Today I worked with one of my students to teach him how to ground drive.  Though most people don’t have an interest in learning how to ground drive, this student currently has a couple of reasons to be interested.

  1. His back is in to much pain to ride. 
  2. He has a couple of horses that he is too big to ride. 

These are both great reasons for learning how to ground drive. 

A couple of other reasons that may interest someone to learn the skill of ground driving

  1. Your horse is to young to be ridden
  2. The horse is to wild to be ridden
  3. You can see far more errors from the ground than you can see sitting on your horse
  4. Teaching a horse how to trailer load is easier if they already know how to work from the ground

Before you begin ground driving you should be able to work your horse on a 12’ lunge line.

Ground driving basics:

There are a few ways you can ground drive:

  1. With the long reigns connected direct to the bit, and nothing else
  2. By running your reigns through a surcingle
  3. By running your reigns through the stirrups of your saddle (tie the stirrups too each other under the horse so that they stay secure)

This last method is the method shown in the videos above. 

Before you strap your long reigns to your horse and run them through the surcingle or through your stirrups, you need to test your horse out to be sure that the horse won’t freak out about having the long lines around their back end.  To do this attach your reigns to your horses bit.  If your horse is especially sensitive start by having the the reigns go over the horses back up close to the horses head and across to the side you are working on.  Start by working next to the horses shoulder.  As the horse builds confidence with this method you can slowly start to work the reigns further and further back until you are working your horse from behind.  Once you get to this position (and your horse is ok with it) you can run your reigns through your surcingle or stirrups.

A great article on ground driving can be found here:

http://iceryder.net/grounddriving.html