The Art of Natural Dressage

Hi, my andalusian is 3 and I would like to teach her to tie...without her flipping out preferably. She is halter broke and can back up and come forward. How do I start?

Welcome Bella

I assume when you say ' learning to tie ' you mean teaching her to stand quietly while tied up ?
I do not tie up my horses , as I do not like to control then in that way - where they have no ways of escape , or no way for him to leave when he wants too , and say what he wants to do . But he does stand quietly when I ask him too , at liberty , but he will leave of I do something he doesn't like . But I am so happy about this , I probably sound mad , but I am , as he is telling me what he wants/doesn't want , in a confident and happy way .

So I will tell you how I would ask for standing , at liberty ,
I would rest my hand on his withers , and when he didn't move, I rewarded him . If he did move I would just go with him , asking him to stop with my body language , and reward him for standing still . I suppose I have never really thought about how I ask MrC to stand still consciously , as I never thought about teaching it , we somehow just do it ... But I would teach it like I have described , if I wanted too

Nice to have you on this forum , please feel free to write an introduction - viewforum.php?f=3 - when you are ready
Best Wishes
Ali

Hi Bella, welcome!

Like Ali, I do not tie my horses. If I did, I would work on it in a way that is supposed to show the horse that he is not trapped. As soon as they understand that, they usually don't feel the need to break free anymore. In practice, this means that I would NOT tie the horse in the beginning but just loosely lay the rope on the thing that the horse is going to be tied to later. If the horse pulls his head away, there is almost no resistance and the rope just follows. If he experiences that again and again, he will most likely not need to test it so vigorously anymore. This is the point when I would increase the rope's resistance, for example by holding its end in my hand. The horse learns that he can still get loose if he really wants to, but it's more comfortable not to. If I saw that he increases the force, I would not do the same but go back to making it easy for him (i.e. almost no resistance on the rope). After all, he is not supposed to learn that he needs to pull harder but that pulling isn't necessary. Only once I am sure that the horse is totally fine with the pressure of the rope and does not try to go against it at all, I would really tie him.

I have described a similar thing in more detail in the Overcoming fear of halter thread and a post in Pia's diary that is referred to there.

Here is another little thread that might be of interest: Ideas on teaching two horses to stand? Actually we have hundreds of little conversations about tying here in the forum, but they are spread in many different threads. If you want to look at them, you could simply put "tying" into the search field and then look which of the results are of interest to you.

Good luck!

Thank you for the replies

I will search and mull over the threads. I need to be able to tie my horse. As the mother of 4 very young kids and living next to a highway...I think it is safest if she knows to stand while tied if the situation should arise