Getting your horse to be “city slicker broke” includes getting on and off your horse in all sorts of different ways. If you are someone who knows horses and knows how to correctly mount and dismount a horse safely, that is great. But you need to know how to get your horse to be able to stand still and calm for any sort of person that will get on him.

Doing it wrong to get it right

What you are ultimately wanting to do is get off your horse in all the wrong ways. Slide your leg over their hindquarters when you get off, “fall” off and grab onto the horses neck to stability, “lose” your balance while you are getting off. Some of the things you can do while you are getting on include. Kneeing the horse in the side with your leg, pulling hard on the saddle as you get on, poking the horse in the side with the toe of your boot at different stirrup heights.

You aren’t hurting the horse, but not everyone is going to get on exactly like you and you want to make sure that however the other person gets on, that your horse will stand still and be calm. You are doing some creative desensitizing with your horse.

Stirrup heights

Let’s take the stirrup heights for an example. Not everyone will have the same length of legs, and therefore each person needs a different height in stirrups. If you don’t get them to being touched with the toe of your boot at different levels on their side, when your friend, or the owner gets on. The horse won’t be used to it and they will want to move and react because it isn’t trained to accept it yet.

So it is your job as a trainer to get them use to all sorts of things, all sorts of ways of getting on and off of them. And if you ever lose your own balance on accident, it will be a good thing when you have already done all the prep work and the horse doesn’t react when you truly where in a vulnerable position.

For trained horses

You don’t want to do this with a brand new horse. You do want to make sure that the horse has some good training under its belt. You don’t want a horse that is still reactive and spooky over simple things like the lead rope plastic bags. Once you have a good foundation on the horse (it has been in training, I’d say for about a month to six weeks) and you can get on and off without any trouble and control the horse pretty well. Then you can start this kind of training to improve your horse.