people have conniptions and say things like, ‘Oh no, he’s going to burn up.’ But the horses are fine. Some of them will snort and look, but then they walk over it.” According to Robin, the point of the drill team work is not to create a good drill
team, but to teach the horses to be in close proximity with one another and to see other horses from the front, from the back and from the left and the right. Chang- ing sides and direction changes what their eyes see on either side of their head, which in turn changes which part of their brain is active. That already starts desen- sitizing the horses. “Then when Bill starts adding obstacles, it feels like a natural progression. He is
very, very methodical. He starts with a piece of plywood on the ground. There will always be three or four horses that will just snort and stamp and say ‘I can’t walk over plywood.’ By the end of the morning of the first day, they are all walking over fire. He waits until everybody is bored and then he adds one thing. Then he waits until everyone is bored again and adds one more thing. It doesn’t really take very long before everybody is doing everything,” Robin explains. Bill shares a story that he cites as one of his best memories in teaching so far.
“I once had a child in my clinic that could neither hear nor speak and he was, of course, on an unruly pony. By the time the clinic was over he had walked his pony through smoke and fire and past lights, sirens and over obstacles! I have to credit my assistant Karen Swanson for knowing enough sign language to get him through it all!”
More Obstacle Challenges Robin and Queen have also participated in Cristin Kyle’s obstacle-based confi- dence-building clinics at Flintrock Farm, in Reidsville, North Carolina, where Robin has boarded for many years. Cristin is based at Flintrock as well and is a natural horsemanship trainer. “I started my business, Stable Relationships, in 2013 because I wanted to help people build better relationships with their horses. Obstacles help better prepare riders for what could happen, but more importantly they help instill trust and confidence in both horse and rider,” Cristin explains. She has accumulated a wide array of materials and tools from which to construct her obstacles. These include tarps, ground poles, tires, corrugated black plastic field tile pieces, mattresses, a parachute, barrels, traffic cones, an oversized ball, umbrel- las, inflatable holiday decorations, a horse-sized teeter totter and a fake Liverpool stream for horses to walk though. Cristin says it is easy to combine a mix of simple objects found around the farm to make a safe, but interesting challenge for horse and rider. One example is a blue tarp with empty plastic water and soda bottles scattered on top. Robin uses many of these items and some of her own creations as part of her
daily bravery training. “I have what I call a snake pit set up, which is 15 six-inch sewer pipes piled up. It looks like pick-up sticks. They look scary, sound scary, they feel scary. They move in an unpredictable way, when you step on one of them they might hit you in the belly. With the tarp, we walk over it, step on it, flap it around, drag it while I am riding, wear it, whatever.” Some of Cristen’s more colorful and innovative obstacles have descriptive
names. The “Noodle Hallway” is a tunnel full of the long, foam flotation “noodles” swimmers use, which the horse and rider must travel through. Another is the “push barrel,” which resembles a steam roller with three barrels in a wooden frame, two on the bottom and one on top, with a wooden push handle at the back like a baby carriage. A third example in Cristin’s arsenal of brain-teaser tests for equines is the “flag tree,” which features a number of colorful flags mounted at different angles on poles and stuck into a bucket of sand.
Kristi’s Tale Kristi started riding as a young girl in Indiana with a local hunter/jumper instruc- tor. Her first horse, Dancer, was an Appaloosa-Thoroughbred cross who was an
TOP TO BOTTOM: Kristi Crowe and her home- bred Trakehner gelding Redi or Not clear the “perpetrator” jump during the National Mounted
Police Colloquium in 2014 in
Kentucky. Other obstacles the pair tackled included the streamers, a baton over a jump, tarp exercises and noodles. The other horse and rider combo is Donna Nay and Comet.
Warmbloods Today 33
All five photos by Officer Brian King / Lexington Mounted Police Unit
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