Learning To Separate

Pulling On The Reins And Pulling On The Traces
When I make a list of things that a draft or driving horse needs to learn before they can be safely used as a driving horse, there are many items: They need to get used to noise following along behind. Turning, backing up, stopping and going forward as directed is a big item. Learning to confidently pull a reasonable weight is required. The list is long.

One of the most important skills that a driving horse needs to learn is one that doesn't even make the list for most trainers. It seems to me that one of the most important new skills that driving horses need to learn is to separate the pulling that they are learning to do on the traces from the pulling that they do on the reins. Teaching your horse to pull on the traces is a good thing - teaching your horse to pull on the reins is not a good thing. When the two kinds of pulling get together, you get chaos.

How “Pulling” Horses Look
Every time I get out in public at a draft or driving horse function, I see an abundance of examples of horses that have never learned to separate the good and bad pressure. The harder they need to pull on a load with the traces, the harder they appear to be pulling on the reins. If you want to see this problem exhibited on a grand scale, just go to any horse pull. Most, if not all of the teams you see are pulling big loads, and they'll at the same time be pulling big men by the horses’ reins.

The thing that is most noticeable about horses that have been trained or allowed to make a strong connection between pulling the load and pulling on the reins is how upset and uncontrollable the horses are. It is not unusual for these horses to exhibit extreme anxiety before, during and after each attempt at a pull. They come strutting up to the pulling sled with their muscle bound drivers barely keeping them walking. Instead of turning and stopping in front of the sled, they often swerve past the front and make a false charge down the pulling lane while they are still a great distance from the sled. Dragging the horses back to a position where they can be hitched to the sled is clearly an endeavor that is fraught with difficulty.

The poor guy who is assigned to hook the doubletrees has to be agile, quick, and quiet, to get the hook on the ring. If he gets a finger in the wrong place at the wrong second as he is making the hitch, it'll get pinched off in the blink of an eye. If he makes any noise as he's hooking up, he could get the load drug over top of him. Those revved up horses take the slightest noise as a signal to go!

What It Looks Like With Separation
I watched a major event horse pull at the National Western in Denver, Colorado about 15 years ago where a teamster showed up who clearly knew about the importance of the separation I am talking about. He brought three teams of horses with him from upstate New York. His horses weighed just right to allow him to compete in the light, middle, and heavyweight divisions. I don't remember his name, but I'll bet a lot of his fellow competitors do!

Each of his teams acted exactly the same - completely different from anyone else’s team. When he came forward to hitch onto the load, his teams all walked flat footed, heads down in a businesslike attitude, and slack on the lines. They drove over, turned at the proper place, backed up a little and stood there like a team that has only ever been used for hay rides. This man carried and hooked the doubletrees by himself without any difficulty.

When he started them into the load, they didn't slam into it or seesaw back and forth, trying to get an advantage by being quick. No, when he quietly gave them the signal to pull, they stepped forward on slack reins and carefully settled into the collars. As they felt their teammate matching their pressure on the collar they settled in and began to calmly pull.

Have you ever seen a magician do a convincing show of “levitating” a person or an object? It happens so slow and quiet. As things begin to rise, you experience a sense of amazement at seeing the gravity-defying trick that is being applied to your eyes. It was with that same sort of magical levitation that the load began to smoothly move forward behind this guy's horses. But this wasn't any trick! Those were real loads, at weights heavy enough to win the light, middle and heavyweight divisions at a major pull. He won with all three of his teams. At the same time, he won the hearts and imaginations of me and a lot of other horsemen and women.

Teaching Your Horse To Pull But Not Pull
To teach your horse to pull on the traces but not on the lines, you have to train your horse so that the two kinds of pulling are separate in the horse’s mind. This teaching of separation begins with the process of teaching the horse to not pull on the halter as it is being led. Good and bad kinds of pulling cannot easily be separated if the two kinds of pulling are introduced together, as is commonly done to draft horses!

Who Is The “Leader”?
Does your horse “lead” you wherever he goes? Does he lean on his halter when you are going where he wants to go, pulling you along with great pressure? If you knew how to correct that behavior, you'd be making a big step toward teaching him to not pull on the lines when being driven. I've never seen a horse that has the respect to lightly and calmly follow its leader (the person on the other end of the lead rope) that also was bad about pulling on the reins when driven. But if you can't get your horse to lead properly, then the lightness and respect that is needed in driving will never be possible.

The form of leading that is exhibited in the show ring, where the horse is head and shoulders out in front of the leader, is the opposite of what is needed to teach calmness and respect. When a horse is following its leader, it will be calmly walking in the path made by the leader, at half a horse length or more behind the leader, on a slack lead rope.

A New Way Of Stopping
After a horse learns to consistently lead this way, I then begin to ground drive the horse, with the objective of teaching it to stop with a new value system. When stopping, most people pull back on the reins until the horse stops its feet. They care nothing about how hard the horse is pulling on the reins when its feet stop, they only know to release the pressure when the feet stop. Was the horse pulling on the bit when the feet stopped? With horses that will get the good and bad kinds of pulling joined together, that resistance to stopping will be there.

I tell drivers to “Hold the rein pressure until the horse relieves the pressure for himself, by rocking back off of the pressure.” With this new way of training, the horse figures out that pulling on the bit doesn't get a release of pressure. The horse has to find the release for himself, if the trainer holds the stopping pressure until the horse moves its feet backwards to relieve the pressure it has put on its own mouth. By always waiting until the horse relieves the pressure by rocking back from the bit, the horse learns to not pull on the reins.

After a few repetitions of stopping in this new “don't pressure the bit” way, the horse will readjust how he moves, so that he can stop without having to put pressure on the bit. The standard I am looking for is zero to four ounces of pressure. If a horse will consistently stop with four ounces of pressure or less, then (and only then) is he ready to learn to pull on the traces. A horse that is not pulling hard on the reins is a horse that can think well.

The biggest reason to get the two kinds of pulling separated is not to make training more complicated (which it will be, at first), or to win pulling contests. The biggest reason to get the two kinds of pulling separated is to get your horses to act sensible. If everything they do for you involves being restrained into place by pressure on the reins, you haven't trained very well. When you see how simple it is to train your horses to not have to be controlled all of the time, something amazing happens. Your horses experience the freedom of being left alone to do good work, and you experience the freedom of not having to restrain every step they take. Horses that know how to separate the two kinds of pulling are wonderful to drive!