How to Break a Horse

Breaking a horse, also known as starting the horse, involves plenty of handling, grooming, brushing and physical contact in order to get the horse comfortable with being touched and trained. Understand how to gain the trust of a horse with helpful advice in this video on training horses.

Hi, Rick Gore from the Travis Equestrian Center. Today, we're going to talk about how to break a horse. That's a pretty big topic to cover in three minutes but just in general, these are very general terms, breaking a horse is about handling and spending time with the horse. The more time from when he's a baby to when he's little, that you're brushing, grooming, picking his feet and spending time with him, is going to be the best foundation you can give him to where when it comes to breaking, which I don't like to use that term, natural horsemanship would rather call it starting a horse. Breaking a horse is the old style way of doing it where they used to use force, fear, intimidation, big bits, pain and rough techniques. With the new modern natural horsemanship, if you're starting a horse correctly, you shouldn't be breaking his spirit. You need to be starting him by introducing things to him in a manner he can accept. Making things easy for him to understand, working with his natural instincts to remove fear and not create it. And that's how you're going to break a horse and get him to where he wants to respond to you, where he wants to be with you, where he's going to allow you to do things that's against all his natural instincts to allow you to do. So although I don't like the term breaking a horse, I prefer to call it starting a horse, breaking a horse is still used and if you're going to start a horse, do it from when they're young or as soon as you get him, teach him using their own natural instincts that even though you're a predator, you're not going to hurt them and use the techniques of removing fear and not creating fear. And remember it's never the horse's fault. If the horse does something wrong, you caused it.