Picture this: You’re at a horse handling clinic watching the clinician’s horse do pretty much anything you can think of and 50 other things you hadn’t. You sit there amazed and envious, wishing you could get your horse to lead or sidepass that well with no visible cue, to say nothing of the ease with which that clinician can clip, load, and give shots to that horse. How do you get your horse to handle that well?

At the Healthy Horses Workshop (held Dec. 2 in San Antonio, Texas, in conjunction with the 52nd annual American Association of Equine Practitioners Convention), clinicians John Lyons of Parachute, Colo., and Mark Fitch, DVM, of Boulder, Colo., spent several hours on this topic for more than 300 horse owners, trainers, and veterinarians in attendance. Using attendees’ horses, they demonstrated how to work around the problems of problem horses, and in doing so increase their compliance with more handling procedures than just those at hand.

"What we want you to be able to do is learn how to read these horses and do what’s appropriate to work around them without scaring them more and making it more difficult to work around them," began Lyons.

 The main message both clinicians emphasized was that handling and training horses isn’t just about what you’re trying to get the horse to do (or not do) at that moment. The way a horse responds to you for one activity is the same way he responds to you for other activities, so by improving your handling of your horse in one area, you’ll see benefits in your other interactions with that horse as well