Episode 42: Training HOT Horses

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Speaker1:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Speaker2:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this episode I'm going to explain hot horses, what they are, common problems that people run into with them and the awesome thing about them. I'll also be answering two listener questions about hot horses in the segment on call with Doctor Mani, sponsored by Equine Thrive. We're going to also discuss the number one killer of horses. Let's get started. It's important to keep in mind that the horse's body is showing us their mind. I like to think about what I see going on in their body is a reflection of the mind, and then I'm using the mind to shape the body, and the body to shape the mind and the mind to shape the body and the body to shape the mind. But one thing you have to recognize is that you are seeing a reflection of your horse's mind in their body. Let's start with defining what a hot horse is. When I try to explain to people what a hot horse is, the first thing I like to do is picture a teeter totter. Have you noticed this yet? Now this teeter totter I actually have an image of in the front of my Smart Start book. And on that teeter totter, I want you to picture on one of the far sides. I want you to put plus ten on the other side.

Speaker2:
I want you to have minus ten, and a hot horse would be in the plus ten side of life now all along the scale down to zero, which is balanced in the middle. You could have plus one plus two plus three all the way up through. Or you could go negative the other direction. And when I talk about a hot horse, what I want you to think about is don't be confused between hot and lack of training, because a horse without training might be nervous or confused, and could appear hot as an expression of that confusion, which Roxy would have been an example of. When she was a two year old and I was starting her under saddle, and she ends up being the bareback and bridleless horse that you see on the internet. When Roxy was two and she didn't understand, a lot of her nervous or confused expressions would have looked a little bit like a hot horse, but at her core she was more like a minus three minus four. And the way that I could see that was that in her natural state, out in the pasture full of horses. Or later on, as the training progressed and she was no longer nervous or confused, she was much more consistently a low energy kind of a horse. Now, I've had three pretty famous bridleless horses at this point. Roxy was one, and she's the one that I did the bareback and bridleless with.

Speaker2:
But the first mare that I showed was Cancan Lina. And you can find that that's the Ghost Riders in the Sky video that you can find on YouTube. And she was more like a plus Three. And then when she was bred, my husband picked who to breed her to, and she produced a little stallion called Cancan Vaquero that we ended up buying. And you can see the video of him on the YouTube if you look up. Oh, what's the song from the Titanic? Um. Oh. Come on. Um. My heart will go on. That's it. And if you look up the song, my heart will go on. Put Stacy Westfall freestyle or something like that. You'll find that. And that was her son, cancan Vaquero. And he was again about a plus three. So it's interesting to me that two of the three horses that I did, bridleless riding at a very high level with, were actually on the plus side of life now. Popcorn. I have been stating since the time that I bought him at the road to the horse, and we won the road to the horse. I have been stating all along he is a hot pony. He is more like a natural plus seven. And the way that I can see this playing out and the plus side of it is that he is very hot naturally across the board.

Speaker2:
An example of that would be that a few summers ago, he spent a couple summers at a friend's house who has a giant pasture, and she takes a lot of my horses and turns them out if I'm not using them. Or like Gabby, Presto. went there to grow up. And so her neighbors are always like, oh, what's the horse in the pasture? And the neighbors don't know a lot about horses. And popcorn goes out in the field. Now, mind you, at this point he was like 14, 15 years old and he puts his head down and runs as hard and fast as he can. And so the neighbors were like, is that one even tame? And popcorn has won lots and lots of stuff. But if you watch him in the pasture, he is a firecracker. He just likes to run. And this is what I mean. At his core, he's a very hot horse. When I was training him for the first two years, I actually said to my husband, Jesse, I was like, I would swear he was deaf because watch, if I say, whoa, there's no response at all. Like, I feel like a total failure as a trainer when I say, whoa, nothing. Not a glitch, but I'm quite sure he's not deaf because if I go, we're off like a firecracker. So pretty sure that's not a the a sign of what he can hear.

