Press

Performance Horse Magazine - April 08

Dowse the Flame with Rob Leach
Simplify your training by using Rob Leach’s approach to handling a “hot” horse.
Article and photos by Annie Lambert

Training and riding “hot” horses, those with a lot of go, can be taxing, and often leaves riders at their wit’s end, pulling and arguing with their mounts until training sessions digress into a tug-of-war. There is a better way to handle those busy beasts, says trainer Rob Leach of Exeter, California, who fights fire with fire by gifting those types with all the forward motion they care to muster.

Don’t Fence Them In
Leach doesn’t have a problem with training hot equines. In fact, he prefers that type of horse to one less quick footed. These busy horses, he believes, are basically claustrophobic.
“Everyone says they’re hot,” Leach says. “They want to go faster. But it isn’t so much that they want to go faster, as they don’t want to be enclosed. They want to move their feet and know they can go somewhere.”
Most riders jump on a horse, even a colt just being started, and immediately clamp their legs around his ribcage and take ahold of the bridle reins, compressing the animal into a smaller space than nature intended. If a horse resents this pressure or is fearful of being trapped, his defense is to run away. Leach’s solution is simple: let him go.
“It’s common sense,” says Leach. “If you get on a horse that wants to go somewhere, let him go until he figures out that going somewhere isn’t that big of a deal. They’ll figure out it’s a lot easier to just hang out.
“Those claustrophobic kinds of horses want to move their feet. If you can harness that energy, you’re way more mounted.”
The worst thing you can do is try to slow down a horse that wants to travel in fast-forward, says Leach, a native of Australia. As a teenager, he traveled from cattle station to cattle station starting many colts. If those Thoroughbred-type ranch horses wanted to take off, he’d let them run full-bore for as long as it took for them to slow down on their own–often several miles across open country.
“When I felt them softening up, slowing down, I’d just pick my rein up and bend them around until they’d stop,” Leach recalls. “Those horses would be like, ‘Phew! That wasn’t so bad after all.’ Then, you just walk them back to the barn and they realize they didn’t have to go fast.”
The problem, Leach points out, is that people are always trying to slow that type of horse down before the animals learn that they can go fast. Once they learn going fast won’t get them anyplace, they have a change of attitude. But, most trainers don’t have the luxury of vast open spaces to let a colt run, so what are the options?

Pressure Point vs. Release
Even when saddling a colt for the first time, Leach lets his babies travel when that is their intention. Because he wants to “keep the life in their feet,” the trainer won’t hobble, tie or restrict their movement.
“I let them stand there, if they want to stand there,” Leach says. “If I go to throw that saddle on them and they want to leave, I just go with them until they stop moving. Then I release, I back off and retreat. Pretty soon, you can throw that saddle right at them and they’re just going to be like, ‘No big deal. I know I can leave.’ They aren’t scared because they know they can go someplace if they have to.”
Leach’s basic theory is relatively simple. Make whatever is bothering a horse more attractive than his alternative choice of running away from the problem. For example, if a horse is jogging around an arena and veers away from a gate on the end, the horse has made the gate his “pressure point.” His release is moving away from the gate to the opposite end of the arena.
Leach allows that horse to escape to the far side of the arena and then works him hard and fast in circles and maybe does some rollbacks off the fence. He then returns to the gate, where he lets the horse stand quietly and regroup. Pretty soon, he has turned that pressure point into the “release,” a place the horse feels comfortable and relaxed.
“It is exactly the same thing working a cow,” Leach says. “If I go up to that cow and say ‘whoa’ and try to stop that horse from going by the cow, I’ve made that cow the pressure point. The horse is thinking, ‘This cow isn’t a good place to be.’ If the cow stops and the horse doesn’t, I’m going to take him beyond the cow and work his butt off. When I come back to the cow and show him where he needs to be, let him stand where he should be on that cow, he finds a release from the pressure he just experienced away from that cow.
“It doesn’t take long for the horse to figure out that the cow is his best friend. And the more you take the horse away from that cow, the more cowy he’s going to get, the more he’ll want to be on that cow.”
Leach can apply his pressure-and-release theory to anything he does with a horse. A horse, he reminds, always remembers the last thing we did with him. If a rider schools a horse in a turnaround by spinning around and around, drilling him into the ground, then jumps off and leads him back to the barn, that horse is going to remember being drilled hard and pretty much feel “his job sucks,” Leach points out.
When teaching a hot horse the turnaround, Leach again uses his pressure and release theory. He gets the horse loping around, drives the hip up under it, and then directs the horse into tighter and tighter circles. As the horse gets to the center, it is ultimately turning around the hindquarters in a basic turnaround. But once the horse takes two or three steps in the spin, Leach lets him stop and just stand there.
“That is their reward,” Leach points out, “just sitting quiet. Pretty soon, that horse will crave that turnaround because there is relief. The biggest thing you can do to give a horse relief is don’t do anything. You can run him around and ask him to do something, and when he’s done it right, just let him sit, leave him alone. He’s got to figure out that the last thing he did, what gave him that relief, was the right thing.”

