Amber Giorgi tells about raising and training horses and about growing up on a cattle ranch.
Many times when we think of horse-training, we assume that the confinement of an arena is where it all takes place.
However, it is in riding your horse out into the countryside and away from the confinement of an arena that you take the first step in creating a happy, well broke horse.
I believe the only successful way to train a horse is by having a happy horse, because a happy horse is much more willing to learn and accept training.
Exposure to new and interesting surroundings holds your horse’s interest while you apply appropriate training methods, and your horse learns new performance without realizing it. This training method also keeps your horse from becoming bored or soured by arena training.
By integrating good, old-fashioned range riding into your performance horse training, you not only make your horse happy, you also develop a well-rounded horse.
One of the advantages of free-range training is that your horse learns how to control her hind-end going up and down hills, rather than by sliding into the sand in an arena every day. Having fun while going around trees or through cattle helps teach horses the beginning of balancing their shoulders, or moving off your leg.
The skills you and your horse can accomplish out there are endless, and best of all fun for both rider and horse.
Looking back at pictures showing four generations of the great lifestyle of my family, especially my grandfather in the early 1900s, one image continues to flash through my memory. The horses. Without these amazing creatures, the ranch lifestyle would not have existed.
From riding for days on end gathering cattle, checking fences, hunting, packing, and pulling plows so the family could eat and survive, these horses sure were worth their weight in gold.
As a kid I remember saddling up my pony—until I was persistent enough to graduate to a “big horse”—and riding all day gathering, parting, and shipping cattle.
As I grew older, my love and passion for understanding how a horse’s mind and body work only grew stronger. I continued to ride more and more horses, and eventually I started a small breeding program. I was able to fund my college education from those sales.
Then I began getting calls from people who wanted me to train their horse because they liked the horses I was selling—those horses I had bred, raised and trained. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of riding with phenomenal trainers and horsemen, and I learned so much from each of them. Training has became my fulltime job.
But sometimes I wonder if I would be the trainer I am today had I not been raised rounding up cattle on my family’s ranch.