10/12/2025
I bought a horse named Moonlight to train as a polo prospect. In a practice game early in her training another player took a back shot where they hit a ball backward while riding forward. I was riding beside that player's horse and a tad behind when he took his back shot, which is not legal if the player's mallet swing might hit a nearby horse as Moonlight and I were that close.
That player's mallet followed through from his shot hit Moonlight in the teeth. At a gallop she managed to do a slight rear up from the pain of the hit. She never played polo well again. That one incident soured her on the game.
Experienced horse trainers know that setbacks in training can be devastating. My mistake with Moonlight was trusting that player to follow the rules and not hit her. While she ended up being a top equine therapy horse, my polo goal for her ended at a significant loss to me.
Setbacks in training can be disastrous. Even small mistakes can take weeks to fix, and a potential training mistake is never obvious until it happens unless you have a lot of experience. The only way I know to avoid training mistakes is to be very vigilant about the potential of every method and circumstance in training that could go wrong and to stack the deck so as to avoid possible bad outcomes.
Training mistakes usually come from too much emphasis on one specific outcome. A trainer might get impatient for an outcome or otherwise push the process too fast without regard for the possible pitfalls in a training sequence. One common pitfall is not seeing that the prospect is not ready for what the trainer wants the horse to learn.
Short term inpatient training mistakes include working a horse beyond their attention span in a session. Long term mistakes are usually something like "I have to get this horse ready for a show next month." In either case, the trainer forces a horse into a learning circumstance that the horse is not ready for. The result is always the same, more training time is required to undo the mistake.
Slow, deliberate, well planned training is always faster than impatient, gotta get an outcome training.
Horse trainers like Andreas Helgstrand (left image from the video that got him FEI suspended for tying a horse's head down to its chest for a long period & more) and Andrew McConnon who forced very narrow training outcomes for specific competition. Horses trained in rushed ways turn into sad, one trick ponies ruined for any future comfortable life as a horse.
The right image shows what happens when a horse is pushed past their attention span. Training horses is like the old saying, "Life is a journey, not a destination". We want outcomes but outcomes cannot be the singular focus of the training.