It’s Show Time
Going faster during home-schooling sessions prepares Leach’s horses for the show pen. Having a solid foundation and teaching a hot horse to think, rather than react, is also part of his preparation. Teaching horses to drop their head and relax when he bumps quietly with his legs is somewhat an exercise in relaxation. He can steal a few seconds in a pattern–say between a stop and a turnaround–to give his horse the cue to relax and think.
“The whole foundation of teaching that horse to think, rather than to react, is going to help him [in the show pen] more than anything,” Leach reminds. “In between every little thing you do, you have to give the horse a second to think–at home or showing. But you have to let them soak, give them time to think.”
When Leach is getting ready to show, he walks his horse in a lot of little circles, with the horse following its nose. He wants his horse’s hind feet in the same tracks as the front feet, proving the hips and shoulders are in alignment. That exercise is repeated, with release breaks between, at the trot and lope.
Leach won the National Reined Cow Horse Association 2007 Snaffle Bit Futurity Limited Open Championship on his mare Pep N Coda Lena. The sorrel is a prime example of a hotter-bred horse.
“She was real busy in Reno,” Leach remembers. “She wanted to be moving her feet all the time, and didn’t want to stand and wait. I just let her walk and trot around. I drove her around there and made her move her feet and I got control of her feet. I put her energy in my direction.
“If your horse won’t stand, the worse thing you can do is try and hold them in one place. All the horse is learning to do is pull on your hands and learning to be totally out of sync with what you’re wanting to do. Keep them moving, like I did my mare in Reno. By the end of the week, I’d come in there and drop my hand down on her and she was just, ‘Phew.’ She was relaxed. She knows that she can go somewhere, but it’s under my terms.”
Bio:
Rob Leach, 28, is an experienced horseman in spite of being “lightly shown.” He grew up in Northwestern Territory, Australia, with the nearest neighbor five hours away. Quitting school at 15, he went to work cowboying, and by the age of 19 was running cow camps and starting colts on ranches as large as 2 million acres.
John Quintana, an American and former World Champion bull rider with ranching enterprises in Australia, hired Leach to work on one of his stations. Little did he know Rob would become his son-in-law, the tall Aussie now married to Quintana’s daughter, Lee, for five years.
Although Leach had heard of the Snaffle Bit Futurity, Quintana’s cow horse knowledge jump-started him to a cow horse career in the United States.
Four years ago in January, Leach got his first look at skyscrapers and rush-hour traffic when he came to the U.S. The first stop was Stephenville, Texas, to watch the World’s Greatest Horseman contest. He worked for Martin Black starting colts, which eventually led to a job with Cathy Twisselman at the Madonna Ranch in Central California. He has also worked with Ed Robertson and Jake Gorrell.
In his Snaffle Bit debut, Leach won the National Reined Cow Horse Association 2007 Snaffle Bit Futurity Limited Open Championship on his mare Pep N Coda Lena. His lifetime Equi-Stat earnings, all won during 2007, are approaching $15,000.
Leach now trains out of Whitney’s Wild Oak Ranch in Exeter, California. His wife is an executive with TVHorseSource.com.