Episode 96: How can I train my horse to ride safely near traffic?

Episode 96- How can I train my horse to ride safely near traffic?.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 96- How can I train my horse to ride safely near traffic?.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Announcer:
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.

Stacy Westfall:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy, and successfully train your own horses. This is season 9 of the podcast and the focus is on trail riding. Today, I'm answering a question that came in about how to handle riding down the side of the road or crossing the road on the way to the trails. Let's listen to the question.

Caller:
Hi, Stacy, it's Sarah from Ontario. I'm really enjoying the trail riding season of the podcast. My question is about a very specific type of trail riding that I never hear much about, and that's road riding. So areas where your trail might exit out onto a road for a time or where you may have to cross a road to get to the trail you'd like to ride. And I have a horse who is definitely on the hot side and definitely on the nervous side, but we do a lot of trail riding and he's improved greatly. However, he is really bothered by vehicle reflections. So while I do a lot of riding him in open fields and along field margins, I don't take him near the road at this point. And that is something I would like to be able to do safely with him. So I'm just wondering if there are ways that you can specifically teach your horse to be less reactive to cars, transport trucks, farm equipment, and also deal with things like drivers who are maybe rude and honk their horns as they're going past a horse, culverts and ditches along roadsides,and having to make a decision between the danger of the car versus the danger of the ditch. And like I've even considered boarding my horse temporarily on a on a pasture or a field that sides onto a highway just to–

Stacy Westfall:
Sarah, I apologize that your voicemail got cut off there, but I think I understand the question that you're asking and I want to thank you, because you sent me on a trip down memory lane. I even ended up messaging my mom and we both got the chance to remember a bunch of the lessons that we learned the hard way by doing a lot of riding down the road when I was growing up in Maine. So I'm going to sprinkle some of my mom's advice and some of our stories into this podcast. I've broken the topic into three areas to consider. And then at the end of the podcast, I'm going to give some actionable training tips. So the 3 categories that I think you should consider would be the vehicles on the road, things like the noise, the height, the speed. Number 2 the road itself, any unique issues that it might have, culverts, guardrails, any different things that go on with the road itself. And number 3, the drivers. Like how do they react to seeing horses? Do they overreact, underreact, try to cause problems? So I'm going to break all three of those areas down and then give you some actionable tips at the end.

Stacy Westfall:
So the first category would be the vehicles themselves, and that would be the vehicle noise, the height, the speed. Here's the great thing about horseback riding near a road. You can hear a lot coming. True that your horse can hear it, too, but the advantage here is that you actually can train yourself to know what's coming by simply listening. And what I mean by that is that, for example, basically there's a couple of different types of roads that I've ridden on a lot. One would be roads like I live on now. So they're hilly, windy roads, which means the cars aren't going to be going as fast as if you were near a highway. But it also means that you can hear how that vehicle is traveling on the road. So motorcycle coming down these windy roads sounds completely different than the occasional big semi truck that will sneak down these roads. So you can actually hear from quite a ways away the difference between a regular passenger car or a bigger truck on these windy back roads. Now, if you ride next to a road–I grew up riding next to some pretty major roads that had a lot of semi traffic on them. And the advantage there is that those roads, although the vehicles are moving much quicker, there is a–they're generally a lot straighter. So you can see a lot further distance to see visually what's coming and to prepare. So a lot of times those roads will very often have a bigger side of the road. We'll get into that a little bit later. But I would definitely encourage you to get used to using your ears a lot, and I grew up riding a very reactive horse, sounds a little bit similar to yours. And it was interesting because looking back now, when my mom and I talk about it and I say, you know, what were you thinking when this happened? And she's very honestly says things like, we just didn't know. We didn't consider the fact that, you know, you were an early teen riding a horse that like now as a professional, I look back and she probably maybe had 30 days of riding on her when I bought her, but we didn't know. And so she was a hotter horse, more reactive. I'll tell you what happens. You get really, really good at identifying things with your ears very far away, because it's that's what prevention sounds like when you can identify the problem coming, because the sooner you can hear it coming–so I grew up in Maine and so there were a lot of logging trucks and large trucks. I don't know what was up with all the large trucks with flapping tarps. But that's a thing and a tarp that flaps on a truck going 45, 55, 60 miles an hour turns into this really wild humming sound. You get real good at hearing those coming. The sooner you can hear it coming, you can start to make different choices. I remember growing up and we would have–the only way that I would ride on a road that had those kind of issues on a slightly greener horse is if I had a really good exit plan. That could have been a side road. So like a down to the lake, they would have these fire roads. It'd be like, and like gravel roads that went down to camps. So if we knew that we could make it from point A to point B, if you can see for quite a ways, you can also know how far you can travel before you get to your next safe turn-off spot. So then you can make these educated decisions about how far down the road you should go on this particular horse. And so there are all these different things to consider. And then let me just add a few more like vehicle noise to me also includes things you might not think quite as much about. Like did you know that a little kid screaming horsey out an open window sounds really strange as they drive by it like 55 miles an hour? Now, not as many people always have their windows rolled down nowadays, but here's a situation that you still might run into now. Did you know that a dog barking out a window at 50 miles an hour, usually people are going to tiny bit slower with the dog hanging out the window, but not necessarily. But a dog barking hanging out a window sounds really odd. And so these are some of the strange ways that vehicles can be making noises. We've got the obvious honking of the horn and then we have the less obvious things, like the amount of wind and that is generated by a semi. When it goes past you at 55 miles an hour. You've probably felt that when you've been in a car and you can feel that air move you. There's a physical sensation that's going to hit you and the horse when that happens. So there are all these different things. Some of those bigger vehicles–so when they're real high up in the air–so like a semis is going to be a lot taller than your average passenger car that drives by. Sometimes that's something to take into account. Like some horses have more of an opinion or thought about those different things. So if you have that awareness, you'll be able to plan a little bit more for that.

