05/05/2025
This 5yo unbroken Mustang came to me with a few issues, the biggest of which was being reactive. Like..super duper reactive. Friendly enough but untrusting at her core and hadn’t yet made up her mind if humans were to be feared or not. She seemed to tolerate humans, and there was not a mean bone in her body at all, for sure a flighter, not a fighter.
Her owner came out once a week to observe whatever training we happened to be doing that day (I encourage owners to be present when possible) that first visit happened to be her mare’s first day with me on her back (I let the horse dictate the training timeline and move at their pace)
I felt it was time to swing my leg over. Easy peasy, super relaxed and all was well. We walked around,stopped,one-rein disengagement left,all good. Disengagement right, all hell breaks loose, she is now a bucking bronc. It was one of those rare occasions the owner was there and got to witness firsthand the under-saddle,bronc busting, glad i rode bulls, not sure i was going to stick this one, kind of rides 😆 Luckily all of the groundwork and practicing one-rein disengagements from the ground paid off. I got her head around, stayed on, she stopped, we ended on a good note and I dismounted on my terms. Back to the drawing board I went.
Now it was tome to figure out what exactly triggered it and how to get her over it safely. It took some thinking outside of the box but 5 weeks later she left here a confident, kind, willing, brave trail-blazing queen who didn’t fear a human on her back anymore. She didn’t buck because she had lots of energy, she bucked out of fear, two very different ways to deal with that training-wise. Sometimes figuring out why the unwanted behavior is happening is harder than fixing it.
