all hard lessons and they’re not all unpleasant to learn.
11
Mary
AFTER ADRIAN AND I WERE DIVORCED, Jeff Griffith and I were good friends again. When I wasn’t off doing clinics, we teamed up to ride a lot of colts, hunt gophers, and fish during the day. At night we spent a lot of time running around, going to bars, and chasing girls.
I didn’t date anybody seriously, but I sure dated a lot. I suppose I was so afraid of having my life destroyed again by a bad relationship that I didn’t go out with any woman for very long. I kept everything pretty casual. Even though what happened between Adrian and me wasn’t my fault, I felt so much guilt and shame about having been divorced that I decided I was going to stay single.
I wasn’t really living anywhere in particular at this time. I was on the road doing a lot of clinics, and when I was back in Montana, I more or less lived up Indian Creek at Jorie Butler’s place. When I didn’t have a clinic to do, I’d ride her thoroughbreds and hang out with Jeff.
There have been times in my life when my choices in women have been fairly superficial. It was unique in my experience to meet a woman who is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Luckily I met one (given my track record, it had to have been luck). Her name is Mary.
I was doing a clinic in Boulder, Colorado, in 1986 when Mary Bower and I first met. She was one of the students, and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
Mary had been a fashion model, and at the hei
ght of her career she signed with the Ford Agency in New York. Even though she was assured of a lucrative career, she didn’t like the idea of living in New York City, and after a couple of weeks she left. She moved to Los Angeles, where she appeared in a lot of print ads and commercials. She had some bit parts in television shows, but after a while she moved back to Colorado.
At the time we met, Mary was married to a former Denver Broncos football player named Rob Swenson. They had two young daughters, Lauren and Kristin. Her marriage was in trouble, but she hadn’t filed for divorce yet. Rob was living in Denver where he was trying to get a real estate business going, and she was in Boulder with the two girls.
I had had a policy of never dating my clinic students, but when I watched Mary lope circles on her colt, I decided if I were ever going to break that rule, I’d have to marry her. I loved her from the moment I first saw her. It may sound like a scene out of a Harlequin romance, but something told me that this was the woman I would spend the rest of my life with.
After Mary had been to a number of my clinics and we’d started getting to know each other better, I sent her a note. I told her how much I thought of her and how much our friendship meant to me. I also told Mary that I didn’t want to take her money for the clinic because I knew how hard it was to come by. I found out years later that she had been mowing lawns to come to my clinics.
Buck and Mary.
Faraway Horses Page 16