Stacy Westfall:
What my mom and I learned accidentally by trial and error, we didn't have the opportunity to read any kind of article and definitely didn't watch any YouTube videos because that wasn't the thing back then. What we learned real quickly when I got that greener horse was that keeping the feet moving was huge, because if I tried to stop her and look at it, which actually worked with some of the lazier, quieter, older horses we had around the barn, like you could just let them stop and look and they'd be like, oh, I see this. She was a hot, more explosive horse. Very quickly, we learned the standing still and waiting to see what happened was a terrible idea. So that meant that I was trotting a lot of circles, which again made it mean that I was putting myself in situations where there was a field where I could be circling in or different things like that, or a great place, if you can find it, is where there's a side road running beside a bigger road and all kinds of different things where you can set up the situations. But, yeah. Don't just stop, stand, and hope that works because a lot of times when you've got that horse that doesn't know what to do with all that energy, that's how I would describe it. Now, I didn't have those words back then, but my mare was a hotter, more reactive horse with less training. So she was already full of energy. And then when a big vehicle came by and all of that energy was added to that area, to the room, to her space, she just didn't know what to do with it. And so she did all the things. She was prone to all of it. She was prone to bolting or bucking or exploding or running backwards or rearing or any of these different versions. So I've learned a lot of this the hard way, and now I'm trying to spare people that same process. So it was quite the training. Now. Now that I know a lot more about this, let me share with you something that I'm doing currently with Presto that helps address some of these things. So in my riding arena, we drag the arena. My husband drags the arena pretty regularly. And a while back, a few months ago, I was holding Presto, leading him actually. And saddling up to go in and ride and I was done, I was leading him towards the arena and my husband was driving the tractor out. Well, it's a little John Deere tractor, and he had the bucket way up in the air so he could make turns closer to the walls. And it was very subtle. But I noticed that Presto had a reaction to the bucket being up in the air. So the way that looked or felt was that I was leading him–I was maybe 20 feet away, something like that. And I was leading him and he hesitated. So he didn't totally stop and pull on me. He didn't pull back, but he hesitated. And when I glanced to see what was happening, his head was kind of up in the air and he was clearly focusing on that bucket, which was raised well above his head level. And he my husband drove by and there was no big, big, ugly thing that happened. But I took note of that being there. And that is one of the little signs that your horse will give you. That will be something. If you work on it now, then you can help cut back on the problems later. So what I started to do was the next time my husband had the tractor out to be dragging the arena, I went in to the arena with Presto and we followed. I was leading him and we were following the drag and the tractor around that pretty much had zero reaction. It's not like he's never seen the tractor before because the stalls open up into the arena. So he's seen it to some degree. So that had zero reaction. So then I started experimenting with when my husband was coming down alongside in the arena, I experimented with leading him not head on at the tractor, but kind of like in towards that towards that direction.

