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April said:

> Which brings up another topic. How does one go about
> ?teaching a horse to reliably ground tie?
Teaching a horse to ground tie is not very much different from teaching a dog 
to "stay" except that you have the advantage of riding a horse, but you cannot 
ride a dog, and the disadvantage of not being able to teach a horse to "sit" 
before teaching it to stay.

The way that I teach horses to ground tie starts from the saddle, and "ground 
tied" means "don't move your feet" so it is a variation on "whoa."

So, if you have taught your horse to stop moving its feet while under saddle, 
you can move on to teaching it to stop moving its feet when you drop a rein (it 
helps if you have split reins so can hold on to one while dropping the other), 
at least you can if you have taught it to stop moving its feet without having 
to haul back on both reins.

Walk the horse along, drop one of the reins and immediately ask it to stop; 
pick up the rein and ask it to go.? Do this a couple of times so that the horse 
starts to get the idea that the dropped rein means stop and don't go while it 
is still dropped.

Then drop the rein and don't IMMEDIATELY ask it to stop, but see if it thinks 
to stop on its own, but if it doesn't ask it to stop....

There are additional steps to this that include: getting off and walking away 
from the horse with the rein dropped and correcting the horse if it starts to 
follow you (by tugging down on the rein and telling it to whoa); drop the rein 
(or the lead rope) but don't tie the horse when you bring it out of the stall 
and tack it up and correct the horse if it moves its feet (by tugging down on 
the rein or rope and telling it to whoa); after the horse has figured out the 
stop from the walk when you drop the rein, drop the rein at the trot and teach 
it that you want it to stop from the trot as well; after the horse has figured 
out the stop from the trot when you drop the rein, drop the rein at the canter 
and teach it that you want it to stop from the canter as well.

Do what I did just today with a horse that is quite well along in this 
training, canter the horse around, drop one of the reins and have it stop, jump 
off the horse and walk away to the other side of the arena and hide, and sit in 
the shade for 10 minutes while the horse stands there without moving its feet 
(and tell it to whoa if it even starts to fidget with its feet).? Note that 
this is not much different from the "long stay" required in obedience trials at 
dog shows.

Some horses learn it better than others.? One of the horses that I ride 
regularly can be left standing ground tied for an hour in an arena with other 
horses riding around in it.? You can also gallop him full out, drop the rein to 
the ground and he do a sliding stop to a halt (so be prepared).

And I have found that ground tying is easier to teach by teaching the "stop 
moving" part before trying to teach the "don't move" part.

kat
Orange County, Calif.

p.s.? As a dog trainer, this is a method that I devised for myself before ever 
hearing how other people teach it.? I remember once reading an article on "how 
to teach ground tying" and the method was NOTHING like mine.? The method 
outlined in this article was to bury a tie ring in the ground that the horse 
couldn't unearth and then tie the horse to it so that it literally thought that 
it was tied to the ground.?? I have never tried this, so I have no idea whether 
it would work any better than my own method.

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