Crazy for Chickens!
Free Ranging
Yes, that is good advice.With most horses, it's a pattern that an owner created, whether they were aware of it or not - like how the gate seems to have a magnetic attraction for horses working in a ring.The horse knows that he goes out the gate when the lesson is over, so he constantly tries to go to the gate so the lesson will be over. If the rider makes a point of ending the lesson away from the gate, the horse comes to realize that being at the gate is not connected to the lesson being over (of course, if the rider consistently ends the lesson at the opposite end from the gate, the horse may start trying to go to that spot!)
We have a horse that was dreadfully barn sour when my daughter first started riding her - she'd fight you every step away from the barn, and duck out and bolt back to the gate near the barn at any opportunity. We started picking random places in the pasture to get off and untack her. If the horse managed to run back to the gate, even if my daughter really had intended to get off soon, she did a lot more riding until the horse quit trying to stick her nose to the gate. She's a smart horse; it didn't take her long to figure out that getting to the gate did not mean she was done, far from it, it meant she was going to do more work. Because she never knew when or where we were going to call it quits, she became much more willing to go anywhere, in case that might happen to be "the" spot.
