A common concept that is talked about a lot by clinicians and trainers is the idea of giving a horse a job. I heard Ray Hunt say many times that by the third day of starting a horse, they should be ready to go on the payroll and be given a job. I think that since Ray came from a ranch working background he mostly had in mind jobs such as tracking cows or even working at a branding. But in any case, the idea of a job can be expanded in a variety of ways to include things such as working other horses, checking the mail, opening a gate, dragging a log, plowing a patch of dirt, leading in a pack string, and on and on it goes.
But why is giving a horse a job thought to be a good idea?
My take on this concept is that when a horse is first started, having a job to do can assist a horse to get comfortable with just carrying a rider and following some direction.
No matter how great a horse is prepared, it is never really comfortable to carry a rider by day three of being started. It just isn’t. There is still a long way to go for a horse to comprehend and feel okay about its new life as a riding horse. A horse’s understanding of having a rider flopping around on top and feeling okay about yielding to the reins, seat, and legs is not yet established sufficiently for it to be considered ‘broken in’.
It’s not always helped by asking a horse to perform senseless tasks like hundreds of circles and thousands of serpentines and endless walk-trot-canter transitions. If this continues it doesn’t take long for a new riding horse to carry out its job, but in a mindless fashion.
On the other hand, giving a horse a task that interests them can go a long way to establishing a level of comfort about carrying a rider and following directions that we want in a riding horse.
Let’s consider cow work as just one type of job. Many horses have a natural curiosity and interest in cows – especially when the cow is moving away from them. It’s easy to get most horses interested in tracking a cow, even from very early on in their training. We can take advantage of this interest by directing a horse to follow a cow and get accustomed to having us on their back and guiding both their direction and speed. By having a job to do that interests our horse, we make the transition from a paddock freeloader to a saddle horse easier.
So the upside of giving a horse a job early in its career as a riding horse is to help make being with a rider much easier and following directions much easier. But giving a horse a job at the breaking-in stage is not the only occasion it can benefit a horse. It can help horses that have learned to carry anxiety about being ridden. When I say this I instantly think of thoroughbreds that have raced and never really learned how to be a riding horse. Giving those types of horses a job can appease their inner worry to some extent as they learn to adapt to their new reality.
But unfortunately, there is also a downside to a horse having a job. This mainly appears when a horse’s job is to always do a job.
In my experience, so many horses that are ridden to do a job are among the least educated and difficult horses to ride. I have said in previous articles that horses receive a lot of comfort from life being predictable. They like things to be as routine as possible and do not like surprises. When we ride horses for a job, a horse will very quickly work out the pattern or routine in the job because that’s where the comfort will come from.
This means that when the job changes or the pattern is interrupted, a lot of horses become distressed. This is because people have taken the idea of giving a horse a job and turned it into a crutch for the horse. Instead of using the job as a way of making the horse a better riding horse, the job “institutionalizes” the horse where it is unable to function comfortably outside of the job.
For example, I’ve come across dressage horses that can’t be ridden on a trail and reining horses that insist on loping any time a rider asks for more forwardness. I have ridden barrel horses that only have two speeds and gaited horses that can’t perform a diagonal trot. I have helped endurance horses that were not able to relax at a walk and cutting horses that couldn’t slow down or would drop their shoulder in a turn.
All these issues came from people training their horses to perform a job.
So here’s my take on giving a horse a job. At some point in the training, the job needs to change for a horse to be a better horse.
Instead of asking a horse to focus and follow a cow (or whatever the job is) and learn how to do that, there comes a point where the job should become listening to the rider and not the cow.
Let’s examine a simple example. Suppose the job we give our horse is to line up next to a mounting block when we step up on the block. If we do this 100 times, a horse will learn to walk over to the mounting block and stand beside it when it sees us preparing to climb the block. That is the job we taught it. But what if we sprain our left ankle and need to mount from the right side of the horse, instead of the left side as we have done 100 times before? Now the horse has to learn a new job.
We can certainly teach the horse to allow us to mount from the right side, but we achieve much more if we teach it that lining alongside the mounting block is no longer the job. Instead, the job is to follow our direction. We replace the idea of standing by the mounting block with the idea of moving any foot we want, when and how we want. We ask the horse a question such as, ”Can you move that foot over here and about that much?” The horse either answers us by changing its thought and moving how we want or comes back to us with another question like, “I don’t understand – which foot, when, and how?” The job has shifted from standing beside the mounting block to listening to us. This may seem subtle or even trivial to some people, but I can assure you it is very important and makes the difference between a horse working for you or working with you.
In my view, once a horse begins to feel comfortable with the idea of being a riding horse, all jobs should be less about the task and more about a conversation between horse and rider. It may take a week, a month, or a year, but if we want a good relationship with our horse then the task becomes less important than the connection.
This is a lesson often forgotten because it’s easy to be pleased with how well our horse does an assigned task. However, the measure of how well your horse is going and how great a relationship you have with your horse is not in how great it performs the job, but in how a horse handles being interrupted in its job. There is very little to boast about if your horse is moving a cow well, but gets anxious and resistant when you tell it to do something else. In my experience, a horse getting upset when their job is interrupted is sadly the norm.
For me, I can see the advantages of a young horse having a job to help it adapt to life as a riding horse. However, there comes a time when to continue with working at a job becomes a hindrance. At some point, the focus of the job needs to move from performing a set of routine tasks to being connected to the rider. It should never be that we tell a horse to do something and then wait until it’s done before telling it to do something else. The conversation should be constantly open and active. It takes considerable awareness and feel on the part of a rider to avoid the job being the horse’s priority, but without it, a horse is little more than a vehicle.
