Putting a stop on a horse with a RM.

Now tell me, honestly, how many of you parents would have thrown an running martingale on that pony to keep his head down so your daughter had some brakes???? I really want to know how many of you think that this would have been the next step to take. Or the next step you would have taken if you were on the horse and had no brakes.

The worse thing that anyone could have done to this pony, (who, by the way, is bullheaded like most ponies) is put a RM on him. My daughter, Kate, was riding the pony, Cloud Dancer, in a curb bit with a low port. He had been trained in a snaffle. He was moved up to a curb once he was responding good to the snaffle and learning to neck rein.

My daughter had been riding him for two years when he started this. Instead on throwing more equipment on him, which in my opinion would have only made him worse, I wanted to figure out WHY he was bolting. You see, I do not believe that any horse puts any more effort into riding then he has to, so if this pony is putting all of this work into bolting then we humans much be doing something wrong. We checked saddle fit, found that since he had matured the saddle we had always used was now pinching him. Changed the saddle. He was still bolting, so I put a snaffle on him and had my daughter ride him in the round pen. My daughter is a very good rider with a good seat and good hands, she took riding lessons as a 5 year old and has been listening and developing her riding skills since then, so I did not think that the bolting might be from the way she was riding him, but I was wrong. I had her put CD through all of the gaits. I noticed that even in the walk she has too much on his mouth, and when she got to the canter her hands even tightened more and her feet went back and she gripped the pony, waiting for him to bolt, which he did. You see she was telling him go with her legs and stop with her hands. He was getting mixed signals and out of fustration was taking off on her. And because of his bolting she was gripping him out of fear and losing control. He probably started bolting in the first place because of the pinching saddle and things snowballed from there. Actually Kate, out of fear, was telling him to bolt!!!

So, to solve the problem, I taught her to double him back which eliminated undo pressure on his mouth. She rode him on a nice rein with a little contact and when he started to take off into a faster gait, she would double him back and put him into circles until he dropped back into the gait that she wanted. Then she would let him continue on. He has done A LOT of circling, but the bolting is getting to be less and less.

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