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Using Artificial Aids |
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Equestrians refer to communication aids that are associated with some use of the rider's body as 'natural' aids. These include the legs, the rider's weight, the hands, and an independent seat. They call anything else an 'artificial aid.' 
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By Faith Meredith |
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Little Things Do Mean a Lot |
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Every movement you make, everything you do in his presence, has meaning to the horse. The horse is a master at reading your body language and knowing just where you're at and what you're about when you first enter his space. So any time you are with a horse, you have to really pay attention.
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By Ron Meredith |
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Applied Heeding: Backing |
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Teaching a green horse to back provides a good example of how to combine and practice the training concepts used in heeding. Horse and handler must pay close attention to one another. The handler creates corridors of horse-logical pressures that shape the horse's feel of direction and speed.
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By Ron Meredith |
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Applying Natural Aids |
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Riders use a combination of influences to communicate with their horses. Within equestrian tradition we refer to these influences as 'aids' and we further subdivide them into 'natural' and 'artificial' aids.
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By Faith Meredith |
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First Rides: Evaluating a Horse's Vocabulary |
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When we work with very young children, we keep our vocabulary simple because their understanding of spoken language is limited. A two-year-old child's vocabulary is much smaller than that of a four-year-old or a seven-year old. But by the time that child becomes a teenager, his or her vocabulary will number in the thousands of words.
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By Faith Meredith |
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Longeing for Riders |
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Longeing without stirrups can be a wonderfully useful tool to help riders learn to relax, ride in balance, and follow the motion of the horse as they work toward developing an independent seat.
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By Faith Meredith |
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Heeding Groundwork: Class Review |
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Let's review the sequence of communication skills a baby green horse learns in a horse-logical 'heeding' program. When he starts out, he doesn't have any kind of vocabulary for working with humans. We slowly introduce him to horse-logical body language pressures that are relieved when his feet move in the indicated direction. We want him to pay close attention to whatever we are doing or, in colloquial English, to 'pay heed.'
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By Ron Meredith |
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Groundwork: From Basics to Games |
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Horse-logical heeding involves showing the horse new things that are only one step, or two at most, away from what he already understands. When we first start groundwork with a baby green horse, the primary goal of the horse's early lessons is not mastering a specific set of skills. Our primary goal is to develop a feeling of trust and camaraderie with the horse.
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By Ron Meredith |
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