Speaker2:
It's a sign of his mental state of being. He is a hot horse. So now that we've talked a little bit about hot horses, and cold horses would be the opposite. That's a whole nother podcast. But hot horses are naturally just kind of a high energy horse. Let's look at some of the pros and cons. So some of the pros of a hot horse would be they're very easy to motivate. Now they also tend to be very athletic because yes, they really do practice those things in the pasture. When popcorn's out there tearing around, the lazier horses are standing there watching him while the lazier ones, colder ones, aren't getting much physical coordination practice. Popcorn is out there turning and burning and running and and he's turning on grass. He's doing a lot of energy output. Very athletic. Naturally athletic. They tend to be very sensitive. It goes right back to what I just said about, you know, I can barely kiss just a little bit. And he's off to the races super sensitive. And they tend to think really quick. So they practice quick thinking out in the pasture, out in the herd. This is the way they naturally lean in life. And so they're very quick on their feet and mentally they're quick on their feet and thinking. Now look at some of the cons. They tend to think really quick.

Speaker2:
They tend to be sensitive. They tend to be athletic. They tend to try too hard. Do you see what I did there? It's pretty much all the things that were the pros. Could also be looked at as the cons because hot is not really good or bad, but it is definitely more useful in certain situations and less useful in other situations. If you want to look at this from a totally different perspective, if the horse thing might not be jiving with you on how you're thinking about this, if you want to get a dog to live in your apartment, you probably don't want a border collie. When I was googling it to double check my my guess on that, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole there, researching what the best and worst apartment dogs were, and one website summarized it as you don't want big, loud, or busy if you're going to be in an apartment and I think it's okay if you say that a horse has certain traits, it's actually really nice to recognize it. I fully embrace the popcorn's a hot horse. But if you're a person who wants to just walk down the trail, you are not likely to enjoy a naturally hot horse because this is a hot topic. Okay, was that too corny? Hot topic. Anyway, because this is a hot topic, I'm going to give you some ideas to think about first, and then we'll listen to the questions and then we'll review those ideas again.

Speaker2:
Idea number one be aware of the patterns that you use when you ride. And I mean the word pattern in two different ways here. I mean the physical pattern, like choosing to ride a figure eight. And I also mean the pattern as in a series of habits that you have, like dismounting in a certain spot or what you end on. Another idea is go ahead and add groundwork. Groundwork is a great place to teach emotional control. Now, it's very possible that you could instill grandma's rules and have a set of groundwork rules that do one thing, and a set of written rules that do another. I've talked about this in other episodes of the podcast, but what I want you to think about is that if you can teach the horse emotional control during groundwork, you're going to do two things. You're going to introduce that horse to the idea of how to behave, quote unquote, correctly under pressure, how to control his emotions when you turn up the energy in the room. But the other thing you're going to do is you're going to convince yourself that this horse contains that possibility within it. And when you believe that this horse is possible, it's possible for this horse to behave that way under pressure. It's going to seem more possible for you to achieve that when riding the horse.

Speaker2:
And another idea to be thinking about is how hot horses often get rewarded for being hot. Think about this when the horse gets a release, it teaches them where to go. So just like in my earlier sentence, I said something about where you dismount. That's a type of release. Now it can be release as in dismounting at the end, or it can be release as in you soften up the aids. But hot horses often get rewarded for their hot behavior. Let's start with that one. I'll give you a quick example of how this would work. I was coaching a rider once, and when I looked at the horse as the first overview when she was warming it up, I would not have called it a hot horse. It definitely needed some more emotional control training in the groundwork area, but under saddle the horse was really willing. Walk, trot. You know the good connection. Very able to move the horse's body parts around. But one of the things she had mentioned was that the horse would get chargey loping. And it's always really interesting to me if I don't see a lot of those symptoms in a bunch of the other areas. Now, mind you, this was a one hour lesson, so I wasn't going to see this horse for a long, long time. But still pretty quickly.

Speaker2:
Right off the bat, I wasn't seeing a lot of signs of hot little bit of nervous during the groundwork because it didn't understand some of that, but not a lot of hot. So when she went ahead and started loping, it looked good initially. And then sure enough, just like she said, the horse started getting chargey. And I always get excited when these things that don't quite match happen because I'm like, ooh, this is a mystery. Maybe this is why I like watching Sherlock anyway, so I'm watching her and I had her ride around and show me some of her normal stuff that she does. And when I watched, I started to notice one main thing, and it goes along with a reigning Q it's not just a reigning Q, but we happen to teach this Q to a lot of the reigning horses, and this horse had a foundation in reigning, and that Q would mean that one of the ways that we can stop the horse is by opening up our legs or releasing our legs, and that will mean stop. So a lot of times people will ask me why my legs are on or have a slight wave in them and they'll say, like, why are your legs waving? And I'll say, because if my legs are on and waving, then it's like the gas pedal. If I take my legs off, then that horse will stop.

