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I've been considering getting some resources to help me teach my horse to drive. However, the available literature appears to be aimed at people who are not me. The reason I am feeling the need for some literature to guide my teaching hand is that carriage and buggy wrecks have the potential to be astonishingly bad. See here. And, y'know, I've already wrecked the horse with a tire. Twice, back in October.



Anyway, the horse-driving books that I have seen split neatly into several classes of thing.

Class 1: I would like to teach my quiet, sane horse to drive nicely around the ring in a pretty, largely ceremonial buggy.

Class 2: I would like to teach my quiet, sane draft horse to plow, harrow, rake, and pull logs because I am either a Gentleman Farmer with a lot of free time, a Peak Oil believer, or an historical re-enactor. Or Amish. (Actually, the Amish probably do not need to buy books about working horses in harness. They may *write* books on the subject...)

Class 3: I have bought a quiet, sane horse who is already broke to drive and I want to be more able to drive him more betterer.

Class 4: I don't think riding 3-day-event allows me the opportunity to spend a sufficiently hideous amount of money on my horse gear and turnout, so I'm taking up Combined Driving. My horses are not quiet or entirely sane but I have lots of money, good health insurance, and several carts, including one with disc brakes and an off-road suspension.

I need literature aimed at Class 5: I would like to teach my fretful, impatient, less-than-sane horse to drive even though absolutely everything I've ever seen relating to the training of driving horses suggests that success depends on picking a properly calm and steady horse to start with. Halp!

I expect I'll wind up getting a book or two at some point, but so far I'm not even remotely to where a book would be helpful. *sigh* Rained out today anyway.

Date: 2010-11-17 01:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fooliv.livejournal.com
Yeah, sounds like a project for a young horse that you can break specially to carriage driving. Is the current project horse young enough & flexible enough to deal with it?

I once saw an Amishman plowing a field over on the road between Centre Hall and Potter's Mills with a half-dozen horses in harness & a flying plow. I swear it looked like he was doing fifteen miles an hour, bouncing along in a crouch on the plow. Looked crazy, but kind of fun.

Date: 2010-11-18 12:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] not-your-real.livejournal.com
They never do write quite the right books...

About that video, I was wondering what you thought of how they handled that situation :) Should they have even been trying to intercept the runaway horses like that? Or were they doing the best they could under the circumstances?

Date: 2010-11-18 01:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] which-chick.livejournal.com
I always want a special snowflake book... but in reality I will make do with what's available.

As for the behavior of the ring crew in the video: The way it was handled was not the optimal solution.

Best practices is to not have a ton of junk in the middle of the ring. However, a judge's table/area in the ring is common practice in higher-end horse shows. (This was a regional championship Arabian show.) If the center of the ring had been clear, the correct response would have been to move all the sane buggies to the center of the ring and then put a handler (person standing on the ground) to each buggy while everyone LEFT THE RUNAWAY ALONE and waited for it to calm down (not more then ten or fifteen minutes, usually, even while dragging a destroyed buggy and the remnants of harness). A runaway, left to his own devices, will always tend to stay on the rail, going round-n-round. (Bolting, panicky horses go STRAIGHT, they do not veer off in a different direction without cause. The reaction is FLIGHT, in a straight line. Left alone, the horse would have stayed on the rail and not run into other buggies.) Also, the audience should have immediately been instructed to shut the hell up -- screaming is not helpful.

A horse wearing a closed bridle (like for driving) can only see directly in front of it, not to the sides or back, which is one of the reasons that the ground people trying to "herd" the runaway had very little luck. Also, a lot of the ground people for a horse show are not horse people -- they belong to the venue -- and do not have the skills or sense to react appropriately in any event. (As an example, one's odds of being able to stop a panicking horse by grabbing the reins or harness as they whiz by are extremely low.)

It was a very bad day for everyone and it was exacerbated by a poor ring setup and less-than-ideal handling of the situation. However, even in the event of perfect handling, the show would have been disrupted for ten to fifteen minutes, the cart and harness would have been destroyed, and the horse would need a LOT of rehab before ever being put to a cart again.

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