On 'Natural Horsemanship'
k s swigart
Kathy Mayeda said:
> However, it's not the method, it's the implementation of the
> method and the attitudes of the students that can be problematic.
Personally, I disagree. It IS the method. It is very popular in ‘natural horsemanship’ circles (or more accurately circuses because that is really what they are) for its gurus to have ‘competitions’ where they show off how little time it takes for them to get on a completely unstarted horse and be riding it around in a halter and lead-rope within a matter of hours, or even minutes.
This is a parlor trick (one that I used to perform, mind you, which is how I know it’s a parlor trick). The horse is no more broke to ride at the end of such a session than it was at the beginning; however, they are creating the impression not only that it is, but that “you can do this too…” if you just buy my stuff. And they do it because they are trying to sell a short cut, to people who are trying to buy a short cut.
The problem is that few people are natural horsemen, and it is an INNATE talent; it cannot be learned, especially not from a person. The techniques currently being marketed under the brand of ‘natural horsemanship’ can only be learned from a horse—or more accurately from horses, since you cannot learn them if you only work with one horse. If you need to go to a clinic or to rent a video in an attempt to learn ‘natural horsemanship’ techniques, you are wasting your money. It is a futile attempt.
If you are incapable of learning directly from horses, it is because you have no aptitude for that language, and where you need to learn horsemanship is from a riding teacher (i.e. somebody who is good at teaching people, not somebody who is good at teaching horses). And this is why, as Kathy said in her post, “the implementation of the method and the attitudes of the students that can be problematic.”
Very few natural horsemen can teach their techniques to people. These people are good with horses, not with people. Training horses and teaching riding are not the same skill at all, and few people have both, and certainly most “natural horsemen” don’t. They don’t know what they are doing; they just do it by instinct.
As an example, I had a jumping trainer who was completely honest about the fact that she did not have much innate talent with horses at all. She (and I) considered this a positive thing for her abilities to teach jumper riders as learning to ride jumpers was hard for her. She actually had to LEARN it. She was aware of every step she took along the way to becoming a winning Grand Prix jumper rider (fortunately she had the privilege of learning from one of the best, Jimmy Williams). Because of this awareness, she is able to teach it to others.
When you are aware of every step that is required to be able to learn to successfully communicate your desires to a horse, you are at a huge advantage when it comes to teaching other people. Natural horsemen have no idea what they are doing in order to communicate so successfully with horses. So they do fruitless things like sell rope halters and “carrot sticks” and have people run horses around uselessly in round pens as if it were the physical pieces of equipment that makes them successful. However, natural horsemen can successfully communicate with horses using no equipment at all. In fact, that is one of the things that many of them brag about.
If natural horsemen can communicate with a horse using no equipment at all, you KNOW that it isn’t the rope halter or the carrot stick that is making them successful, and you are a fool for buying these tools in a futile attempt to emulate them. However, this does not keep people from doing it, and then making the foolish mistake of thinking they can be successful and take a horse they can’t communicate with (no matter which equipment they have bought and brought along with them) and go out on the trail with it.
In addition to needing a competent riding teacher, people who are not innately natural horsemen (i.e. all the people who are buying videos from and taking clinics from “natural horsemanship” teachers) need to learn from school horses. And, unlike in the past, there are few competent riding teachers and there are few good school horses (and yes I said horseS deliberately). It is impossible to learn competent horsemanship from one horse.* However, the people who are buying (into) these things usually have only one horse that they are trying to “remake” often from a whack-job lunatic that nobody else wanted.
The reason this is mostly a futile attempt is that there are no short cuts. Lynn White mentioned in her post on the topic that the Spanish Riding School would take inexperienced novices to turn into accomplished Riders (I capitalize it because Rider is a title that the Spanish Riding School bestows…after you have been there a while and have earned it). What she doesn’t mention is that these inexperienced novices move in to the School and do nothing other than work with horses, all day, every day. And even then, they spend the first year of “riding” on a horse on a longe line with no stirrups and no reins so they can actually learn to ride without holding on, while somebody else gives direction to the horse. A horse, I might add, that is sufficiently broke that it can ignore the ineptness of what starts out, in essence, as a sack of potatoes on its back. Until they can ride with a completely independent seat, they aren’t even allowed to touch the reins.
