Episode 03: How to Lead a Horse

Hello! Welcome to Flip N Tails: a tiny podcast for BIG horse lovers! I’m a horse girl who loves to ride and each week I’ll share about what I learn and love about horses. Today’s episode is all about leading a horse.

I love leading horses

Because it’s fun to feel like we’re a team and we’re together with each other. Leading horses is when you want to walk your horse out of the stall or a pasture. You need to have a halter and a lead rope, and then you’re also going to want to have a positive attitude because if you’re having a bad day that doesn’t mean the horse has to have a bad day. And also you’re going to want to go in with enthusiasm.

One of the times I’ve led a horse

Is in a stall where I grabbed my halter and I grabbed my lead rope. And there’s actually a little pole at the side of the stall that I set my lead rope on so I can have my full attention on putting the halter on. After I put the halter on, then I still keep one hand on the halter to make sure that the horse doesn’t run away because the gate is already open and then I clip it on, and I lead it out. Except that before I lead it out I want to make sure that the coast is clear and no other horses are coming out.

What are some good tips?

Make sure you keep your feet in front of you so that you don’t get stepped on by the horse because if you get worried that the horse is going to step on you and look back that’s actually a way to get stepped on.

What are some things not to do?

Drag [the lead rope]. Because if you drag it then you could trip on it and fall forward. And then if you fall forward and you’re at like a 90 degree angle then the horse could step on you and you could get really badly hurt.

One of my horse riding instructors has a trick

for backing up a horse where you don’t even have to touch a horse. It’s basically where you take the end of a lead rope and you circle it around kind of like a helicopter and that shows a signal to the horse that they should step back. Because it’s kind of like a hoof, where if a horse kicks another horse that means “you’ve got to back up because you’re in my space bubble”. So you don’t even have to touch the horse to back it up. That’s kind of like horse body language. Because we don’t have a tail or a big leg to show them how to do that, so we use lead ropes to be able to tell them our body language to say “hey, can you back up please?”.

Fun Fact

Did you know that horses can actually lead horses? I’ve actually learned that most head of herds, that’s what I call them, or stallions, or ones that have won the herd, they normally lead the herd kind of like a triangle. Have you ever seen geese where there’s one in the top middle and everyone is leading behind? It’s kind of like that.

So that’s it! Now you know a tiny bit more about this special trick. Join us next time and subscribe for another episode of Flip N Tails: a tiny podcast for BIG horse lovers!