Alternative and traditional methods of training

[Hannah.Lucy]

Hi all! I'm a equine student trying to gather as much information as I can on Alternative and traditional methods of training! If you could please take your time to fill out my survey it would be very helpful! And also if anyone knows any good books or references I could use I would love to hear them Thankyou

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FX6KQ88

 

[sychnant]

I fell at the first hurdle!!

All 4 of my current horses are trained using a mixture of traditional and alternative methods. I don't believe in sticking rigidly to one school of thought - I will use the method that seems appropriate for the horse/situation.

Sorry - if you can alter the survey so I can tick both boxes at once I will be happy to go back and try again

 

[Hannah.Lucy]

Thankyou but you can do the survey per individual horse which would be a great at getting my responses up! Thankyou!

 

[be positive]

I have done it but found the survey rather limited, I used an ex racehorse as my example but his injuries during training relate to the discipline, the fact he raced extensively and successfully, they have nothing to do with his early education, whether it was traditional or alternative is totally irrelevant to how sound he was.

I cannot do another as I use a mix of methods with my horses, I think you may need to tweak the survey a bit and use a different way of describing what you mean by training, training encompasses so much, once they are riding and competing many people will move on from groundwork but they are still training the horse, the horse may get injured during training whether it relates to it's early introduction to work is anybody's guess unless it actually gets injured during the starting process.

 

[Hannah.Lucy]

Ok thankyou for your suggestions, I think I kept it limited because I need to be able to easily analyze it but I will definitely put your view into the literature review thankyou and keep note for the next time I do one!

 

[Orca]

I also found it impossible to fill in, sorry! I think there's a lot of crossover between methods. Long reining, you have classed as traditional but it is also used in natural horsemanship, for example. So if I long rein, I can only class that as both methods but there isn't an option to do so. Many aspects of traditional horsemanship stem from prior natural horsemanship and lore and aspects of current natural horsemanship stem from traditional, etc.

I can understand what you are trying to prove/ disprove but I can't think of a cast iron way to do that or even whether it's possible, given the melting pot of techniques people have to draw from and how readily available all of that various information is now. Most people will train intuitively, I think and take whatever they/ their horse needs from wherever, including sheer imagination sometimes!