“My horse is great at home but . . .”

Ask me if I’ve heard that before! Whether it’s at a competition, a clinic, or just trying to school at the neighbor’s arena, for some horses it’s hard to replicate the relationship you have with him when you’re not at home.

The first part of the solution is rather obvious. You simply have to take him places—a lot of them. You don’t always have to do complicated things there. Going and standing around—low key hanging out and chilling where your horse discovers that there’s nothing threatening about a different environment is the first step. It’s a first step that may have to be repeated over and over!

Beyond this, you need to redefine for your horse what “home” is. It needs to be more than his familiar arena with the trees and letters and benches just so. To submerge his self reliant flight mechanism, you must make him much more trusting of the decisions you make for him. The more on the aids you teach him to be— the more in front of the leg, the more in an unrestricted way he finds himself safely surrounded by the aids— the more he will place his faith in you. In time that relationship becomes his definition of “home” and it matters more to him than his changed physical environment.