Speaker2:
But you have to actually have your legs on to be able to take your legs off. So my legs are going to be on. So her horse was going around and she had her legs on and and she was loping around. And then the horse started to get hotter, hotter, faster, faster, faster. And then she wanted to stop so she would release her legs. And after I saw this series a few times, it started to dawn on me that what was happening was that the horse would lope for a while and she could collect and bend and steer. She could do the four leaf clover pattern, and then it really did look like he would just kind of shift gears in his mind and he would just start going faster, faster, faster. And then she would take her legs off. Did you hear it? So she had all the shoes on. And then when he would go faster, she would take her legs off. And when she took her legs off, he would stop physically and he would get a release and he would get a break. That's a smart pony. Now, that horse, I would guess, was just a little bit on the hotter side of life. So maybe it was just a little bit more like what Vaquero and Catalina were a little bit more like that. Maybe that plus three range because a lot of him didn't look really hot.

Speaker2:
So I think he was maybe just a little bit hot, but he was just hot enough to think putting in that extra effort to go was worth it, because it pretty consistently cued the rider to release the legs and they got to take a break. So the fix for that was pretty easy. It was. Although your horse does know how to stop off from the leg cue when he gets hot or hotter like that, you actually need to close all of your age. You need to close your hands and collect them. You need to close your legs and bring them down to the trot. And so even though he knows a release as a cue to stop, you need to now mix this up to where sometimes you're bringing him down through the gates. Because a lot of times when people have trainers, they'll stop. They'll stop going from lope to trot. They'll just go from lope to slide. So I'm like, stop doing that. Go lope down a trot, trot down the walk, and as you come down through those gears, you need to give them a hug. Because remember, the body is showing us their mind. And in this case, the body wasn't a fully hot horse, but the mind of the horse was saying, ah, I've figured out how to train my rider. Let's listen to the first question.

Speaker3:
Hi Stacy, I recently bought a six year old working cow horse who's a good country horse that I want to mold into a great country horse this year and then start showing next year. I'm pretty sure he would fall apart in any show environment, until I can raise his emotional balance and teach him to dump his worry bucket. He's super smart, really wants to please. I think he just gets amped up and worried and then he doesn't know how to let go and relax. For example, if I'm loping him, he has a hard time resetting himself into a relaxed state on a loose rein, counterclockwise in an arena. He will literally revert into a cow mindset and start diving, pivoting quasi rollbacks. My approach is to just relax, make it really easy for him to just walk and relax, stop back for steps, or turn with no leg and release immediately if he slows down. It's an exciting ride, but has a tendency to just sort of add fuel to the fire if he's already kind of switched into that cow mindset. So anyhow, I feel the real answer may come from integrating groundwork tailored to teach him to relax. And I'm wondering what percentage mix of groundwork to writing you recommend, what duration? What sequence? Um, any specific groundwork exercises? I'm hoping that this is a useful topic for others and sort of fits into your teeter totter balance theme.

Speaker2:
Thank you for your question. There's a lot of good information inside of here, and I'm going to go ahead and answer a few things before I review both hot horses at the end of the episode, one of the things that I heard was that you said that when you turned him on a loose rein, he got faster and faster. And I'm going to translate that to he feels lost. And when he feels lost and he starts doing I think you called it quasi rollbacks and you listed several different things. I'm going to call that volunteering. Lots of ideas. So what I hear is a horse that's a little bit lost when you put him on the loose rein, or a lot lost, and his mind is spinning and he starts volunteering a lot of different things. And it I could definitely see how that could cause an exciting ride. So what I want you to think about is I want you to think about, if we look at it like he's lost and volunteering a lot of different things, I hope that phrasing makes you a little bit more encouraged to give him a little more guidance. Now, one thing that you said was, you know, you'd stop him with no legs. I'm actually going to propose the idea that he needs a great big hug. Not mean he needs a hug because he's got to get more comfortable with your legs. And I'm going to talk about that after we listen to the second question. Now, I do want to touch on a couple of your other thoughts before I move on to the second question and then wrap everything together.

