Mary Wanless teaches how to desensitize a horse to a schooling whip by stroking it on the horse's body, rewarding stillness, and confirming the horse stays relaxed. Horses move away because they don't understand the whip, not because they're afraid.
Make sure that the horse learns that the whip is a tool and not something to be scared of. And I used to think that there was a lot of horses who were scared of whips, which meant they must have been badly treated. Actually, it's because the horse just didn't know what a whip was, so moved away from it. And as a human, our response often is that as we move a whip towards the horse, if the horse moves away, we take the whip away. We've accidentally taught the horse that the thing to do when they see a whip approaching them is to move away. So we've got to teach the horse that if they want us to take the whip away from them, they must stand still. So we're going to start here on desensitization, which basically means Mary is starting at the shoulder, is stroking the horse in a light but determined manner. If you stroke them too lightly, the horse gets irritated because they think it's a fly. If you do it too hard, they think it's actually pressure they need to move away from. Because basically this pressure just means stand still. And then if the horse was moving, Mary would keep the whip on her, and as soon as she stopped moving, Mary would remove the whip. And we're making sure we can stroke the horse absolutely everywhere. This also is an important thing to do with the horse to get them used to being handled and touched in various places before you do it with your own hand. So the whip is an extension of my arm, really here. As you can see, this horse is absolutely happy. Now, an extra little test that we would do, because some horses will stand and let you stroke them, what they're doing is standing, holding their breath, and they're very worried. So what we test is that we can actually move the horse backwards, that the horse doesn't then immediately get upset. So if Tinker was standing here thinking, I'm very scared, I'm very scared, I won't move. When we then ask the horse to move its legs, she would probably then explode. Okay, so you're just going to see if you can just. Just move her from my hand or. Yeah, just from your hand. Just move her. Yeah. And that she doesn't. She doesn't bother. She still says, yes, you can stroke me all over with the whip. So I think we can say this horse is desensitized to the whip.
The Fleck carbon composite whip is the only schooling whip we use or recommend for both our ground and ridden work. It's beautifully light and balanced and can transmit energy without all the wiggle and wobble of normal whips it it takes only the slightest movement from the rider's hand and is stiff enough to allow for precision placement. Check it out on our online shop. We only sell products that we use personally in our day to day work. Members of dressage train TV get a full 15% off any of the products.