Stacy Westfall:
So I was headed down the middle of the arena and my husband's headed down the outside of the arena. And that definitely got more of a reaction out of Presto. And so I worked through that on the ground. And what that means as I was lunging him and moving him around and communicating like, listen to me and focus on me. And so to me, the way I would describe that is it's almost like Presto's focus has to be split. He's got this thing he's concerned about, which is the tractor. But now he's also having to split and listen to the cues that I'm giving him. And we were kind of on the bubble of his comfort zone. So it wasn't like I was having my husband buzz right past me while I was trying to hold him still. I was moving Presto's feet. Sometimes I was moving him and having him circle around me and a lunge type circle. Sometimes I was having him move with the tractor. So he was almost coming up behind from the rear of the tractor and kind of passing the tractor. And then I worked towards being able to lunge in the opposite direction and have him come towards the tractor. And that got, you know, a little bit better. It wasn't like I was like, I'm going to conquer all of this in one day because I don't believe you have to conquer all of that stuff in one day. It's not like a, you know, it's one hundred percent fixed or else he's ruined. I don't believe in that kind of thinking. So I made progress in a positive direction. And then an interesting thing happened. So there was another day and my husband was coming out of the arena and I was saddling up and I had been doing some of the clicker training. So if you go back and listen to Episode 84, I had been doing clicker training with Presto and I had been targeting him to touch and send and do different things. And so I actually I did a hand signal to my husband who stopped the tractor, and I'd already I had the tools with me and I pointed at the bucket of the tractor, which again is up in the air above his head. And and I–and I pointed at it and I could see Presto be like, what? You want me to…And he reached towards the tractor slightly because we'd been practicing this. And I clicked and gave him a treat. And he was like, what? Are you kidding me? And so I pointed at it again and he reached up and he touched it. And I clicked and gave him a couple treats. And in one very short session, all of a sudden he was like, OK, wait a minute, tractor equals treats. And so it was very funny because then he switched gears and then he was like, we should definitely drag Stacy to the tractor so we can get treats because Presto thinks like this. So he will even become pushy in his seeking of rewards. So that's a whole another issue. But it was kind of cool because I really hadn't done a lot of other training. I mean, I hadn't spent a lot of time. I just happened to–I happened to be like, hey, I've been using this tool and this tool. And I put it together. And he was very, very interested in that. So I'm seeing these little tiny things that could be problems in the future, like, oh, he reacts to this moving "vehicle" that's tall and up in the air. Let me go ahead and address that now. So those are some of the little tiny things that you can look for. Even when somebody's like dragging an arena with a tractor, start watching for any little signs. And I'll go into more of the training at the end of this podcast.

Stacy Westfall:
Let's go to number 2, the road. So the the next issue, you've got the vehicle now you've got the actual road. And if you're in the process of getting to know a horse that you have and you want to know whether it's good around the road or you've got one that you're trying to teach to be good around the road, the first assignment is get to know the road because there are going to be things about the road that can work for you and things about the road that can work against you. So some of the challenges that roads often have are, you know, then they're all going to have unique issues. So you've got to really study it. But there could be culverts, there could be guardrails there. You've got to be able to make the decision about which side of the road to ride on. Do you want to be riding into the traffic or do you want to be riding with the flow of traffic? What other things can you consider like electrical transformers? That's a little strange one, but I remember there's one we always had to ride by up in Maine and it's this humming electrical hub and the horses would have somewhat of a reaction to it. Interesting side note, they would have a slight reaction. They would always kind of like look at it, slightly sketchy, but we trained them to go by it. Fine. And then it was interesting because there came a time period, a couple of years into doing this, that the horses would not go over there. And it was so interesting because my mom–it was a small town–my mom was like, there's something not right with that transformer station. I can't remember the actual technical term for it, but she's like, there is something not right with this thing over here. So she actually contacted them and they came out and they looked and they were like, yeah, actually it was giving off some, you know, it was giving off some actual electricity. Not that it was going to, like, shock you to death, but there was something not quite right with it. And it's interesting that my mom knew to trust that the horses had been going by it and now there was something off. So I know. OK, back to some other road conditions. Very narrow footing on the side of the road. A weak spots on the side of the road, somewhere where there–where there could be like almost like a washed out edge of the road, you need to be able to identify those things. Something else that I think goes in this category would be things that are near the road but aren't the road itself. Like, if somebody has a flagpole and there's a flag flapping wildly in the wind, this becomes a road issue. Garbage cans, they can become a road issue, mailboxes, they can become an issue. And just when you conquer mailboxes, somebody puts up one of those really strange, weird mailboxes. And that's a whole another issue sometimes. And dogs. So if you're riding by areas where people have dogs that come running out to protect their home, then you need to know which ones and where and how that's going to work. Because these are all things that if you know they're going to happen, you can train for them. So I live in Ohio now, but I grew up in the state of Maine and we did a lot of riding down the sides of roads to get from one place to the other. Sometimes it was a sure thing, but many times we rode 4 miles on the side of the road. Sometimes we rode on miles on gravel roads, and sometimes it was miles down the sides of very busy roads to get from one place to another. And I'll tell you this, the sides of the road are completely different in Maine than where I've been in Ohio. And that's going to be true for you wherever you are. So in Maine, they're prepared to push back a lot of snow. And so there's very often a wide edge of the road. And that's so that they have a place to push the snow when the second and third snowstorm come. And so the mailboxes are set further back because of the plowing. The wide edge of the road is wider. There tends to be like almost a gravelly edge to that road because of the way that they maintain preparing for all of this different weather here in Ohio, the ditches tend to be road and then 6 inches or 4 inches of like a little bit of gravel and then boom, a big quick drop into a ditch. So in Maine, there were oftentimes places where I could take a horse directly off the side of the road into into a ditch because of the way it wasn't a quick drop off into a ditch. It was a long sloping thing, but not so much the places I've ridden here in Ohio. And that matters.