Speaker2:
You asked what percentage of groundwork. Now, I've talked about groundwork here on the podcast, and there's some amazing examples of it on the Stacy's video diary Jack on the YouTube series, because the cult that I was using and videotaping was very animated, and he did lots of different things. And so during the videotaping of that which you can find on YouTube, he put out a lot of big body language so you can get a ton of examples on there. But here's the deal. The percentage of groundwork is not as important as the quality of groundwork and what you are releasing on. And keep in mind, it is totally possible for you to create grandma's rules, which is the idea that he could have a set of rules that functions on the ground, and a different set that function on his back. Now, you mentioned that he, I think, had a kind of cow horsey kind of background or a roping or some kind of I think you mentioned a discipline in there. And when you mentioned some of that, sometimes you have to think maybe he's having thoughts about what other people might have said was a good idea. So maybe someone said, it's a great idea to go fast this direction in the arena. It's a great idea to do these things, and this shouldn't discourage you, but sometimes it's helpful to be like, okay, I can understand where you're coming from. You had it introduced to you that this was a good idea, and maybe you were a hot pony to begin with, and then somebody added some more heat.

Speaker2:
So just kind of keep that in mind that you might be working on some thoughts that he honestly thinks are a good idea because somebody else told him they were. So the percentage of groundwork is not that important. I do go back and pretend like some of these horses have never been started, and that means that before I'm going to mount up, my horses need to be able to pass a test, which is they need to be able to stand on the lunge line. Let's say they're 20ft away from me. They're facing me. I should be able to whip the ground as hard as I physically can, left and right on either side of them, like the I'm using the stick and string and I whip, whip, whip. And they should just stand there looking at me. I should be able to ask them to turn left or right. Doesn't matter. And if they were standing at 12:00 and they turned to the left, they're going to be going counterclockwise. So by the time they go to 9:00, they should be picking up the lope, and they should be able to lope around and stop immediately again at 12:00, which is where they just started from. And I should be able to whip around them again. I do this with all my young horses before I mount up, or any horse before I mount up. If it comes in out of the blue, either for training or something, I want to know if they can pass this test, because what this test does is it tells me that they understand the difference between whip and standstill, and then actually ask them to move, and then they can transition back to the standing still again.

Speaker2:
Now keep in mind this is not a good training pattern. This is a test. It is not training. I think that I've gotten into that on one of these podcasts. I know I have it in my video vault online, but just keep in mind you need to be able to see these horses do these really good transitions, but go to that YouTube series and look at that and make sure you can do all the crazy groundwork stuff that I do on there as a start. Now, your plan to just keep loping him and whether or not this is a good idea all boils down to where he finds the release. So if you continue loping him and he senses a release in the loping, he will get hotter and hotter. You can actually train him to be enduro pony. You could train him to think that going out there and loping at a medium fast speed for hours on end was a good idea, because he probably contains a hotter inclination anyway. And if he feels like that release is coming in the speed, then he will get hotter. I'm going to talk about cooling him down after we listen to the second question.

Speaker4:
Hi Stacy, this is Ronnie Andrews. I really enjoy your podcast and I've learned so much. I've had my gelding, he's 17 for three years. He was a ranch horse before. Hard worker. Um, he's a 16, two quarter horse, um, very athletic and he's really mellow and a lot of your things about pushing them to the upper end and back has been very helpful in getting him to be more balanced emotionally. He comes across as a big old softie, but he can be pushed up pretty quickly, and I'm learning what those triggers are and helping to balance them. But anyway, I just listened to your podcast about correcting behaviors, and the one for him rather than going is stopping, not stopping. But as soon as I let him canter or trot very much, he does not want to walk. I mean, he just wants to keep going. And so I've used various kind of techniques to bring him back to a walk and gotten off him. And I just wondered what your suggestions were to once he's trotted or cantered, he really brings his head up and kind of wants to keep doing that, and it can be difficult to get him back down to a nice easy walk. And so corrections, you know, I've used some kind of bilateral, um, reins tension a little bit pressure, bringing his head down a little bit until he starts to walk again and then release and some of those things, but it's been somewhat of a challenge. So anyway, I thought I would throw that question out for you.

