Training Setbacks: How to Deal & Move Forward

Ride On with Julie Goodnight

Today’s topic is about how to deal with training setbacks with your horse. We've all been there at some point or another in our journey with horses where things don’t go according to plan. The horse that normally walks right into a trailer suddenly refuses to load. Or your horse has one bad experience at a horse show, and that turns into an ongoing problem. Or maybe you had a frightening experience on a normally unflappable horse, or an incident that overwhelmed your horse and broke down his confidence. Horses have wills of their own, and they are predictably unpredictable. They're flight animals, they are sensitive and reactive, and they run the full gamut of emotions—from utter contentment, to fear, anger, and resentment. Sometimes when horses go south on us, it’s because we made a mistake. But sometimes you have a training setback with a horse due to situational circumstances, like getting a bad draw in a cow class or someone else’s horse spooks and runs off on a trail ride, causing your horse to have a meltdown. It’s unreasonable to think that in the long-term training of a horse, which takes place over years and decades, that everything would always go perfectly and you would never encounter a setback. Neither human nor equine are robots and stuff happens. In this podcast, I want to focus on what to do after the setback, how to analyze the situation, dissect what went wrong, and be proactive in developing a plan to get your horse back on track. Plus, I’ve got some brand-new questions to answer, straight from our listeners, in my "What the Hay?" Q&A segment.