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There are lots of reasons that horses rear up, and how you "fix" it can
frequently depend upon the reason that the horse is doing it.

Since the original poster did not specify under what circumstances the horse
rears up, determining its cause, and thereby coming up with a program for
stopping the behaviour is virtually impossible.

Whack it between the ears as it comes up (so that it thinks it smacked its
head on something that it couldn't see and therefore is loath to do the same
again for fear of smacking its head on something else that it can't see) can
sometimes be a cure; however, it may also have the by-product of making the
horse constantly worried about whacking its head, and it will only work if
you time it right (i.e. it needs to be done on the way up, not the way
down).

However, many of the other explanations of situations where horses rear up,
are actually rider induced; like, for instance this situation described by
Karen Sullivan:

> Sometimes, the act of trying to push them forward will initiate the
balk....then rear.

Especially in a green horse that is not fully trained.  What lots of people
do when a horse balks is to kick or squeeze with their heels....both of
their heels.

The natural reflex for a horse when you apply pressure to the muscles of the
underline behind the girth is for that muscle to contract.  If the horse has
that hind foot in the air, the contraction of that muscle will pull the foot
forward, thereby making the horse track up further under itself and propel
the horse forward. However, this reflex action only works if the foot is off
the ground (or unweighted and about to come off the ground).

On the other hand, if both of the back feet are firmly planted on the ground
and both heels of the rider are applied at the same time, the reflex action
of that muscle contracting won't pull the a hind leg forward, it will pull
the front end up...i.e. the horse will rear up.  In order for a horse to NOT
rear up when both the riders heels are applied behind the girth (the way
that lots of people ask a horse to move forward), the horse has to have
learned somewhere along the line to overcome its reflexes.

Because the cue for move forward and the cue for rear up are very similar,
if you have a horse that is naturally kinda light in the front end (which is
what many people STRIVE for in their selection processes), you have to be
careful when first teaching the horse to move forward off your leg....and it
is far more effective (and less likely to provoke a reflex rear) if you
apply your legs one at a time....and since what you are trying to do is get
the horse to move a back leg forward, there isn't much point in cuing the
horse to move both back legs at the same time as it is virtually physically
impossible for the horse to do so.

Personally, _I_ LIKE my horses to be responsive to my leg and encourage them
to use this reflex so that the lightest application of the leg will allow me
to place each hind foot exactly where I want it to.  As a consequence, I am
disinclined to teach a horse to ignore that reflex by correcting him for
rearing up when I have, in essence, asked him to do just that.

Many horses, that don't rear up when you apply both legs behind the girth at
the same time while they are standing still are either too lazy or have long
since learned that the rider doesn't really mean "rear up" despite the fact
that that is the horse's natural reflex.  And for horses that are expected
to have riders that don't know how to properly time the application of their
legs, teaching them not to rear up even if they think they have been asked
to is a good thing.

This, however, is not the same thing as a horse that rears up as an evasion
technique, or a horse that rears up because of too much bit in too heavy of
hands.  And it is pretty much only for this horse that a tie down keeps it
from rearing up.

Horses such as those that I have described above (that rear up because they
have reflexively contracted their underline muscles on both sides while
their hind feet are weighted) rear up from behind by raising their backs and
shoulders, not by throwing their heads up, so unless you have the tie down
adjusted so tightly as to be unsafe on any moving horse, it isn't going to
keep this from happening.

There are lots of reasons that a horse might rear up; how best to correct it
depends very much upon those reasons as well as upon the disposition and
prior experiences of the horse itself.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



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