Speaker2:
Thanks for your question. And I find it really interesting that you are seeing signs on both sides of the teeter totter. Sometimes you've got some of these colder things like, hey, this is good that I've got him up a little bit, but oh wait, he goes up quite a bit. I like that, but sometimes I'll say, does your horse feel a little bit like Jekyll and Hyde? And people will be like, yes. What is going on? Sometimes I think I have a hot horse, sometimes I think I have a cold horse, and this is actually a really good sign that he is closer to that. Zero. So a lot of those horses that are down in that, you know, plus two plus three range or even the minus two range, you know, when you when you get into those horses that are kind of closer to the middle of that teeter totter, you'll actually sometimes feel like you're losing your mind because you'll be like yesterday. It was cold. Today is hot. Now, I don't know he's going to be tomorrow, but that's actually a good thing because he's going back and forth between the two sides. Now, the one thing that you mentioned was that once he gets going, he doesn't want to come down. And what's interesting to me about that is that makes me think that's a little bit more of a training thing. So for example, just for fun, let's say he's naturally more like a plus three.

Speaker2:
So he'd be a little bit hot. But he's not like popcorn plus seven. Hot hot hot. So if that's true he might be going up. And when he goes up he doesn't know how to come down. Which makes this borderline onto more of a lack of training type thing than the I am a naturally really hot horse. That's just something to think about. Now I'm going to give a bunch of ideas here that all tie together with hot horses in general. If I could give a number one thing, and of course it's the hardest one to work on, but it's very, very true. It's going to be that you need to use your legs more. And I know that sounds like crazy land when you have a hot horse, so I'm going to go over how to do it. But it's the concept I want you to be thinking about while I'm talking about these other things. So another thought here is if your horse is hot, you want to avoid exercises that would be considered spicy. Makes sense. If this was a cooking recipe, you wouldn't take a hot dish and add more heat unless you really like a lot of spice. So let's think about that with horses. I have exercises that I do with my horses and I tend to call them boring or base exercises. And then there are other exercises that I do with the horses that are spicy, and they add a lot of quickness and spice to the horse.

Speaker2:
But if you've got a really naturally cold horse, you can afford to add more spice. But if you've got a spicy horse, you might need to add more of the base or boring stuff. Some examples of spicy things would be a lot of rollbacks or quick turns. Basically, if it seems like it would be really boring and repetitive to you, there's a good chance that it's probably a little bit more in the boring exercise category. Keep in mind that boring isn't meant to be mean. You don't take a really dull horse and do a ton of really boring because they get like lethargic. But if you've got this hot horse, you're giving them the gift of learning how to slow their mind down. So a lot of these repetitive exercises, like my four leaf clover pattern, are something that you can do over and over again. And you can actually give that horse that gift of being like, oh, I know what's coming next. I'm not having to stress about whether or not I need to be thinking left thinking right, thinking right, thinking left, going quick, quick, quick. Because a lot of times when they don't know what's coming, they tend to get anxious and it compiles the hot horse and then the hot mind. So make sure that you're doing a lot of what I would call boring exercises. Again, the four leaf clover comes to mind.

Speaker2:
A lot of the video stuff you'll see on the Stacy's video diary. Jack, you're going to see. It's not nearly as exciting when you're watching me train a horse as you might think it is. When you're doing downward transitions, you want to make sure that you think about it like this. I think about downward transitions as a hug. This way you're not thinking like, oh my gosh, how do I use my legs? I want your hands to move slow and steady, and I want your legs to be slow and steady. But when you think about slowing down, I want you to think about a little hug. And I should have looked it up, but I didn't. But I know in one of the early episodes on my YouTube channel of the trail to the world show, I made a really good video showing how I do this standstill cue with my horses, and it's this nice hug, and I will put a link to that in the show notes for this episode over at my website, but I know it's it's something about like standstill. It's on my YouTube channel. It'll be titled trail to the World Show episode. It's going to be one of, I think, the first five. And it's going to say something about like slowing the horse down or stopping stop. Cue standing still. So what I want you to see on that video is that my horse Willow, understands that I can, even at a walk or even literally standing still, I want to be able to close all my aides.