Stacy Westfall:
So at one point you mentioned in your question, Sarah, boarding somewhere so that there would be a field that would neighbor up against that. Now, I did a podcast a while back and I didn't look up which episode number, but I did a podcast a while back talking about teaching horses leading or–and I was answering a question about horses that popped their head up when they step on the lead rope. And in that podcast, I mentioned that like a horse might step on the lead rope and keep its head down and discover that it can step off the lead rope. And this is ideal. Other horses will step on the lead rope, go to–go to pick their head up, realize they're trapped, basically kind of almost like rear hop, which, by the way, releases the lead rope and they will learn that that's the answer. And so you can't just leave it up to them and be guaranteed, which answer they're going to come up with for the release. The release could be the more desirable release of keeping the head down and stepping the feet or the less desirable release of rearing and bringing the feet off the ground. That way, if you were to board your horse where there was access to the road or the field, like a field that came up against a road, I would suggest doing some training out there for the same reason. Yes, you can put the horse out in the field with another horse that's usually fine and hope that it all goes well. But you could also be proactive in that. You could take the training that we're going to talk about more at the end of the podcast. And you could then apply all of these use of your aides and all of this out in that same field. So let's just say that that field butted right up to the edge of a road you could choose to go ride in the far-away-from-the-road side of the field, and you could work your way over to the halfway point and back and forth. In this way, you could be proactively deciding, are you moving with the direction of the vehicle you see coming? Are you moving towards it? Are you–how close can you get? Do your ground work out there. So if you do decide to board somewhere like that or find road access like that, I do highly suggest finding a place that you can do safe training and in your case, that might be boarding somewhere. When I was growing up in Maine, we knew where there were big fields that people were OK with, with us riding in that were near the road. And so we essentially did what I'm telling you to, and we did it in those those fields. So it matters where you are. Sometimes you can find access roads that run beside main roads where you can safely do some of this training. That's where getting to know the road matters because then you can make a plan. When I was the teen riding the really, really reactive horse. It was really good that we could hear that vehicle coming and I would for sure pick places where I knew that I could go into those circles and so that limited our riding originally. That meant that we needed to make a plan. We needed to be able to, you know, come up to where we were going to need to cross the road. We needed to be listening way before we got to the road. It made meant that we needed to be careful which roads we went on because I needed the room to be able to circle or keep her feet moving. As she got better that got more drawn in. And that's when you've been listening to any of the previous podcasts, and I talk about putting the horse between the aides. The horse that I started with was like an elementary school horse. You couldn't put her between all the aides. She wasn't trained enough. And then as she got more and more trained, that's how you can keep them more between the aides and that's how you can lose that desire to have to circle the horse. But that's truly a place to start. And remember, along all of this, you're trying to convince yourself that this is going to work, too. So do whatever it takes to convince yourself that this is a good idea. So if that's boarding and being able to ride in a pasture near the road so that you can work on this kind of stuff in a safe environment, I say go for it.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, a couple other things that kind of fall under the category of considering the road itself, not all horses have ever seen pavement. Some horses are really funny about new surfaces. I'll see that here with my indoor arena where they'll be horses that will unload for a clinic. And they're a little bit funny about coming into the big building the way that the surfaces change and have–have you ever seen a horse…I've seen horses where maybe I'll go to pick up a pole out of the arena, but I'll let the pole drag in my deeper sand and it'll make this really distinct line and some horses will be like, whoa, what's that line? So it'll be funny about surface changes or lines. Well you'll definitely get that with horses seeing the white and yellow lines on the pavement also. And not too many years ago, I trained a mini to drive and I wanted to pick up–I'm a little bit strange for…as a mom–I wanted to pick up one of my sons at school and I wanted to go through the car line with the mini. So my plan was drive down, and the school was across the road from a fairgrounds. So I drove the truck and trailer and mini down to the fairgrounds, unloaded the mini, hooked up to the cart, warmed up over in the fairgrounds. And then my plan was to drive across the road, over in car line, pick up my son with the mini, and I did all of the above. And I got to the point where I went to go across the road–it was a fairly busy road and you could only see for so long. I still had my ears though, so I drove up to the road, made my guess at the best timing, trotted, started trotting across the road, crossed the outside white line perfectly fine, and then the mini hit all the brakes when we came to the double yellow line in the middle, like not moving. Like that was the intention the mini had was to totally stop. I, however, was able to apply the gas pedal and convinced the mini to keep going, which led to a small hopping over the double yellow line. So this is just a note to self, like they don't always just understand those differences of either the surface itself or those painted on symbols like that. I know when I went on a a trail ride in California, in Norco, you're in a lot more of this dense area. And then I also did it in Chino Hills. And in those situations, you're going to run into things like the drainage, the covers that go over, like where the water grates where the water can go down and you're going to have all these different things. Again, this is all about awareness so that you know what you're working with.

