miss manners

[Karen Allnutt <allnutt@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>]

A couple of weeks ago people were talking about competing with stallions on
the list and training them to behave (keep quiet, not drop, etc).

My questions is this.  I have a mare that when she is in a particular part
of her cycle gets  noisy = whinnies when I am riding her (usually only a
couple of times).  The last time this happened she carried on the entire
time I rode her (an hour) and got herself really worked up (lathered).  If
we had been riding alone, I might have thought that our buddy sour training
was not working, but we were riding with her buddy.  It was embarassing and
irritating.

I have not seen anything in the literature about how to keep a horse quiet
so I was wondering if the stallion riders or anyone else could tell me how
they train their horses to be/remain quiet.

Yes, I know, riding mares, at times, because of their hormones is a dicey
thing at best.

This mare is the alpha mare of the herd.   The only other thing that I am
aware of is there is a new horse that lives alone without any company in
the neighborhood.  It is possible that when she started whinnying that he
kept answering her.  She stopped as soon as we got home.  Regardless, this
is unacceptable behavior in my opinion, but I don't know how to rectify it.

Any ideas???

Karen & Rose & Archie