Student program
The Irish Horsemanship student program is run in conjunction with Silversand Horsemanship, Australia. Steve Halfpenny of Silversand is an incredible teacher & horseman, and comes over to Ireland each summer for clinics.
Foundation skills 1: Complete the 10 basic tasks detailed here. Video them, and send the videos to Steve Halfpenny to review through the Silversand website. Costs from $20 per month AUD, which also allows you access to Steve’s online lessons to help you learn.
Foundation skills 2: Complete another 10 basic tasks detailed here. Video them, and send the videos to Steve Halfpenny to review through the Silversand website which also allows you access to Steve’s online lessons to help you learn.
Foundation skills 3: Complete another 15 basic tasks detailed here. Video them, and send the videos to Steve Halfpenny to review through the Silversand website which also allows you access to Steve’s online lessons to help you learn.
For more information please visit Steve’s website,
or continue reading below for more details on what the skills are about.
Silversand Horsemanship Overview
The Silversand Horsemanship Programme is designed to teach the principles of good Horsemanship to people who desire to work in a way that is more fitting to our horse’s point of view.
It takes into account the horse’s natural way of dealing with new situations and places and works on the supposition that he is always trying his best to deal with what is being presented to him. It is also the awareness that some things appear to the horse to be of a life threatening nature although this is not always apparent to us. In fact the hardest thing for us as humans to do is to be able to see things from our horse’s perspective. If we are unable to do this we will never truly get to the point where we can work together with the unity that comes from being totally tuned into each other.
The programme is divided into two parts at present, Foundation skills and Advancing skills . Foundation skills is further divided into three parts to help break things down into progressive steps. The Foundation skills are designed to teach you how a horse thinks and learns, and has an emphasis on safety and control. There is a three DVD set available to help you with these skills.
The Advancing skills take on the concepts learned in the Foundation skills and move into more accurate patterns and body suppling exercises. In this part you will learn how to control your horse accurately in all sorts of different environments at high energy levels (speeds) while keeping your horse confident. At the end of this section you should have the knowledge to safely and confidently ride your horse anywhere. The Advancing skills are for people with serious goals and will include advanced gymnastic exercises and collected lateral work.This is an area that we will develop in conjunction with Philip Nye who will be my mentor. The whole programme is designed to help both horse and human develop their confidence progressively and gives the horse the opportunity to respond to our cues without fear or resistance.
The purpose of the programme is to teach you skills – it is not designed to be a test. To this end our horse’s needs and our own principles become more important than goals. They need to be confident about us as leaders. We never wish them to be frightened of what we are asking as this will result in a loss of confidence and ultimately hinder the softness and unity we are hoping to achieve.
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The Aims of the Programme
Horses have evolved over millions of years to survive in an environment where they depend on having highly developed survival instincts. These instincts were essential if horses were to avoid being the meal of one of many predators. Even though horses that we generally deal with today have been domesticated for generations, this survival instinct is still very strong and when aroused the horse’s behaviour can change in a fraction of a second in order to save its life from a perceived threat. I say perceived threat because we may see absolutely nothing that could be of any danger to our horse, but our horse may have a totally different view of the situation.
The main aim of the Silversand Horsemanship Programme is to provide you with a system that can enable your horse to perform confidently with responsive yields at higher and higher energy levels (speeds).
The initial aim is to teach you some good habits that if practised enough become automatic, just the same way as you would drive your car. Once you have been driving for a while you do not consciously have to think about every gear change or every adjustment of the steering wheel.
To achieve the aim, we need to understand the following:
• The importance of a confident horse
• The importance of responsive yields on a confident horse
• The importance of accurate patterns with responsive yields on a confident horse
This is a simple formula that, once understood, can help you attain your goals with your horse. Successful use of the model requires us to have a clear understanding of the above statements.
The confident horse has a certain look about it. Usually it will look relaxed, if at a halt it may cock a leg, have a soft look about its eyes, its head will probably be not too much higher than its withers. Most of you will already know this look very well and you will also recognise that an unconfident horse will probably show the opposite of these postures.
