Tina Fagan and Rock Star’s harmonious display of liberty work and their beautiful connection took the crowd’s breath away at the 2015 Horse of the Year Show, where they won the inaugural Kaimanawa Stallion Challenge. In this article, Tina offers an insight into her system for schooling at liberty.
Starting from the ground up
Groundwork is brain gymnastics for the horse – it makes them easier to school under saddle. The more you can manoeuvre and control your horse’s feet, the better you are able to problem-solve. People might think teaching your horse to stand on a box isn’t relevant, but if you can get your horse to stand on a box, it’s going to be easier for them to climb in and out of the truck or go across a bridge. So even though the tasks I’m teaching the horses to do aren’t everyday tasks, it makes the things you do come across everyday a little easier. If I have to walk between the floats at a show and there’s a bag on the ground he has to walk over, my horse understands how to negotiate it.
Everything you do on the ground relates to what happens when you get on your horse and a lot of accidents could be avoided if people spend five minutes on the ground first. How often do you hear of people saddling up and getting bucked off before the horse has taken five strides? If they’d just circled their horse a couple of times and made sure that nothing was pinching before they got on, they would have then kept themselves safe. I always tell people to do their pre-flight checks. Your horse doesn’t always wake up on the right side of the paddock!
It’s really important for safety and control that you can get your horse to move away from pressure and back out of your space (pic 1550). We basically have four phases of firmness. We start off with phase one, which is the lightest pressure, then quietly increase the pressure until the horse moves out of our space. Phase one might just be moving a finger – the rope doesn’t even move to start. When your horse responds and moves away from the lightest pressure, you are ready to take the halter off and do it at liberty. Everything you can do on the lead-line, you can do at liberty.
People send me their horse to start and say they’ve already put a saddle on – they’ve just made it harder work for me really! Sometimes people have created horses that have become so desensitised and in their space that I have to work a little bit harder to teach the horse how to move away from pressure.
The whip is an extension of your body (below). We don’t really call it a whip as such, it’s a training stick. A lunge whip works but it tends to be a bit floppy. The best thing to do if you don’t have one of these at home is to go and buy a stock stick, which is a fibreglass stick, and tape a bit of yachting braid to the end of it – that’s a cheap option and it’s really effective. We don’t want the horse to fear the stick; it’s not a punishment.
Rubbing the horse with the whip is like a reassurance – you’re okay, I’m right here. We do lots of rubbing with the stick, the ropes and the string to desensitise the horse at the start. It’s really important that we get them used to our equipment first, so they’re comfortable with it, before we start directing them, otherwise they’re going to be moving away from fear and that’s the last thing we want.
Liberty work
Whatever you can do on the line, you can do at liberty. Obviously it takes time to develop these skills. It’s not actually about your horse – it’s about your feel and timing. The horse’s shoulder is your driveline, so anything you do behind the driveline sends your horse forwards or sideways. What you do in front of the driveline stops your horse or will turn him. Anyone can learn how to do liberty work and it’s so cool. If you can do this, imagine all the other things you can do with your horse?
Sometimes just doing nothing is really important (below). A lot of people think they have to be doing things all the time – they hop on their horse, ride them for 40 minutes, and then ride them back to the stables. I tell people to be a great daydreamer and reward your horse by doing nothing – if you’ve worked hard, let the reins go, give them a rub and just stand there. That time you spend doing nothing is actually great bonding time.
It’s about body language
How often do we go to catch our horse and as we cruise back, we’re texting on our phone? We brush the horse, saddle up and ride, and as we’re riding we think about what we’re going to have for dinner. We unsaddle the horse and send it back to the paddock… how much conversation have we actually had with our horse in that time? And we wonder why, when we get to the tie-up, the horse smacks into us! If we’re not aware of their space, they aren’t aware of our space.
We live in such a busy society and do so much texting and phoning that a lot of people are not really aware of body language because they don’t practise it. If you’re not very good at reading other people, you’re going to have a lot of trouble with your horse. People will tell me about something their horse has done and say it just came out of nowhere, but it never comes out of nowhere. It comes out of somewhere. You have to understand how to read the signs.