Speaker2:
So that's going to be right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg, all can close and give you a nice little hug. And when your feet freeze I'm going to soften up and let go. So they start to understand that that when you apply pressure it doesn't always mean move. Because see a lot of these hotter horses are like, cool, I figured this out. Everything you do means move somewhere. You put pressure on my face. It means left, right, backwards. I don't know what means. Go somewhere. You put pressure on with your legs. It means left, right, forward, backwards. I don't know, but it means go somewhere. What they're missing is the idea that you could actually give them a hug. Or you could actually apply pressure to mean slow down. Now, this is a huge concept for a lot of riders that they have to struggle with. And again, this is a great one to tackle in groundwork, because if you look at groundwork as emotional pressure when you're whipping around them. Or you'll see a lot of videos where I know In the Trails of the world show, I was doing some videos where I was bouncing the ball off the horse's side, and I think I do have that one labeled emotional control. And if you can teach that horse to stand still on the ground and you take these big like exercise ball and bounce it off their side, they are resisting moving, you know, while you bounce that off, they're not running away from it.

Speaker2:
They're like, oh, I'm supposed to just stand. It's another sign of desensitizing. But that's the same idea you have to have in your mind. That could happen with your legs. Because right now a lot of these hot horses are confused. That leg always means go somewhere, and hand really always means go somewhere, you know? And they probably even fight you in their face when they're slowing down because they really just don't understand. The pressure could actually mean collect and stand still. Another thing to think about with these horses is they tend to be very physically tight, which means that they tend to contract their stride. So a lot of times their walk will be quick, but it will be short and tight and their trot might have this like jiggy jog kind of a tightness to it, and their lope can often feel like a pogo stick. So a lot of these things can be helped. If we're doing some kind of turns like the four leaf clover pattern. What I like about the four leaf clover pattern over a figure eight is a figure eight sounds like this mentally. Right left right left right left. My four leaf clover pattern sounds like this. Left left left left left left. Can you hear the difference when you're trying to figure out if you've got a spicy exercise or not? Just use a simple little thing like that and say it out loud.

Speaker2:
And if it sounds real boring, that's probably a good sign that it's not spicy. Now, a lot of these horses, if you do something like you set up some logs to walk over, you can actually help them learn how to take those less contracted steps. So maybe they want to be really tight in that walk. But when you put these poles out, they need to actually step and lengthen their stride just a little bit. And you can play with lengthening their stride in, say, the walk or the jog. And a lot of times the horse will be a little bit more okay with you kind of touching them as they're going over these things because they're like, ooh, there's something on the ground. I need to be aware of my feet. And they're a little more mindful, and you might be able to find some ways that you're able to, you know, have that gentle contact that I show in that video and be walking and try to get that horse to have that longer step. So they're not just contracting their stride, which in turn feeds that whole tightness of their body, which feeds the tightness of their mind again, over and over again. You can probably just put it on a loop and keep saying in your mind, slow and steady with your hands, nice hug with your legs in hands.

Speaker2:
Hug. Soften. Release. Hug. Soften. Release. Hug. Soften. Release. Now, one last thing I'm going to talk about. And that is again an idea I started with in the beginning, which is that it matters where you release these horses. So for example, when a horse turns a tight turn in the beginning, when a horse turns a tight turn. And let's just put this in your mind, like go down to the size of like a horse turning around a barrel, like a barrel racer turning around a barrel. So something fairly small when horse turns in a turn that tight initially in the beginning of their life, it is going to be more natural for them to break gate. So for the example of a barrel racer, they actually spend a great deal of time teaching these horses how to collect themselves up and be able to push around there and not break gate, or come uncollected and slow down and not turn like that, not turn as tight they sometimes horses will try to avoid it by not turning as tight. They'll try to go bigger, but at the end of the day, it's wherever the rider releases that teaches. So for sure, barrel racing horses, when you're making that turn, they don't do any more. What was natural in the beginning? Naturally, in the beginning you turn a horse really tight. They're either going to slow down, brake gate, or fall down.

