Jazz The One Eyed Horse - Overcoming Horse Training Challenges

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Her Story

Jazz is a registered 5-year-old mare I got from a KWPN breeder in PEI, Canada at the end of May 2019.

I was visiting the farm to observe their facility and had no intention of coming home with one of their lovely horses. We all know how this story ends, we are equestrians after all!

My hostess was filling me in on all the horses and when she got to Jazz she told me she had been born with only her right eye and that she was for sale.

Remember I said I had no intention of coming home with a horse? Well I didn’t … not right then that is.

A month later I went back for her with the plan that she would be a stunning broodmare for my CWB stallion and we would have some lovely babies.

My friend and I arrived at the farm to pick her up and bring her home. She had never been in a trailer before and she had not been handled much so getting her on the trailer was a terrifying experience for her. The way the breeder loaded her wasn’t the technique I would have used to get her on but it worked and off we went.

She was super for the four and a half-hour drive back home. When we arrived it was past midnight and it was time to get her in the barn. Who knew cement flooring would be such a big deal!

To cut a long story short we got this scared 5-year-old one-eyed mare, who didn’t seem to know much about anything, into the barn and into her new stall for the night.

Terrified Horse

The next day this poor creature was stood in the corner of her stall, she seemed curious but was also scared to be approached and terrified to be haltered. She was spooky on the side of her good eye so when we led her on the correct side – her blind side – she would spook sideways into us. Then on top of that when you were on her left she trembled and jumped to the right when you touched her.

For the next little while, I led her on her right side instead of the left and when I worked on her left side I talked continually or had music playing on my cell phone in my pocket so she always knew where I was.

Over the next few weeks, she settled to the point I could lead her on any side. She was still spooky on her good eye side but after constant handling and some groundwork exercises, she learned where my space was on her blind side and no longer mowed me down trying to get away from things on her good side.

On the first day, I put her in the indoor arena to play, took some photos and realized how stunning this creature really was. Her movement was incredible and over the next few days, my plans for her began to change.

I began to realize I didn’t want her to be just a broodmare, I wanted to train her to be ridden and possibly to compete as a show jumper. I also realized the challenges of training her would be huge in comparison to anything I had done before.

She would take every bit of my brain capacity to analyze what she felt, what made her tick, how being a social herd animal for so long affected her, and how that would reflect on how our training would go.

There were so many things to consider:

She was 5 and had not been handled much. Maybe you would ask why that would be much of a challenge. My answer is that she had been in the herd all her life and although she had some human interaction it wasn’t the same as a horse I had bred who had been handled every day from birth.
She wasn’t an OTTB that had plenty of handling but needed more ground manners and retraining. No, she was none of these. She was a young adult with an established idea of who she was and had most of her social interaction as a herd animal.
She was blind in one eye. There are lots of one-eyed horses competing at high-level competition, but most of these lost their eyes during their lifetime and had usually competed at their sport already. I am sure most of them were handled and trained as youngsters.
She was not desensitized to touch on her blind side. She was terrified of it.
She was a BIG girl so if she wanted to be feral it was going to be interesting for 5’3” me. I was going to have to approach this one from a whole new perspective.
She was scared of everything: blankets, noise, movement, people, hosed water, the farrier, she kicked out, pulled back, blew cross ties, didn’t know how to be led, didn’t want to be caught, constantly reared, turned her back to you in the stall, not out of meanness but because she was scared and wanted to get away.

Yes indeed, this one was going to be a challenge. Every horse I had trained I had a bond with almost immediately. There was a trust and a connection. This was a whole new realm I was going to have to enter. The combination of all the above things made the challenge a big one but I had decided I was going to train this mare, and if one day I got to ride her then I would be pretty proud of myself.

Where was our starting point? A horsemanship halter with a long rope, a ‘carrot stick' (I will explain this one in my free Groundwork Exercises article), and extensive groundwork training. We needed to develop a bond together and groundwork is the way to do this with training any horse.

Welcome to my journey with Jazz, we have already traveled some distance together since that first day and I will be updating you on in other blogs.

Remember I said I got her at the end of May? Here she is in October. Sign up for my free groundwork exercises and follow the blogs about her to find out how we got from my terrified, hard to handle mare, to this lovely under saddle horse!

I will be blogging about her future progress regularly and posting photos and videos. I hope you enjoy the amazing story we have started together and stay with us on the journey we are going to travel.