My horse lays down...

As you probably know if you follow my Instagram page (if not, go check it out!), today I spent almost 6-7  hours at the stables as there arrived 27 new ponies for the show that will be going on from  Friday and we had to test them and see if they were calm and quiet enough for children between 11-14 years old. I rode this guy, and he was quite good tough I tried to work on directing him correctly as, like lots of ponies do, he was always trying to move to the centre of the field. Tough all of a sudden he laid down and unfortunately I wasn't able to keep him enough fastly, so I got my feet off the stirrups and moved away. Of course I should have reacted differently, but I didn't have the time for thinking, anyway next time this happens, I'll be much more ready. Anyway I just searched a bit on the internet in order to understand why they do this and I found out that there can be so many reasons: first of all it can be the consequence of health problems, so if the horse does this frequently, the vet maybe is what he needs. If this is not the cause, it might depend from an 'extreme relaxing' of both the horse and the rider, who becomes a ghost on the saddle, so the advice might be to keep a good pace even if we're just walking the horse quietly. If this happens frequently it may be a bad habit that needs to be faced ad resolved. It can also be caused by a bad positioning/ too tightly closing or of the girth, and so the horse tries to solve this annoying problem in its own way. Another possibility is that the horse doesn't like to feel sweaty and wants to dry up itself (tough this relates to the bad habits-area). This is a frequent problem, that has to be understood and solved. I remember when I was four and I was riding a lovely pony who laid down while I was riding him...  I didn't get injured and so the horse, but I got really scared as I couldn't understand why he had done so, and I didn't want to get back on the saddle. So I hope this article was useful to you guys and let me know if you have any need for advices, or maybe you have ideas for new articles! These days I'm full of work Sto arrivando! he stables so I'm not actually so active on socials and so on, but I'll answer you suddenly! BB Saba