Stacy Westfall:
And then the last thing on this subject of understanding the road here is the idea, should you ride into the traffic flow or with the traffic flow? Now, the first thing to consider is the law, because some states treat horses like vehicles, and that means that the vehicle should be going with the flow of the other vehicles. So you would be on the same side–going in the same direction as the cars. And some states treat horses like pedestrians and pedestrians are in most places supposed to walk towards the traffic. And so this is an interesting thing to look up and know. Now I'm going to give you my–what I do and kind of my opinion. So when I'm looking at it from a horse training standpoint, what I'm kind of looking at choosing between is when you ride straight towards a car that's oncoming, what's the most frequent problem that's going to happen? Well, in my experience, if you ride head on towards a car a lot of times what a horse is going to do if they make a mistake is they're going to do some version of a roll back like they want to turn and go away from this thing that's coming head on at them. So you need to be aware of that. Now, if you're riding along and this car is coming from behind and you can argue that they're not looking straight at it, they would have to be using their peripheral or bending their head a little bit. The most common problem that tends to have is that it sends them forward. And so in a way, that's another thing to consider is your horse is this rollback thing something that you're capable of dealing with or this go forward thing, something you're capable of dealing with. In which mistake, if the horse were to make it fits better due to the lay of the land. So layer that on top of all this other stuff. So if all things are equal for me, which means I'm riding in kind of an ideal situation down the side of the road, if all things are equal, I tend to go with the traffic. Say I'm in an area where it's undetermined whether or not the law says where I need to be and there's no factor on the road that's making me want to be on a different side if everything's equal. I like riding with the flow of the traffic because I really don't like unplanned rollbacks. And I think it feels like more pressure when that car's coming head on at the horse's head than when it's coming from behind. But if everything is not equal. I do whatever I believe is safer in that situation. So an example of that would be when I leave my house right now where I live, I have to go about a five minute ride up the road to get on the trail head. And when I leave my house and I turn left out of the driveway, there's a very sharp turn quickly, just a few hundred feet down the road, there's a very sharp turn to the right. And what that means is that drivers coming around that corner, they can't see that I'm on the road with the horse, but I can still hear them. And I make a plan from basically looking at it from the car drivers point of view and my point of view both. So I stay–I cross across and I ride with the flow of traffic as I'm headed up to that really sharp turn, because I know that a car coming around that corner, I know, first of all, I'm going to hear it. But second of all, I know if they don't see me, they're probably going to be on their side of the road and they're going to probably be maybe a little wide because they tend to speed around that corner. So I want to be on the inside of that corner. I don't want to be on the outside of that corner. So that's what I mean by knowing what's happening on that road. So that's where I choose to ride on the way out because of that. Now, what's behind me right then is actually like a longer stretch of a few hundred feet. So somebody coming from behind me is going to see me far earlier. Now, when I come home from the trail, I ride the same place, but it's kind of opposite reasoning. So when I come home. I know the cars are still speeding predominantly from that one direction, so now I crossed the road earlier and I'm riding head on into the traffic where I was riding with it before. But basically, I want to be on the inside of that corner is what I'm saying, because I still know that the car's coming from what is now behind me. That's the way that they tend to speed. And when they're speeding, they tend to hang wide. I don't want to be on the wide side of that. I don't want to come around, be surprise and be right up the rear end of my horse. So I am over on the inside of the turn and I'm riding head on towards the traffic. But the good news is I can see that traffic head on because it's a long, straight stretch and they can see me really early. So it's kind of interesting to know that that's how much influence the road is having on what I choose to do.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, let's talk a little bit about the drivers and what they're doing around the horses. I broke it into 3 categories and then added a fourth. So basically you've got drivers that have no change, drivers that slow down, and drivers that want to see a problem. And then the insanely big category now is distracted drivers. So now I'd like to go back through those a little bit slower so you'll see drivers that pretty much don't change the way that they're driving at all. And that can be because they're not very familiar and that doesn't occur to them. Or it can also be for the opposite reason. They're super familiar with seeing horses so they don't change at all. That's a big change that I noticed coming from Maine, because growing up, which granted that was a couple of decades ago, you know, you would see drivers that didn't change much, but you would also see quite a few people that would slow down and be like, wow, a horse, you know? But around here where I am in Ohio, there's a large population of Amish and there are a lot of buggies and horses on the roads. And so this is actually had kind of the opposite effect where drivers largely expect horses to be completely fine. That's what I've noticed. So you should study kind of what's normal in your area because it will help you a little bit. But at the end of the day, all 4 of those categories still exist and you should know them.

