Working With a Horse Who Spooks Easily

When working with a horse who spooks easily, try using a shadow roll, which keeps the horse's line of vision at the appropriate level for jumping. Practice working with a spooky horse with helpful tips from an experienced Grand Prix rider in this video on horse exercises.

Ok, so this is my new horse Timo. I just got him about a month ago. He was campaigned by Lauren Huff one of the best riders we have in America. He's a really nice horse, if I have to say one problem that he has is he's very spooky. He's always checking things out and studying them too much and so my exercise with him, my goal is going to be A) to make sure he has a good arc, which I showed you earlier. Because what he does is when he spooks he drops his stomach down and he really crouches so he almost scoots over the jump. So I put a catapult behind but the new thing I'm trying is this shadow roll for him. And that will keep him from looking really down to the floor. That will really keep his eye sight level. He can't get up too high, he can't get down too low, cause I won't let him. And so that's the idea today, is I want to see how the shadow roll works and so yea we'll get started and we will see how it goes. So I expect him the first time, to really scoot over this jump. And you'll see as he goes, he'll get more and more relaxed and take more and more time and I am really looking for him to really scoot. Oh much better this time. A few days ago he was really crouching down and so I'll do this again. I'll set up the load. So now I'll go ahead and do the whole course and see how we do. Whoa. Whoa. Good boy.