What your horse needs to know

If she doesn't know how to calmly enter and exit a trailer—and in the dark, not just in the daylight—then you need to fix that situation right now. This fundamental skill could quite literally save your horse's life. The time for her to learn to load in a trailer is not at eleven p.m. when she's having a bad choke and your mobile vet wants to send her to the clinic, and the horse transport you've hired shows up and the trailer won't fit in your driveway so you have to load her from the shoulder of a busy road.

She needs to be able to stand quietly, tied, for longer than ten or fifteen minutes. This is also an easy thing to practice at home. If your horse has issues with pulling back, breaking halters, pawing and striking, and other bad behavior when tied, you might seriously consider consulting a trainer—while these seem like mostly nuisance behaviors that you can usually work around, they're all things that can also be very unsafe for the horse as well as anyone trying to work with the horse.

Again, this perhaps seems like a no-brainer. Wrong. I'm always stunned when I get a call to trim or shoe a horse who promptly tries to either bolt, jerk feet away from me, or worst of all wants to kick me repeatedly. You can avoid this. It takes time, effort, and work. If you're not picking your horses feet up, handling them, tapping on them, flexing and maneuvering them, you're doing a disservice to your horse as well as to anyone you're asking to work with that horse's feet. And the time for her to learn to let you handle her feet is not after she's stepped on that roofing nail and needs x-rays.

Horses have odd ticklish places just like people do. If you're not regularly handling your horse's muzzle, lips, ears, sheath, udder, tail, flanks—and all the other odd places you don't typically handle when you're saddling or grooming—you might be surprised at your horse's reaction when you attempt to do so. If you'll desensitize your horse ahead of time, you'll save your vet (or farrier) a world of grief when it becomes unexpectedly important.

It's not difficult to school your horse to accept having her legs and hooves hosed, and from there, it's an easy step to accustom her to having her body hosed. If fact, in the summer after a workout, she might well come to appreciate when you take the hose to her before turn-out, rinsing the sweat from her coat. Then on spring when she gets caught in a chunk of wire you had no idea was lurking under the blackberry bushes on the far end of your pasture, and you have to hose the caked mud and dried blood from where she's lacerated her legs? It's going to go much more easily for both of you.

You don't have to show-clip or body clip. Heck, I don't do either of those things. But if a laceration is bad enough to require stitching, or if your colicking horse requires an IV catheter, she's going to need to tolerate clipping the affected area. In those circumstances, she under plenty of stress, so if she's already used to the noise and buzzy sensation of clippers, that's one less stressor for her to deal with.