Stacy Westfall:
So then we've got the people that slow down to be helpful, which in a large part is helpful. The number one good thing about somebody slowing down for you is it means they saw you. This is helpful. If it's at all not helpful what happens is sometimes they slow down, they get right beside you, they count being beside you as being past you. And that's where they step on the gas and rev the engine. That can be a bit of a, you know, that can be something that your horse needs to get used to because the the drivers in trying to do something helpful, but they didn't quite make it past you before they stepped on the gas–so that can be an interesting side note for the helpful people that are not super educated about it. Now, thankfully, group number 3, the people that want to see a problem, thankfully, that's a small percentage. I don't run into a lot of that, but it absolutely is there. And when I sent my message to my mom and I was asking her what she remembered or had for tips, she reminded me of a time that we were riding along a road–and this was a very busy, bigger road. And we decided to stay on the main road instead of doing one of these bypass roads. And like I said before, this would not have been a choice we would have made early on owning my mare. But when the horses start to get better with road noise, you can start to make some of these more advanced choices. Well, what's interesting is we were riding down this road and we stayed on the main road down through this kind of big dip in the road. And the reason there's a big dip there is because under the road there runs a decent sized stream with a massive culvert. And so that meant that on the road that we were riding on, we were about to enter a section of the road that had guardrails on both sides for like at least one hundred feet on one side and probably 200 feet on the other side, guardrails on both sides with big drop offs. So when you enter a section of road like that, you're committed. Now, we could hear that there weren't any big, you know, trucks coming for quite a ways. We knew the risk we were taking, but we decided to go straight. And then we heard a group of motorcycles coming up behind us. And what's interesting is when motorcyclists talk to each other and you're riding on horse, you can hear them. And one of them said, "let's scare the horses," very clearly. And my mom by this time already had me trained and we communicated and we picked up the pace. So we began trotting down this side of the road because if somebody intending to spook your horse, they're going to rev the engine. They're going to do some kind of motion. They're going to yell, they're going to basically pick up the energy in the room. So by moving our horses up to a trot down this side, we were, number one, sending the horses in a direction that was more positive than jumping off the railing. We weren't bottling up the energy and then letting the motorcyclists add even more energy to that bottle already. And we were being very proactive. So the horses are getting clear signals now. Go here now. And that kind of authority is something that you've been hearing me talk about when you ride with a plan and intention. Well, right when all the stuff is supposed to–could be falling apart like this, that's when you need to ride with the most intention. Don't wait to see what happens. Be proactive. And thankfully, they were fine. But you can hear how that could have been a bad situation.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, this is a great one that my mom sent. My mom sent a bunch of these different ones and some of them I've incorporated in here and–and without giving her direct credit. This one, I'm giving direct credit to her. So she wrote, watch people as they approach. Not all drivers know how to drive around horses or what to do if a horse reacts. Look right at them. So, you know, they see you. And so when I'm reading that now, it makes me laugh and I went and dug out an article that I have over on my website about which side of the road to ride on. And this is a paragraph that I wrote about what my mom was just saying. So in this here…here, I'm quoting my own article. It says, "Occasionally we would find ourselves on a stretch of road that was less than ideal. I remember that sometimes my mother would choose to have us ride against the traffic flow for no other reason than to be able to make eye contact with the drivers. As strange as it may seem, sometimes the accountability of looking someone directly in the eyes will make a driver slow down and pay more attention to their driving. It also did not hurt that my mom had a look that could kill if she felt her horses or children were being threatened". That's why my mom's note, "look right at them"…made me laugh because seriously, she would stare someone down. Now, what's interesting about that is it's very effective because of a bunch of things. So so sitting here right now recording this podcast, if I think that I could be getting in trouble…so if I think that a driver is not paying attention, if I think about looking them straight in the eye and letting them know I'm there…No, sit here and do this with me. Like, if you do that, do you notice that you open your chest? Do you notice that you make yourself bigger? Do you notice that your look is intense and that your focus is there? And there's this big feeling that you have now do the opposite now. Pretend that a car is coming and you're afraid of your horse's reaction and you're afraid of what might happen. I start that as soon as I start talking like that, I start bringing my shoulders, I roll them forward and I roll them in and I start curling my spine down and I start shrinking down and I start worrying about, like, am I going to grab the saddle horn? How's this going to work? You know? And so it's fascinating. There's something my mom was inadvertently teaching me was how to be that intentional. So that not only does it have an effect on…your…the people, but it has an effect on your horse because of the way that you show up in the room. Sometimes people want to see if they can get something to happen. My advice is make sure your horse is trained so that you rob them of that chance. Don't give them the chance to see your reaction. Let's be proactive about it. So we're going to talk about the training in a minute. Thankfully, with most of the drivers, it tends to be a lack of education versus being rude. And so what this means is that often if you do look at them, if you do make that eye contact, a lot of times if they see that you're being intentionally aware of them, they will also increase their awareness of you. And at that point, a lot of them will respond to hand signals. And now keep in mind that if you do what I consider like a universal slow down signal, I'm doing it right now in case you can see me. That's like almost like you pet the air, like in a downward motion, like slow down. And if you do that motion a lot of times if they see you, that'll work. Sometimes they will honk at you in response like they think you have a unique way of waving. So make sure your horse is already trained to respond, OK, to a honking horn. Sometimes they will slow down for you and then they're past you and they'll speed right back up and sometimes they don't slow down at all. So be prepared for all of that.