Will you walk with me?

Something I enjoy doing a lot right now is to walk with the horses from the field to the riding arena and back.

I always bring a halter, but usually they follow me without. 

Both Minor and Weto will usually meet me by walking a few steps towards me. Minor is always ready to follow me straight away, while Weto sometimes needs a moment to make up his mind. What I will usually do is to start walking 2, 3 steps and then stop and wait until he joins. 

Walking “with” the horses feels a lot different than leading them somewhere. There is less of a goal involved and more checkin in with each other. Kind of like establishing an internet connection with an old modem.

We might actually not go straight to the arena but stop at the water trough or still nibble a few bites of grass. The path we walk might also be rather curvy than a straight line. When it’s hot, they prefer to walk rather slowly. On cooler, windy days, they have more energy and walk faster. It’s a good indicator for me as to what and how much I will train.

It also feels a bit different with each of them. Weto prefers to walk shoulder to shoulder, and I feel a strong sense of leadership from him. Minor walks behind me, with his muzzle softly touching my hip from time to time. It feels like checking in with me. This is how he follows Weto, too. 

On very windy days, Weto is often a bit insecure and watches the environment a lot. He might have to stop and wait several times. I will usually walk ahead a few steps and also wait. If I go too far ahead, he might spook and run back to the field. If I stand right next to him, we usually stand for much longer until he’s ready to go again. Forcing him to walk with me will result in him arriving over threshold at the arena and then being quite on guard the whole training session, and not being able to focus well on my cues. When he stops on the way to the arena to observe the environment, I know that he will probably not be in the frame of mind to do something new but that we rather have an uneventful training session, doing simple stuff. When I get too detailed or change too fast from one exercise to another, he will rather get nervous on these days. It’s like his RAM is already quite busy with wind noise and moving bushes. On these days, I might do some focus exercises, too.

When I lead them back to the field, I will also walk with them without halter. I observe how the feeling between us is now, and if anything changed. Minor usually feels very energetic after the training, in a happy, unexcited way. We might prompt each other to start running at some point, sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s him. Back on the field. He likes to stand with me for a while and then starts grazing very close to me.  I might stay a bit, slowly putting one foot in front of the other, before I wander back to the arena to pack up my equipment. 

Weto might prefer not to walk back to the arena straight away but to have a bit of a think in the shade of the big pine tree by the arena. Sometimes I just let him stand there and I go and fetch Minor, sometimes I wait with him and walk him back to the field. But he doesn’t do this every time. When we walk back together, he makes bigger, more energetic steps than before the training and he goes better over the back, while before the training he often has a lot of push (which you can see by observing the poll). He might have a roll when we arrive on the field before he starts to wander off to the others. 

I love connecting with them before and after the training this way, which gives me a lot of information about how they are doing on this day and what they thought of the training.