Horse Training in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is a small island with a lot of horses on it, and a fair number of them were never given a proper start. They get handled when somebody has time, they learn what they can get away with, and by the time an owner writes to me the problem has a name: he drags me around, he will not stand, he has been sitting in a field for two years. There is no closed season here, so there is no winter to wait out. The work can start whenever you are ready to load him.

What the four weeks are

$500 for 16 sessions over four weeks. Stable and feed are separate. Your horse is worked four days a week for four weeks. Ground work comes first, then manners, then listening, then riding under saddle, and each stage waits until the one before it is honest rather than tolerated. You get a progress video every week, so you are watching the change instead of taking my word for it. The full breakdown, including which problem starts at which step, is on the horse training page.

Any breed and any background. Young horses that have never been started, horses coming back after a long time off, horses that push through you on the rope, buck, will not stand for the saddle, throw their head away from your hands, or ignore you the moment the rope comes off.

How far you are from the stable

Everything happens at Hacienda Los Ponce in Isabela. Your horse lives here for the month, which makes the distance from your place to that gate the one practical thing worth checking before you commit. Most of the northwest is inside 90 minutes towing. Quebradillas is just east of us. The rest of the island is further, and still closer than it looks on a map.

Getting the horse here, and home again

You can bring him yourself, or I can collect him and deliver him back at the end. I haul island-wide, up to three horses at a time, and transport is quoted separately from the 500 dollar program rather than folded into it. Tell me where the horse is, where he is going and roughly when, and the price comes back within 24 hours. If he is flying into Puerto Rico rather than already standing on it, I take the handover at the cargo building myself, which is what airport horse transport covers.

The island breed, and what training it involves

A lot of the horses that come through here are Puerto Rican Paso Finos, and the gait is not something anybody teaches them. It is a natural four-beat lateral gait, one hoof striking at a time, with almost no vertical movement, and a foal has it before anyone puts a hand on him. Paso corto is the working speed, paso largo covers ground about as fast as a canter, and classic fino is the collected show version. What a Paso Fino needs from training is the same as what a quarter horse needs: brakes, manners, patience with the girth and a handler he actually listens to. You can read the history of the breed if that is the horse you own, or the history of the American Paint Horse if yours is one of those instead. Two of the horses in this herd are Paints, and the breed has five hundred years on this side of the Atlantic behind it.

Training by town

Isabela is home. The other four are the places horses most often come from, and each page says what the drive means for dropping off and for coming to see the work.

Not on that list? I take horses from anywhere on the island. Say where you are and I will tell you what the haul looks like.