As you may have read in a post back there, Country Quest recently begun a Monty Roberts horsemanship course. Monty Roberts methods have always been a base which with we have trained our horses and we are now working towards a qualification which will allow us to teach these violence free methods to other people.
Monty’s method violence free and based on the horses free will. Monty says, ‘ a good horse trainer can get a horse to do what he wants him to do. A great trainer can get a horse to want to do it.‘
The training is based on communicating with the horse and it always begins with a process called ‘ Join- Up’ during which the horse is initially sent away from the trainer and then by communicating in a way the horse understands invited back in to be with the trainer. In this way the horse chooses voluntarily to be with the trainer and the bond that is created enables the horse to accomplish tasks it may have struggled with before. For example trailer loading with a horse that has ‘Joined-Up’ is much easier than with a horse that has not gone through the process. This was obvious – CQ horses Lola and Hakita were much easier to load after the course than before.
During the course we deepened our knowledge on the nature of horses and worked to perfect our body language to communicate with them. Two CQ horses were chosen to participate in the course, so we loaded up Lola and Hakita and took them along to Lagos for the week. They were both fabulous and my connection with both of them really improved.
We have continued our practice at home and will continue to do so also moving forward. You can see snippets of our practise through our Instagram page.
There are also plenty of photos and video from the course on our Facebook page – you have already liked the page so you have seen them, right? If not, you know what to do!
