Ace conundrums, episode 7

I have been reviewing Ace's behaviour right back to when I bought him. It is fair to say that right from when he began to be properly fed he has been feisty and sharp and nappy. He was also spooky on hacks and in a dressage arena. More recently he has been very spooky on hacks and in a dressage arena.  The more precise I get about where and when he has to do transitions and changes of direction, the spookier he gets, and recently he has been bucking in earnest when he naps.

My attempt to confront him, to prove to him that he could not win, failed. He became more and more confrontational. One of us had to back off, and that had to be me.

Lately I have been keeping him relaxed by overbending him. I stress this is not hyperflexion. His nose is somewhere near his knees, not his chest. I am not using the draw reins to achieve it. He is not stressed by it in any way, it is easy to get him to do it. What's more it is, and always has been, his preference to warm up like it.

Now, back to my first trainer. This trainer insisted that I confront him and dig him hard with my spurs to make him do what I wanted. He was a baby of 5 with less than 6 months under saddle at the time. I ignored what she told me to do and stopped going to her. But before that, she had told me very firmly that his desire to work overbent was a very big flaw, and that I should never allow him to do it. For some reason, even though I know that pretty well all top trainers use long deep and round positioning to stretch the horses back, I believed her and didn't let him do it.

The result of this was increasing tension over time, with him never really relaxing into his work. The reintroducion of long deep and round as a warm-up has made a very big difference to his relaxation and I am kicking myself that I ever stopped doing it.


This has worked well until it got cold, when he has become very bucky and nasty with it. He was like this last winter too. I am countering this with the use of an exercise blanket and by warming him up on the lunge first. Up to this point, the suspicion has been that he has some physical issue with cold.

However, today I am becoming more certain that most of his issue is mental. It was extremely cold today but he warmed up with no trouble at all on the lunge. Other days  he has skipped a bit, but only to the extent that you would say - "young fit horse, cold day" and not question whether he has any other problems. I got on and he was doing some really relaxed stuff in walk and then in trot. Then he just mildly felt like he was going to nap to the gate, and suddenly he was bucking to get me off, not in fun. I stopped him and went back to LDR walk, and when I asked him to trot again, it was great. And then we cantered (me with heart in mouth on each transition!), really nicely.

So today it seems clear that he bucked for the hell of it and not because he had any problem except a desire to go back to the others in the stable. I'm sure that he has nerves in his back that are close to the surface (hence the physio being able to damage them by mistake) and that he genuinely feels the cold in them. But I am also pretty sure that most of his issues are a mental over-reaction. One of the clues to this is that if you add other mental irritations, like introducing a new horse, the over-reaction escalates markedly.

The only course left open to me is, I think, to wait for him to grow up, and to prevent any overreaction on my part. Punishing him has not stopped the behaviour, it has escalated it, so there is no point. I am now ignoring spooking totally, and reacting to bucking only by stopping him doing it so that I am safe, and going back to a pace and shape that he settles in.

If I do this, he frees his back and relaxes and then we can go back to what we were doing before he exploded. He certainly isn't the quiet horse we tried to buy! But he is superb, and getting more superb by the day as he fills out what is now a very, very big frame. I hope, with this new non-confrontational approach, to get to an equilibrium where I want him to stay. Time will tell.

C