The responsive yield can be defined as when your horse confidently moves away from a feel applied to it – either by a rein, leg or some other tool that you may use to apply the cue – in soft relaxed manner. That was a very short definition for a term that is often misunderstood, even amongst people who have been practising Horsemanship for a number of years. Imagine you are with someone you really trust and are really relaxed with; it is someone you would be happy to help and would be honoured if there was something that you could do for them. How much effort would they need to use to ask you to do something for them? Would you get irritated and defensive if they asked something of you? Would your body tense up and brace against the thought of some pressure that was being applied to you (whether mental or physical)? I think you would be happy to help and it would take only a suggestion from someone like this and you would respond without any tension or resistance. This is how I feel a horse needs to respond before we could class the response as a yield. I think it would take a whole book to really cover this one subject but I hope this is a good enough explanation for now.
An accurate pattern could be anything from a circle, figure eight, serpentine, or cloverleaf right up to a reining pattern or a dressage test as long as it is done with responsive yields on a confident horse. The main thing here is that your horse puts his feet exactly where you want them as accurately as you can place your own feet.
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The Silversand Model
Imagine that you have a horse that is fine when he is at home in his field with other horses close by. He will allow you to handle him and even ride him around in his field. However if you take him outside this familiar area he becomes very upset and if you push him he may rear or bolt back to his field. You may not have this exact situation at home but if you have been around horses for any length of time I think you will know someone with a similar problem.
We can now apply the model illustrated below to analyse what is happening to the horse in the above scenario.
KNOWN TO BE SAFE is a place where your horse believes everything is OK and nothing is going to hurt (kill) him. This place for the horse we chose in our story would be in the horse’s field with other horses around.
THE NOT SO SURE is where your horse is starting to lose confidence. For the horse in our story it could be when he started to move away from his yard or when you added something to his yard that he had not seen before, or moved some horses away from a nearby yard.
THE UNSAFE (life threatening) is where the horse is put in a situation where he believes his life is in danger. For the horse in our story it would have occurred when he was moved so far away from his yard and other horses that his confidence was reduced to the point where he believed his life depended on returning to where he felt safe. To achieve this he may have done anything he thought necessary as he believed his life was being threatened. For example he may have reared up and fallen over backwards resulting in injury to both himself and his handler in the process.
Regardless of how he returns to his yard or how much injury has been inflicted, his successful return to Known to be Safe reinforces that behaviour. His perception would be that the behaviour saved his life, far better than dying, which is probably what he believed was going to happen to him.
The difficult thing for us to do is to see things from our horse’s perspective. They do not have the reasoning power that we have and therefore may act in a way that could totally frustrate, frighten and even hurt us if they are put into a situation that they do not feel able to cope with (survive). If we left this horse in his yard he would not have a problem and would be happy to live his life there if he could. Chances are, that if we left him there for months or even years nothing would change and he would be unable to become any braver without a specific plan of action.
Think of an area that your horse has a confidence problem with. How does it relate to the above scenario? What behaviours does he use to get back to his Known-To-Be-Safe area?
If we look at the diagram above, we will substitute the small circle in the middle, Known To Be Safe, with the horse’s yard or a place where your horse is confident. The next circle, the Not Too Sure, is an area around his yard where he is less confident but is still under control. Then we will have an area further away, The Unsafe, which is the area outside the second circle (where you would lose control).
The application of this model is central to the Silversand Horsemanship Programme helps us to understand and know more about how our horse thinks and learns. It was designed and used by Tasmanian Natural Horseman Philip Nye. Whilst the model remains the intellectual property of Philip, he has kindly given us permission to use it in our courses and in our teaching in general.