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, at this point in the podcast, you might be questioning why anyone would ever ride down the side of the road. Now, the amazing thing is you actually can train a horse to handle all of this. If you come to an area like mine, you'll see Amish buggies on the side of really busy roads and they've gotten used to it. And I trained horses when I had much less experience. And we were very successful about teaching our horses to be excellent. And all of these conditions because you have more power than you might think in the way that you train the horse to be between the aides. You have a lot of power there, but you also have a lot of power to be proactive in how you desensitize the horse. And so here are some very actionable tips that you could use in training your horse. I'm going to go back to this one again. First off, know the road. So walk it, bike it, jog it. You're probably–if you're training your horses, just a little section of road, get to know the road you're going to use to train your horse on. The reason I really encourage you to go on foot at some point is because I want you to feel your own reaction to the traffic. I went jogging this morning before recording this podcast, and I have my own reaction to traffic on my own two feet jogging. I have a reaction now. I also jog and I make sure I can hear things because I want to hear the cars coming. Depending on how they sound. I will even play a game with myself as I hear them coming. And I'm on my own two feet jogging or walking. I will listen to how they are driving. Do they sound like a lead foot? Do they sound like they're on their side of the road? Then I'll look back over my shoulder and I'll see what if–if I agree with that. Depending on which side of the road I'm on at the time, I will switch sides of the road because I don't want to be on the same side of the road because they might be distracted driving and distracted drivers tend to do an OK job of staying in their lane. But if the law says as a pedestrian, I'm supposed to be walking head on and I don't think they're going to be looking, I'm going to do whatever's safer for me at that moment and I'll change back. So you need to know your own reaction and you need to know your own road. Then you need to visualize that you can train your horse like a police horse would be trained. So when you think about police horse training, I haven't done a YouTube search, but it's possible and I can get some links because my husband helps with the police horse training program. And so there are definitely clips out there where you can teach horses to approach vehicles with flashing lights or smoking objects and all these different things. That's the visual you need to get in your head about being proactive at home the way that I would go about doing this. Here's some things you can do. One thing I do with my horses is that during groundwork…done all the groundwork that you see in, like the Stacy's Video Diary: Jac kind of stuff. Another thing I'll do is I will drag a tarp. I'll be walking. It'll be me, the horse on a long line. I'll be dragging a tarp. They're, following me, following the tarp. So it's like it goes me, tarp, horse and I drag it until they step on it, which means that they've increased their curiosity. They're following it and I encourage them to come up and step on it and stop it. So I'm basically teaching them to not only follow, but I'm also teaching them that they have the power to stop this. Then I give them a reward and I will do that until they're really good at like, chase the tarp and stop it. Then I will do that riding. At that point, I have to have somebody else drag the tarp and then I will ride up to it and I will let them follow it, let them follow it, let them follow it, and then encourage them to like step on it and encourage everybody to let that stop and get a reward there.

Stacy Westfall:
Then when you want to move to more specific training, like with the car, get a friend to drive a car. It's amazing what you can do for training in a driveway or in an indoor arena. You can get really creative and weird. First of all, you can do it simple, like I was with my husband in the tractor. You can drive, have them drive and you can follow it. If you're at a boarding barn, take turns. Everybody wants the horse to be good with traffic. So take turns. Somebody driving and somebody else's is–is the horseback rider. And then you can swap so you can have a friend driving and then you can have them stop, get out and pet the horse or feed the horse or treat. You could use it like a clicker training session if you wanted to. You could work up to the fact that you're following the car and they're blowing the horn. You could be leading your horse following the car and they're blowing the horn. Work up until you can do that while the car is driving past you and then driving past you and blowing the horn. I blow the horn at my horses in the pasture and paddocks all the time. They do nothing because they're like, she's just weird. I want my horses to think I'm just weird and weird things happen. So if I'm doing the training with the car, I've actually done this training with my dogs a lot where I didn't like it when I was–when we–when we gave a lot of lessons and people would drive in, people driving into your driveway will accidentally teach your dog to run in front of cars. And the way they do that is they drive in the driveway, the dog gets in front of the car, the person stops the car. Maybe they even roll down the window and talk to the dog. Well, the dogs start to get the sense that they can stop vehicles because they are. But it's also like a terrible thing for the dog to learn. So I would actually get into vehicles when I saw this happening and have them drive out and drive back in. And I would be like, get out. I would be the one in the car. And then when the dog did that, I'd be like, get out of the way of the car. I would tell the dog what I wanted to do. So you can be very proactive with the reactions you want your animals to have. So if I wanted to get myself really comfortable with my horse being around vehicles, I would get to the point where I could have somebody that could be blowing a horn, yelling out the window, screaming, getting out, slamming the