Bareback Bonding

January 28, 2008

I’ve always thought that part of what makes riding bareback so much fun is the higher level of bonding it creates with your horse, and I was reminded of this yesterday.

It’s been cold, so I’ve been riding Marahute bareback for the added warmth.  (In reality, I’ve just been too lazy to drag my saddle and all its accessories out of my trunk and into the barn.) She gets a little squirrely when I ride bareback, and is much more resistant to listening to my aids. After a few rides though, she usually settles in.

Dave and Tracie (the horses’ owners) have done a lot of Parelli groundwork training with Marahute’s younger brothers (no actual blood relation), and it always amazes me to see them yield their hindquarters just because Dave leaned over and looked at them. Dave hasn’t done much Parelli with Marahute because he was waiting for me to teach her. So we started playing the Friendly Game and the Yo-Yo Game prior to our ride yesterday. She wasn’t the least bit worried about the rope I was tossing around her neck and barrel and hind quarters and legs for the Friendly Game, but she was not about to back and come forward without a fight in the Yo-Yo game. She didn’t do it easily, but she did it.

At any rate, we played for a while and then I tossed on her bridle and my helmet, and hopped on for a ride. I didn’t ask too much of her at first, just got her walking and trotting and listening to my transition and turning aids. She was listening relatively well, so I figured there wasn’t any reason we couldn’t do any actual work just because I didn’t have a saddle. So we did our walk-trot-walk transitions to get her back end underneath her. I was very deliberate with my seat aids, as I realized I was being lazy and sitting too heavily bareback. I think she actually responded better without the saddle, and didn’t fight the down transitions as much as she usually does.

After we did that for a while, we went back to trotting on the rail and she was moving very nicely. We did a little bit of canter (not cantering a whole lot while I’m still building my muscles back up), and she was much more responsive. Marahute is great with her walk to canter transition when I’m in saddle, but she’s very reluctant to canter bareback. She went right into it though, and we just cantered around a few times working on getting a correct bend in the turns.

Marahute is 14 and has been a trail horse pretty much all of her life. She’s been learning how to go in a ring over the last few years, and is proceeding nicely. Our next step is to start learning to do some basic jumping. So yesterday we finally started over some trot poles. I was bareback and posting to get her moving out, and doing two-point (bareback!) over the poles to stay out of her way. She was a little side-to-side the first few times through, but once she discovered that I was asking her stay straight over the poles, she did. She just floated right through and seemed to really like it.

We’d worked a lot of different stuff, so to finish up I let her play the Passenger Game (I did this the week before just for fun, and found out afterwards that natural horsemanship programs actually advocate this activity and had named it). I put the reins down and let her go wherever she wanted as long as she kept going. She likes that game and it’s great balance practice for me. She even took me over the trot poles once.

When we were finally finished I just sat on her awhile and laid down and played around the world and sat backwards. I hopped down, and she nuzzled me and seemed pleased with our ride. She had been really crabby before we started, and was much happier after.

I think our ride was so successful partly because there was no saddle in between us. Marahute was hyper aware of every move I made, and I could feel every single muscle moving under me. We really did work in unity, and it was a great bonding experience both as horse and rider and emotionally. We’ll definitely be keeping this up until spring comes.

Posted in Jackie's Thoughts, Riding and showing