Here's some advice from a trainer in another gaited breed, about getting a colt to gait on the ground:
Yes, it is common in our youngsters, and thank your stars that he is trotting and not pacing under saddle. I am working one of the latter right now, that trots in the round pen but paces under saddle. I personally find that very difficult to work out of a horse. I think I will have to round up some cavelletis to work him over to break up that friggin' stepped pace, and perhaps also teach him to loped before I am going to get the gait out of him that I know is in there. Anyway, on your colt, since you have ridden pasos, the key is the old Paso maxim "restraint and impulsion," ie, you have to restrain him in front and get impulsion from the rear. This is easily seen with colts like him on the lead line, in the paso bella forma position, head up, nose in, butt tucked, restrained in front, driving forward into the restraint from the rear. With pasos they do the bella forma on long lines with usually two, sometimes one very skilled person walking behind the colt with a buggy whip to get them to tuck the hindquarters under them. With our colts, when I am testing for gait in a youngster I haven't been able to see out in the pasture, I put a halter on them and use a butt rope tied in a loop with the knot about in the middle of their back, and the long end or the loop running through the halter ring. Then I have both the rope connected to the loop of the butt rope and the lead line in my hand. I don't pull the colt forward with the lead line, I pull them forward with the butt rope, which has the effect, from the point of view of the colt, of pushing them forward with the butt tucked under them. I use the lead rope to the halter for direction, and to get the head up. I run forward, and if I can, have someone behind them kissing and clapping at them to get them going forward faster than a walk. Most of them will immediately pop up into a step rack for me. After a while, they just learn to run forward in gait beside me. So, apply the same principals to the colt under saddle, get that head up, nose tucked, and use your legs to keep the forward motion going despite the restraint in the front. Raise your hands to get the head up, and tilt your pelvis with the top toward the back of the horse, so that the bottom, your seat, is driving the rear end of the horse to tuck under him, or, as I put it, you are using your body position to drive him "up" into gait. When he understands what you want, all you will have to do is raise your hands a little and tuck your butt under you and he will know to move up in speed into gait. Your horse is laid back, as we want our Mtn Horses to be, so unlike Pasos where if you put your legs into their sides you had best be prepared to hang on tight or the horse will shoot forward out from under you, you may find yourself pounding away on his sides with your legs to get any forward motion at all in the face of the restraint you are applying to the front. One friend of mine that crosses Mtn Horse mares to her conformation champion Paso stallion said of her young Mtn Horse stallion she bought to breed to her Paso mares, that when she went to put him under saddle, she felt like she should get down and push! I laughed because I fully understood her comment after riding Pasos for 8 yrs before going into Mtn Horses in 1990. I told her to get a set of spurs for her Mtn Horse colt to get his attention and get some impulsion going. Spurs on a hot Paso schooling colt at the same point in training has a high chance of provoking an explosion and may get you dumped. Anyway, once you get him framed into the correct position in the front, and get some forward motion into the restraint, your colt will "pop" up into gait, usually the step rack, sometimes the collected intermediate walk or the glide, depends on the conformation of the horse through which the genetics wired into the neural system are expressed, but in any event, all are the evenly timed intermediate 4 beat gaits that are what you are looking for. Even if you get only a couple of steps, praise, praise, praise your horse! They get it very quickly that this is what you want, and they very quickly love it. A young strong gaited Mtn Horse will very quickly develop one speed... FASTER! Then the trick is to slow them downand extend the range of the intermediate 4 beat gait from very slow to fast. That's a whole nother subject. Check your saddle, too. I have seen horses that due to a saddle that was too large or too small, or especially with trotty horses, set too far forward, would throw the horse out of gait to either a trot or a pace. I had one colt I had sold a lady, and she kept complaining he was not gaiting, but he would gait on a lead line for me using the technique described above. So I loaned her a saddle, and that turned out to be her problem. The Circle Y Western saddle she was using would make that colt trot every time. Now I have seen a lot of Circle Y saddles used successfully on gaited horses, in fact, when Kentuckians drag a saddle out of their tack shed that has seen the most use, it is usually a Circle Y, so I don't mean to imply that Circle Y saddles are responsible for making Mtn Horses trot, only that for this particular horse it was absolutely the wrong saddle for him. The cordura Big Horn that I have used for 15 years, and is my longest used and most used saddle, worked just great on him, I think because it was wider in the gullet, and his shoulders were being pinched by the Circle Y. That is something we have to watch with our mutton withered horses that are so common in Mtn Horses. _________________________ Judy http://icehorses.net http://clickryder.com
