Neil Davies 
I’ve seen many of the big name trainers working with horses and I don’t agree with much of what they do or what they say. I don’t agree with harassing horses with ropes and flags or letting horses buck with the saddle or roping their legs or chasing them around until they’re sweating and distressed. … Read more
When your horse is overfed and fresh and feeling frisky, lungeing him before you ride will help to get the excess energy out of his system. However, if your horse shies, rears, kicks up or uses other unwanted behaviour when you ride him, there’s absolutely no point getting off and chasing him from the ground. … Read more
Walk into any saddlery and you’ll see many different types of bits. There are hundreds of different types of snaffle bits – all shapes and sizes, smooth metal, rough metal, twisted wire etc etc. There are hundreds of different types of curb bits – short shanks, long shanks, spoons in the horse’s mouth, nose pieces … Read more
Some trainers claim they can saddle and ride every young horse in half an hour. They often time themselves and make a big deal of how quickly the horse was ridden. This makes no sense. Starting a horse under saddle isn’t a race. There’s no prize for how quickly you can ride a young horse. … Read more
People often describe how their horse feels when they’re riding. Some say their horse is soft in the mouth and light and supple. Some say their horse is stiff and hard and they need to flex him to one side to soften his neck and poll. Others say their horse is hard in the mouth … Read more
In every group of horses, there’s always some form of pecking order. When you feed a mob of horses in the paddock, there’s always one horse who will chase the others away so he can eat more. If you take this boss horse away, another will take his place. In the wild, a stallion keeps … Read more
Your timing is critical in every aspect of horse training. If you’re even a few seconds early or late with your timing, your horse won’t understand what you want and he won’t respond as you think he should. Horses learn only from the immediate result they get. You must correct your horse by making things … Read more
Lots of horse owners are obsessed with the idea of tying young horses up. One of the first things they do is tie their foals to a post. When the foal pulls and fights, people often say ‘It’s okay, leave him and let him pull. He’ll work it out for himself’. This makes no sense. … Read more
NEIL’S HORSE TRAINING HISTORY By Christine Davies I’ve known Neil since he was twenty and shared his love of horses for all those years. While I rode my nicely trained (by Neil) horse five or six days each week, Neil rode at least eight or nine ‘outside’ horses that came to our stables for training … Read more
When I was about 14, people often sent ponies to us to be ‘broken in’. I got the job done on weekends and after school, with my father’s help. Looking back, we took a pretty crude approach. For the first few days, we put the girth and mouthing gear on and left the pony in … Read more