A Book and a Rant

 School has been keeping me very busy lately, we were doing homework for the next semester before we had even finished finals. However I am going to try to get a post in once a week. Probably a 'middle-of-the-night post'' like this one. However, this post has two parts to it, as the title suggests, so onto the first!

Apropos... Horses and Riders by Hans Senn (edited by Nell Kromhout)
This book is short, 50 or so pages if you include the introduction. It's filled with a bunch of small phrases and tips that is not only immensely useful for your skills as a rider, but also applicable to your everyday life. I read this book before my riding lesson and choose a few of the tips to work on as I ride. I am not sure how it'd translate for western riders, since I believe it is targeted towards English. The only downside to my tired midnight rave about this book is that I have heard it is getting increasingly harder to find. I  love this little black book. I highly highly recommend that you track down this book if you are an equestrian. In fact, I am so fond of this book that I am going to start putting quotes from it at the bottom of posts if any corresponds.

The second part of my post is more of a rant. Horses are constantly learning every single time we ride them or work with them. They don't speak our language, they have to figure out what we want them to do. Not only do they learn of what they are suppose to do, but also what their rider will allow them to get away with. So it bothers me to no end when I see a rider get lectured about a bad habit that forms quickly and is difficult to fix but then allow their horse to form this bad habit outside of their lesson. Horses do not know the difference between a lesson and playing around; especially when you are doing the same exercise, in the same arena, only in your lesson you don't let them do the bad habit and outside of the lesson you do. It is most definitely not fair to the horse. I can already picture the rider who is getting frustrated at their horse for having this horrid habit when it the rider who taught it to the horse in the first place.
Which brings me to my first quote of Hans Senn's book:

"If you don't train your horse, he will train you."