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Foundation Skills 1
These skills are designed to teach you to teach your horse how to become a confident, soft, riding horse. In the Foundation Skills 1 programme you will learn some basic ground skills from catching your horse and preparing it mentally to be ridden up to basic riding skills with safety being the main consideration for both horse and rider. We will take care not to miss any areas where our horse may require our help. In Foundation Skills 1, I would like you to pay particular attention to the yielding the horse’s hindquarters both on the ground and in the saddle. The reason being that if your horse does take fright and tries to run off you may find that pulling on two reins is not effective. However if you have practised bending to a stop until it is solid in your mind as well as in your horse’s mind then it could well save your life one day if something unexpected scares your horse. Horses can provide us with a great deal of pleasure if we handle them with the respect they deserve. However please do not take any unnecessary risks as only you can take responsibility for your own safety around horses, and the best way to stay safe is to understand their great need for self preservation. If you have not done so already
Online: Show that you can catch your horse safely in a small yard
Online: Show that you can rub your horse all over including handling his legs to prepare for the farrier
Online: Show that your horse can follow a feel in all directions, including lateral flexion
Online: Show that your horse can follow a suggestion in all directions
Online: Be able to back your horse a few steps out of your space using the 4 metre line
Riding (using one rein):
Show that your horse can stand still untied while you politely saddle him
Mount from both sides without your horse moving
Show that your horse can follow a feel in all directions including moving the hindquarters 180 degrees to the right and left
At the trot show changes of direction
Show that you are able to bend your horse to a stop.
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Foundation Skills 2
Foundation Skills 2 builds on the skills that you learned in the Foundation Skills 1. If you have not yet mastered these skills you will have great difficulty understanding these next ten skills as they develop the “building blocks” (first ten skills) that are shown above. By now you and your horse should be confident about the skills that you have already learned and you will hopefully have understood how horses learn.
One of the important things to mention here is to be able to recognise the smallest try in your horse. If we have done a good job of preparing our horse in the last section (Foundation 1), there is a good chance that he will understand what we want and he will hopefully try to work out what we want and move in this direction. If he does not understand he may try lots of things in an attempt to gain comfort. This is where we need to have good timing and not stop while he is doing something that is undesirable. Then stop instantly when he makes any move in the right direction. We will need to remember the lessons we have already learned about giving him time to think and repeat these skills until he is confident about what we are doing.
The skills you are going to work on in this section will be focussing mainly on confidence and yields.
Online
Ask your horse to go on a circle to the right and left
Cause your horse to move from the circle into a sideways movement
Cause your horse to move sideways both right and left without using the fence for guidance
Cause your horse to squeeze between you and the fence to the right and left
Load your horse into a trailer while you remain outside
Riding (using one rein)
Bend your horse, yield the hindquarters and move the front end of the horse through
Ride your horse from the walk to the trot and back down again
At the lope (slow canter), show that you can yield your horse down to a stop
Back your horse a few steps
Yield your horse sideways a few steps
Skills Sheet – Foundation Skills 3
The third part of the Foundation Skills programme builds on parts 1 and 2 above.
Liberty
Yield your horse’s
• hindquarters
• forequarters
• cause your horse to backup
Ask your horse to follow your elbow as you walk once around the round yard or pen
Ask your horse to follow a feel by asking him to trot a figure 8 from the muzzle
Online
Ask your horse to follow a suggestion, cause him to move through a 90 degree maze
Cause your horse to
• follow a feel over a 2 foot jump
• follow a suggestion over a 2 foot jump
Riding (using two reins)
Cause your horse to back up 5 metres
Demonstrate transitions up and down at the
a) walk
b) Jog (slow trot)
c) Lope (slow canter)
Ask your horse to face up to a frightening stimulus
Cause your horse to go sideways over a pole
Demonstrate an emergency dismount from a lope
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The Advancing Programme
The Advancing Programme is designed to consolidate the skills you have learned in the Foundation Programme. You will build on this to make sure that your horse has impulsion (is mentally and emotionally balanced), introduce the bridle and work towards having every part of your horse soft with much more accurate placement of the feet, without resistance, at all speeds.
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What is the next step?
If you are interested in what you have read so far about the Silversand Horsemanship programme you may like to find out more and see how you could apply this philosophy and learn new techniques to help build your relationship with your horse.
Email Steve and Irena at steve@silversand.com.au
Talk to one of the Silversand associates, their details and phone numbers are given in full under Silversand team at www.silversand.com.au
Purchase the Silversand Programme online in their web shop at www.silversand.com.au
Book onto a clinic with Steve in Ireland. Visit our events page to see more details.
Get a lesson with an Irish Horsemanship trainer.