Speaker2:
This is why you see foals fall down in the pasture, because they don't know they need to either collect or brake gate. And so barrel racers learn that slowing down is not allowed. Hopefully before you got on them, they learned falling down is not a good idea. So they learn to collect and even accelerate during the turn because they're getting a release outside of there. So like the turn they're being hustled through, and then there's a release outside of the turn somewhere. So these horses actually learn, turn and accelerate because of where the release comes. Early on, you could have taken that horse and meant that turning You could have encouraged that when they turned, if they were to break gate, they could get a reward there or turn they could collect and get a reward there. This all comes back to where does the horse feel the aids soften up? In dressage, there's a saying that on a dull horse you should use less leg. And on a hot horse you should use more leg. And I did not say that backwards, but most people ride it backwards. So again, you should use less leg on a cold or dull horse because you don't want to be desensitizing them to your leg. You want them to be sensitive to it. You should use more leg on a hot horse, because you basically want them to be a little bit sacked out to your leg.

Speaker2:
You want them a little bit desensitized, but most people ride a dull horse and kick and kick and kick and kick and kick and desensitize him more and more. And they ride the hot horse and they brace their legs off. When I was growing up and I was a barrel racer, and I told the story before I came out of running my horse one time in a contesting class, and I had the hole, the chute going out. And then I had, you know, I don't know, 30ft. I had more than that, like multiple cars could have, you know, met and passed in the distance. And I hit a car that was parked on my horse because I couldn't stop. But I guarantee that hot horse that I had been training, I was riding less and less with my legs. My legs were braced away and more and more with my hands. So I was basically teaching my horse to run through my bridle. So you've got to get this balance in your mind. And here's an interesting thought. The awesome part about hot horses I'm going to list two. But I could even go further. But two really cool things about hot horses is you have a lot of forward motion to work with, and they're asking for the training, meaning they require the training because they're asking for it because they're kind of busy and they're hot. So they're going to teach you a lot.

Speaker1:
Supporting companies make this show sustainable. Thank you.

Speaker2:
In this week's segment on call with Doctor Mani, sponsored by Equa thrive, Doctor Mani and I discuss colic. I learned a lot during this interview, and I'd like to say a big thanks to Equa thrive for creating the opportunity to talk to Doctor Mani and for sponsoring this podcast. Doctor Mani Mcinturf is located in Tennessee, where he's the co-owner and president of Tennessee Equine Hospital, which has three locations. He has been an equine practitioner for over 30 years with a focus on the equine athlete. Let's listen to my conversation with Doctor Mani. Doctor Mani, thank you for joining me. And today, what I would like to discuss with you is probably one of the greatest fears that horse owners have, and that is colic. Can you give me a kind of a brief rundown on what we should be looking for, for colic, and maybe what our moves should be if we suspect our horse might be colicking?

Speaker5:
Yeah. I appreciate you bringing that up. I mean, colic is such a scary thing. And the research shows that it's the number one cause of death in horses. And I can tell you that that you shouldn't be scared by colic. You should just be ready. Um, out of every ten colleagues that I see, eight out of ten horses, they just need a little bit of medication, like banamine, maybe a good examination and a tubing by your veterinarian to make sure that we have the proper electrolytes and or laxatives on board to help the horse clear whatever's going on, and they do fine. Eight out of ten just need a little mild medical management. Getting to them early is key. So when you see signs of not wanting to eat, laying down, trying to roll, you know, just depression in general. Consider colic as a possible cause, and consider communicating with your veterinarian to kind of nip it in the bud quick. But there's also a category of horses that we just talked about, the eight out of ten. There's two out of ten that fall into a different category, about one and a half out of those two. They need what we call medical management. They need some additional fluids. They need some additional pain medication. And your veterinarian can help you with that, or maybe your local veterinary hospital. And then you you work through this colic that occurred. But the category I want to talk about is that last category. And that's that that half half a horse out of ten or that five out of 100. They need surgery. We've got a life threatening condition going on. We've got a twist, we've got a displacement, we've got something going on that your horse is going to die if it doesn't have surgery. And and if you don't mind, I'm going to take a second to tell you about a program we have here at Tennessee Equine Hospital.

