The Top 3 Tricks Horse Owners Can Use To Unspoil A Barn Sour Horse

It’s been weeks since you went riding. Now you have time to ride
this afternoon and there ain’t no one gonna stop you. Excited,
you saddle up your horse and get on him. You get about 50 feet
from the barn and your horse turns around and goes back – and
you can’t stop him. Why? You have a barn spoiled horse. This is
a common scenario for novice horse owners. 

 Here are the top three tricks to solve the barn sour problem. 

 Teach your horse that you have control over him. Once your
horse gets it in his mind that you can make him do what you want
him to do, you have control over him and can thus make him leave
the barn. One way to get control over him is to use a training
technique called doubling. When you double your horse you teach
him you can control him. 

 It doesn’t take long before your horse will know you can
control him. Be careful when doubling though. If you do it too
much at a time you can over do it. Your horse could get so
sensitive to you doing it that he may try to anticipate it. If
he sees your hands making the slightest movement that looks like
you’re about to double him, he may double himself. Thus, just
double him four to six times a day on both sides. He’ll quickly
learn you have control. 

 The next thing you can try is this: Make it dang hard to do the
wrong thing – and make it real easy to do the right thing.
Here’s what I mean. A while back my horse didn’t want to leave
her buddies or the barn. We’d get about 100 feet away and she’d
turn around and bolt back. She’d stop in front of the barn
expecting me to get off, remove the saddle and tack, and put her
back into the corrals. 

 By my barn is two hay stacks. There is a space between them big
enough to go through and do figure eights around the hay stacks.
So every time she’d go back I would make her work, and work, and
work at running figure eights around those hay stacks. Then I
would test her to see if she had enough and would leave the
area. 

 The first seven times she ran back. Each time we came back to
the barn we’d run more laps around the hay stacks. I could tell
she was getting tired. But the eighth time I walked her away
from the hay stacks I noticed she went quite a ways before
turning to go back. 

 When we went back again we ran more figure eights. Only this
time I could tell we didn’t have to do too many. I walked her
out and away from doing the figure eights and I suddenly had a
horse who decided that it was sooo much nicer going for a walk
away from the barn rather than doing a bunch of crummy ol’
figure eights. We had a nice ride that day and she was in no
hurry to get home. 

 The last thing to do is this: Ride. Ride a lot. Don’t wait for
weeks or months in between riding. Try to ride at least once per
week for three or four hours. Preferably, try to ride at least
twice a week for a few hours at a time. (Ideally, you should
ride everyday. But that’s hard to do with today’s time
constraints) Doing that your horse will get in his brain that
you’re going to ride and he’s going to leave the barn and there
will be no argument. In fact, if you want to have a great horse
the biggest secret is this: Ride the heck out him! 

 So if your horse is barn spoiled you can try doubling him to
show you are in control. The next thing you can try is making
the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy. Make it dang
hard for him to go the wrong thing and very pleasant to do the
right thing. And lastly, ride your horse often. Two to three
times a week if possible.