08/20/2026
It’s Winning Wednesday, and I’m an hour late because I didn’t have anything swirling around in my brain this morning. Or at least I didn’t think I did. Then I realized what has been swirling around is a mare we have in right now for a restart.
She’s gentle, and she isn’t trying to buck anyone off, but every ounce of her is tipped over her front end—specifically over her right front foot. I don’t know who started her, how many days they put on her, or how much she was ridden afterward. I haven’t asked those questions because the horse will always tell me what she knows, and right now, this mare is telling me that she has never learned how to balance herself and drive from behind.
When I ask her to lope to the left, she hangs that right shoulder out, lets her hip fall to the right, and has a terrible time picking up the left lead. She isn’t refusing, being stubborn, or trying to do the wrong thing. Her body simply isn’t in a position where the left lead is easy for her to find, so it takes some finesse on my part to help her organize her feet and get there.
This is incredibly common in the horses we get for restarts. They’re often tipped forward, heavy on the front end, and described as “dull in the face.” But this mare isn’t really dull—she’s actually a little sticky, and while she would be happy to comply with a request to move forward, she would wait until next Tuesday if we gave her the chance.
The reins have never been properly connected to her feet, and she doesn’t yet understand how to shift her weight back or move her shoulders and hips independently. If you pick up a rein, she will look in that direction and give you her face because she believes that is where the release comes. She is a perfect example of face before feet.
Maybe the question isn’t who we blame for horses ending up this way. Maybe the better question is how we educate more trainers to understand that starting a horse is about much more than getting one gentle enough to ride. How do we teach trainers to help a horse drive from behind, carry itself in balance, and understand what the rider is asking its feet to do?
How do we teach trainers that their job is to keep horses out of wrecks—not put them into a wreck like we saw last week with the bucking horse that had milk jugs tied to it? There may be more than one way to teach a horse to shift its weight back, but it still has to be taught. Getting a horse gentle enough to sit on is not the same thing as giving that horse a quality start.
I actually really enjoy horses like this because it’s easy to see the fruits of your labor. I would take tons of them if people had the checkbook to leave them long enough for me to adequately work through the problem. Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t afford to leave a horse for as long as it takes to truly undo the old program and replace it with a better one.
It can take mere moments to instill a program in a horse that may take months—or even years—to completely remove. A horse may have received only 30 or 60 days of poor-quality training, but it can easily take me two or three times that many days to get the horse where it could have been if it had received a quality start in the first place. When the horse has to go home before we get all the way through that process, we may make progress, but we lose the opportunity to truly finish the task.
The win for this mare won’t be forcing her onto the left lead or putting a bigger bit in her mouth. The win will be helping her reorganize her body so the right answer becomes possible, then giving her enough time and consistency for that answer to become her new program. She isn’t wrong, and she isn’t behind—she simply knows what she knows today, and now it’s my job to help her understand more.
That’s winning.