door, running up to my horse and petting it and feeding it like, can you picture how that could make you a little tense? But if you got to the point where people could do that, you'd be like, yeah, I think we're all on the right track and we haven't even left the property yet. And so, you know, if you can involve multiple people, you can get really creative, you could–you could have like cars that are pulling trailers, make different noises. It depends on what you want to sack them out to. You can get crazy creative. Now, Sarah, you mentioned that your horse was specifically bothered by vehicle reflections. Whatever that means, train for it. Like if that means you have to–I'm not sure how that works. Like I get that like the sun glares off from different parts of the vehicles. So train for that. That means you need to train on a sunny day. Maybe it means that you need to train…I have led horses around in the dark with flashlights and pointed the flashlights at the ground and done weird things. Getting horses used to that strange illusion that happens. Get creative with people that you trust driving, honking, jumping out. I'm telling you, you can do this. I have to ride about 5 minutes up the road to get to the trails that I ride on now, and I always tell people that the first 5 minutes is the most challenging part of a trail right here. We've got the sharp turn that I talked about. We've got slippery pavement, which especially I ride my horses a lot of times with sliders on. What that does is it teaches you how to teach your horse a collected walk. We've got deep ditches, so there's nowhere to go off the road. If you've got places where you can get off the road, that's great. I know how far I can make it to my driveway from my driveway to my neighbor's driveway to the next road. I've got an unsafe edge of the road near my property because there's a a culvert. And when there's really big rain, the culvert can't handle all the water. So it starts the swirling motion and it's actually eaten out the road under the pavement. But you can't see that. So don't ride real edges–don't ride near the edges of pavement. You don't know because you might run into that. And I tell everybody to stay away from that edge of the road on the way up on that five minute ride. I have all of that. A lot of–there are dogs, neighbors that have dogs, that run out and bark. Thankfully, the dogs do respond to the owners. So that's great. But it's still there. There's a mini–a miniature horse that comes running out, and so I actually call to the miniature horse because I like knowing that it's coming. And there's an alpaca, a llama, goats, there's a guest house. The guest house has cats. And these cats have been so handled by the guests that they don't move. So don't assume that all animals are going to move out of the way of your horse. I'm like, OK, this cat actually could be stepped on because it the mini walks around it in the pasture. So the mini has trained the cat not to move. The kids that stay there have also trained the kid not to move–the cats not to move. Sometimes kids will come running out of the house to see the horses. There happen to be big bushes that block part of that. So sometimes you can't see the kids running out. Get good at listening again. And there are also cars on this road. So, yeah. Wherever you decide to take up this challenge, be careful, careful, careful, because to me, the most dangerous thing going on right now on the road is that it is more about distracted driving now than it has ever been growing up. Distracted driving was somebody maybe eating or adjusting the radio, which you only adjust the radio for so long. Distracted driving now is so serious. I see so many people that are texting while they're driving or checking whatever they're checking. Some days I think they're watching movies. I don't they're looking down more than they're looking up. And since my mom taught me to stare them down, I know that they're not looking because I'm staring them down. So you want to be ready for that because that's the most challenging thing.

Stacy Westfall:
Two more tips that come directly from my mom would be when you're riding in groups, you can learn to communicate with each other and be really helpful. My mom taught me when I was growing up that if you were riding, she wanted to keep it really simple. She would say that it was always, car ahead. So if you're riding in a group, let's say that it doesn't matter if there's just two of you, it can be anybody. But especially when you get into larger groups, the person at the front of the group can often see the cars coming towards them, car ahead. Because that's super clear. It doesn't matter after the fact, you can have more of a discussion, big car flapping, you know, truck with flapping tarp or whatever, the first thing to communicate in very clear language, car ahead and then same thing, car behind. After that's communicated, you can add whatever to it that you want to add. But my mom was crystal clear, car head, car behind. If you're in the back of the group and you can see something sooner, call it out. If you're at the front of the group, you can see it sooner, call it out. Anyone who sees it, call it out, because that way everybody can be more prepared. And I totally forgot my mom teaching me the word ditch it. Two words, ditch it. And I mean, my mom–this was the same thing, is when you saw–when they would teach you to like stop, drop and roll, if, you know, if something caught you on fire. We were–we used to camp, and the Girl Scout leaders, the thing it was a stop, drop, and roll. This is what you do. When my mom said ditch it, there were no questions asked. I got my pony when I was 6 and we had to ride on the side of the road right away. And I mean, if she said ditch it, and she would do it as a training drill, and she would do it when needed, but there were no questions asked. You were getting the pony in the ditch and whatever that ditch that meant, that meant that my mom, if she called it out and that meant you had to jump a ditch to end up in a field, you'd better do it and you better do it right now. Because she wasn't kidding when she said ditch it. And it definitely taught you to be like…right away, aware of where you were going. Which again, I think was brilliant because what it did for me as a young child, 6, 7, 8 years old, it made me very aware of where I was sending my focus, my energy, and my pony. Because my mom was probably staring someone down. So thanks again for listening to the podcast. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a reading and review on whatever podcast app you are using. It really does help spread the word and recommend it to a friend if you want. And I will talk to you again in the next episode.

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