People tend to look at the horse’s head all the time, but if you’re looking at the head you can’t direct it properly. You actually have to look towards the area you want the horse to yield, or where you want the horse to go. It’s like developing a new language with your horse and we can all learn it. The horse has to learn how to understand us a little bit and we have to understand them a lot. And then we can do anything.
The groundwork helps enormously when starting horses. If your horse already understands how to move laterally from the ground, it is much easier it is to get them to move laterally when you’re under saddle. It just happens.
People ask me at what stage do you get your horse to move away from your leg when you start the horse under saddle and I say from the day I get on it. The first thing I want my horse to do is understand how to move away from my leg and not be worried about. It’s super important.
Bringing out the play drive
Rocky is a little bit introverted. When I first started working with him, he didn’t snort and bounce off the rails like an extrovert; he would stand there and look at you. He’s the sort of horse who could have become dull very quickly if you went overboard on the desensitising or put him under a lot of pressure. He would have just shut down. So the biggest thing with Rocky was bringing out his play drive and trying to create a horse who was light and happy, not introverted and slow.
People used to call warmbloods ‘dumb-bloods’, but I think it was more a case of dumb humans! Thoroughbreds are quite reactive as a general rule, which means that even if they don’t like something we can generally pressure them into it. A warmblood will say, you know what – I don’t like it, so convince me otherwise. Rocky is very much like that – he thinks a lot. When we’re training, we’re trying to teach them to think for us, not against us.
Rocky is a nice mover now, but some of that’s training, because when he first started out, he had the Kaimanawa shuffle! Now he’s had more training, he can balance a lot more easily and he knows how to use his body better. He’s not just picking his body through the tundra anymore; he can actually afford to get up and move. You can see the softness of training.
Teaching your horse to bow
When I’m teaching a horse how to bow, I use treats as reinforcement. I try not to use treats too much in my training, but when it comes to tricks like this that require a little bit of physical effort, I like to give them a little something. To start, I pick up their leg and I get them to rock backwards and forwards a little bit by applying pressure under their chest, until they rock right down to the ground. I don’t use the treats to get them to the ground, but once they’re down here, I give them a little reward. Eventually, I can just tap their leg and they’ll drop and bow.
I always pick the places I ask them to bow – I don’t do it on hard ground. You have to be responsible for them. They give it to you so willingly that you want to look after them.
Riding without a bridle
Of course the work’s not going to be as sharp as when you ride with a bridle, but I like the fact that you can get on and just feel so relaxed up here. I mean, doesn’t everyone want to do this? Wouldn’t you like to get up there and feel that comfortable on your own horse? Of course you can’t just go and get on your horse and think it’s going to happen, because it probably won’t, but I do encourage everybody to learn this.
You have to be patiently persistent, and when your horse gives you something, you stop and you reward it, and maybe that day you just don’t do it again.
“You can ride a horse with no reins, but if you can’t stop it or move it sideways, then all you are is a passenger. We’ve got to understand the difference between trick riding and training.”
People get frustrated with young horses. And I get frustrated as a trainer, because I see these young riders coming along and because they’ve ridden horses that are trained and they’ve done quite well they assume that they can bring on a young horse, but really they don’t understand the process of training. They are two completely different skills. There are good trainers, there are good horsemen, there are good teachers and there are good riders, but very few people are all four, or even two, of those things. Understanding where you fit is really important with horses.
About Tina: A true all-round horsewoman, Tina has worked full-time with horses for most of her life, and set up her own warmblood stud, Starlight Farm, while she was in her early 20s. Besides starting young horses, Tina teaches, rides competitively and takes horses for schooling.
Tina was first inspired to look further than mainstream equestrian training after watching a Frenchman perform liberty work and high school dressage movements. She began studying Parelli natural horsemanship, and went on to train at Pat and Linda Parelli’s base in the US for six months. She has also worked with horses in Europe and trains regularly with Spanish classical dressage rider Ramon Guerrero; her own training system is an amalgamation of all these experiences. “I can transfer the natural horsemanship or the classical through to competition, and make a horse that’s lighter and smarter and happy. That’s a big motivation – I want my horses to enjoy the work and I want to enjoy it too. I want people to watch my performance and feel inspired.”
- This article was first published in the June 2015 issue of NZ Horse & Pony
