LEE SMITH Clinic

By Shelly Finck

Seeing that it's 8 pm and still 90 degrees, I'll defer my horsemanship study to renewing the clinic while in my air conditioned house!!

Lee started the clinic with everyone without horses outside the arena. Introductions were made and she made a point of asking everyone their goals for their horsemanship and why it brought them there. The first heading on Lee's web page is "Performance Through Preparation." Too many people think that natural doesn't belong in performance, and Lee begs to differ. All our adventures with horses need preparation and understanding, from trail riding, to the upper levels of dressage. The most important thing of that beginning talk was about firmness. Meeting the horse with the right amount of firmness. She walked around and greeted each rider and auditor with a handshake and wanted each of us to meet her firmness. Feel of, for and together. We need to do this with our horses. Firmness has a place with horses, they're a lot stronger and bigger than most of us. But, we must become aware of how much firmness to use. She used varying levels of firmness in her handshake with different people and would coach them through "firmer, firmer'', "that's a little firm for me", "meet the firmness" were among her comments. What's firm for one horse is excessive for another. She talked about the importance of putting the horses in a learning frame of mind. Allowing our horses to feel confidence in what they're doing and not criticizing them. This is where the story of the little boy learning to make his bed explains things nicely.

We then gathered our horses and moved to the arena for the morning session of ground work. Lee uses a simple lariat for ground work. She gave everyone a little tutorial on how to coil a rope and set us to work. A used team roper's rope that you can pick up at a feed store is just fine. The stiffness and thin diameter encourages horses not to lean on it, and since it can bite human's hands, it teaches people not to lean on it too much either, plus it's really inexpensive. With the lariat around the horse's neck she teaches lateral and vertical flexion, circling or Iongeing, and sideways tasks. The neat part is, with the calmness that Lee's techniques focus on, no one had to struggle with coiling ropes rapidly. Very few horses moved any faster than a walk or trot at first allowing the people time to get comfortable with the coils. The main ingredient in all the ground work is focusing on the try and softness in the horse. If you can get the horse's feet to move, but there's a brace anywhere in the body, jaw, neck, loins, it's not right. Ask for softness first. Her focus on asking for the try and what is a try is unbelievable. I'll go into depth on how she teaches sideways to give you all a better idea.

She asked for a horse that had never been asked to do sideways or lateral work. This horse was pretty tight and Lee had already spent some time teaching the horse to free up it's mind and feet for circle work. She started by standing with her back kind of to the fence, angled so that she was facing the horse's shoulder and the horse's nose toward the fence. She gave a running commentary on what she was asking the horse to do and also what she felt was going through the horse's mind. With the coils in her left hand, she started feeding the lariat out towards the horse in a slight driving motion with her right hand. No waving, no wiggling, just sticking her arm out with the rope in her hand and feeding it out to get the horse to leave. The horse got the idea, turned it's body parallel to the fence and started walking away.That was a try, it didn't look anything like sideways, but the first thing was to get the horse to leave. The horse stopped a little ways out, Lee let him sit and soak for a moment, comfort. Lee reeled the horse back in and gave it a pet between the eyes. If you can get a mental image of someone playing a fish into shore, it might give you a pretty good idea of how this worked. She offered for the horse to leave again. Horse leaves again, sooner than last time, Lee gives it a little line, lets him stop and think, then softly asks him in again. Pet between the eyes, "you're gonna make it" Lee says. After a couple of times at this, she would motion with the coils in the other hand in an attempt to get the horse to take it's hindquarter a little straighter. Not completely straight, just step under a little bit and get a little closer to perpendicular to the fence "Go ahead, do your job" she'd say. Out the horse would go, if it stalled, got confused, if it's ear flicked back towards Lee instead of the way it was supposed to be going, she's softly ask him back in. The idea she was trying to convey was that comfort was out at the end of the line, OR with her, As long as the horse's ear was cocked the way he was supposed to go, she wouldn't interfere and just feed out the coils.

Gradually she's ask for more straightness by sending a wave down the rope that would touch whatever wasn't moving fast enough. She'd say "go over there", feed out some rope towards the head, "take that with you" and send a wave toward the hindquarter. The horse was going farther out, more perpendicular to the fence every time. Every time the horse went out, he was allowed to soak out and away, however far out he felt comfortable, then back in for a pet between the eyes and a comfortable place with the human. Each time she'd encourage him to go a little farther and with a little more straightness.

She wasn't concerned about speed. At one point the horse was soaking about 20 ft. out and decided to have a nibble of grass, here's the firmness. Lee sent a slight wave down the rope to encourage the horse to lift it's head. Nothing large, no flailing arms or swinging ropes, just a curl that ran down the rope and bump the horses nose and said "do your job, go over there". Of course there was a lot of licking and chewing going on. I wish I had kept track of how many times that horse dropped it's head and licked it's lips, it was amazing!! Eventually the horse was about 40 ft. down the fence, standing completely perpendicular to the fence with a soft eye and a Iow head, licking it's lips. "You made it!" Now, this sounds like it took half the morning, but it was only about 15 minutes or so. Every time the horse left, it left with more energy and a look to it's body like it knew where it was going and that it was doing the right thing. There was no swinging, swatting, sweating, or stiffness. Lee had set the horse in a learning frame of mind.

Now. I relate this in detail, not to dwell on the detail and Lee's individual techniques, but to focus on the try. There have been some posts about recognizing the try lately and I thought this might give people some things to think about. All of the other ground work was in the same vein. Ask for the slightest bit of a try. If the horse doesn't understand, he does'nt need to be forced into it. Lee called this the "teeter". Setting it up to wait and encouraging the horse just enough that the teeter tips the other way. We can easily come up from the end of the teeter and give the end a shove and get the horse to do what we want, but, if we set it up to wait and allow the horse to tip the teeter over and find the answer, the horse comes out the winner. He's found the release, the comfort and more than anything, will feel like trying again. He wasn't coaxed, cajoled, or forced into anything, he was allowed to find his way through it. Eventually, once we're sure the horse understands what's being asked, we can start asking for faster or more complicated responses.

Well, I got long winded again, and I've only briefly covered the first morning of the clinic!! Again, don't focus on the details or the techniques, it's the response from the horse that Lee's trying to get us to see. I also would encourage you to find out when she's going to be in your area so that you can take a look yourself or better yet participate. I've only spent a few days with the lady and consider myself no expert on what she's offering. I just want to encourage people to go have a look and ask questions. That's the best thing she did for me. I'm encouraged to look at what all the natural horsemen have to offer.

Natural Bound! Shelly