Speaker2:
Oh, I'd love to hear about it.

Speaker5:
Yeah, it's called the Promise Program. And basically all it is is not an insurance program. It's a loyalty program. And and the program says, hey, look, if you let us help you with your wellness, your vaccines, your your oral exams and dentistry's, your, your coggins testing, your basic care for your horse that you're doing anyway every year. And you allow us to do that and you promise to allow us to do that. And then you put $50 in to enroll your horse annually in the program. We promise that if your horse colics and needs surgery, that will pay for the surgery. Wow. And you're like, what do you mean? What do you mean you'll pay for the surgery? Well, the $50 that everybody puts into the pool, we put into a little pool to sit there. So when that horse that comes in that's on the program needs colic surgery. And colic surgery runs anywhere from 5 to $8000. Okay. And when that horse needs surgery, what happens is the owner has a real hard choice to make, right? I love my horse, but do I want to spend the money on saving his life? Well, the answer is yes. We always want to do that. But can we afford to do that right? So we have this hard choice to make. The other the other question that's asked a lot is how successful is colic surgery? I can tell you with our surgeons and our team, we're having a greater than 80 to 85% success rate on all our colic surgeries.

Speaker5:
If we get to these horses in time, you say, what do you mean, success? They're going back to jumping. They're going back to competitive trail riding. They're going back to racing. They're going back to whatever they did before they had this catastrophic colic. And they're going back. Yeah, they're going back to a full career. There's this adage out there that, hey, look, horses that have colic surgery are never the same. That's just not true. There's not there's no truth to it. And it's all about timing and having the right team. So I say that to say we started this promise program because one year we euthanized close to 60 horses that the owners were like, you know, we don't want to spend the money. And we and we want to let them go because they're hurting. Right. And they and I'm okay with that. I mean, I don't want a horse hurting if we can't fix him, let's let him go. But I'm much happier with the end result of, hey, let's fix him. So these promise program horses, they're being fixed, and they're being fixed on on our nickel. And everybody throwing their money into this pool to help each other. It's a beautiful thing.

Speaker2:
That is a really awesome concept.

Speaker5:
It might make sense for us to talk to our local veterinarians about having a similar wellness loyalty program.

Speaker2:
Yeah, that is that is super cool. And you, you definitely touched on a couple of things I hadn't thought about. You're right. In the back of my mind, I did have the notion that these horses were not returning to full blown work, that they were not returning to that. So that is amazing that you're saying that they're getting a recovery back to what they were doing before. So that is really good to know. And I have been beside owners who were trying to make this decision. And it is heart wrenching in that moment when they are like, I do not have the money and this horse is going to have to try to make it, you know, and yeah, that's that is not a good place to be. So anything we can do to get ahead of it and that sounds like an amazing program you have there. Kudos to you for creating it. That's just that is. I love to hear there are vets out there that just love the horse and were like, how can we solve this problem? You know, you guys are watching this problem come in and that is just amazing. Thank you for what you do.

Speaker5:
Well, thank you so much for letting me share it. It is a cool program.

Speaker2:
I think that Doctor Monty's Promise program is an amazing concept. If you were impressed with it, please let him know either on his Facebook page, which is TN the abbreviation for Tennessee Equine Hospital. Or you can also find his website too. And I'll put links to both of those on my website. Thanks again to Equine Thrive for setting all of this up. Doctor Monty mentioned the horse's electrolytes during the conversation, and I want to say that I'm using equine arrives electrolyte pellets. I prefer to use the electrolyte pellets because they go in the grain, and some of the ones that go into the water, some horses will actually refuse to drink when you change their water, which can really compound the problem. So if you do choose to use something that would go in the water, please offer two buckets of water, one fresh and one with your electrolyte in it. But for me, I think it's way easier to feed them the pellet and see them ingest them and the horses seem to like them quite a bit. You can actually like hand feed them to them if you want. If you'd like to learn more about equine products, you can visit equine thrive.com. And if you decide to purchase something, use the code Stacy Stacy in the checkout to receive 10% off plus free shipping. Thanks for joining me and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker1:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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