Just try teaching riding to an American adult that way. Few American adults have either the time or the patience to learn riding in this way (and why should they, it is their hobby and they have to spend most of their time on their jobs). Besides, they don’t want to be Grand Prix dressage riders, they “just” want to go out on the trail and hack around on a horse, so they think they shouldn’t have to.
In the past, people who could not ride with an independent seat limited themselves to riding broke horses that were willing to ignore the inaccurate communications from their less than competent handlers. Today, ‘natural horsemanship’ is mass marketed to people who have no aptitude for it. However, ‘natural horsemanship’ is also predicated on the underlying premise that horses are observant and respond to the lightest and most subtle cues. To be effective with these methods, a handler MUST have complete body awareness and absolutely impeccable timing as well as the ability to constantly monitor EVERY action that a horse takes and respond immediately and appropriately.
If you can’t do ALL of these things, the methods will fail. People who cannot do all of these things need to get a horse that does not respond to the lightest and most subtle of cues, but rather knows its job and ignores any stupid things its handler is telling it to do (e.g. a school horse or a trail hack).
Just this past month, The Horse magazine had an article about the importance of ground work. One of the things that it said it this article is that people who aren’t completely competent at it should not do ground work with young or green horses, as doing it wrong can ruin a horse for its entire life. One of the things that makes horses so trainable is their memory. If the first things you teach a horse are the wrong things, they will take those things with them for their entire lives. In a horse, a bad lesson is a hard thing to undo, especially if it is an early lesson.
People who are not VERY skilled, should not be giving horses their first lessons (so they shouldn’t work with green horses, at least not without expert supervision), and they certainly should not be trying to “remake” a horse that has already had bad lessons, since that is even harder. And yet, ‘natural horsemanship’ gurus are constantly advocating just that.
However, this is not the only problem with ‘natural horsemanship,’ the other problem is that the underlying premises of “you need to be a member of your horse’s herd” and “you need to interact with your horse the way horses interact with each other” are just plain wrong.
You can’t be a member of your horse’s herd. Herd members live together 24/7. There is no way that any herd animal would assign the role of ‘herd leader’ on a transient (i.e. somebody who comes and goes) which is what every person in a horse’s life is. Your horse doesn’t think you are a member of its herd. Additionally, for it to be a useful horse, you need to be able to take it away from its herd (so it is a good thing that the herd instinct isn’t too well developed in horses either, or we wouldn’t be able to do this).
And interacting with a horse in the way that horses interact with each other is just plain dumb. The way horses deal with each other is to bite each other and kick at each other. When they first meet they squeal and strike at each other. This is NOT the kind of relationship that anybody in their right mind would want to join in on. The first lesson that any horse needs if it is going to be a useful domesticated horse is that people are NOT horses, and that no matter how provoked it is, it MAY NOT bite or kick at people (even ones that it does not know or it does know but has no respect for).
Additionally, there is no point in joining a horse’s herd. We train horses so we can get them to do work for us. Spend as much time as you like watching horses interact with each other, you will never see any of the horses putting another one to work. It just isn’t the nature of their relationship with each other. And you will never see a horse giving another horse a carrot either.
It is, and has been for millennia, the nature of the relationship between humans and horses. Humans put horses to work: riding them, asking them to plow fields, having them carry them into battle… And horses put humans to work: being fed by them, sheltered by them, cared for by them, scratched in places they cannot reach themselves…
THIS is the relationship that a good horseman should foster and develop. It is THIS relationship that has served both humans and horses well for thousands of years (remember, all the horses that had no humans to care for them and had to depend solely upon their herd became extinct).
To deny this unique relationship that horses and humans have with each other is to invite failure. And while ‘natural horsemen’ may say they are acting like a horse (and some of them might even be ignorant enough to believe it), they aren’t. To work successfully with horses, you have to be the HUMAN in the relationship. Because it is THIS that will keep the horse you are riding from bolting or jumping off the side of a cliff just because it saw a deer or a bicycle or because there was another horse ‘acting up.’
To your horse, you ARE a human; there is no avoiding that; no horse is so stupid it doesn’t know that. Being a GOOD human in the relationship is what will keep your horse from behaving badly. Because if you aren’t a good human in the relationship, you will be a bad human in the relationship and the horse will respond accordingly—unless you have one that has been successfully taught by somebody else to ignore its handler when that person asks it to do something wrong and to not behave badly regardless (such horses do exist, and those are the ones that less than expert people should take out on the trail).
Horses thrive on having a good human to have a relationship with. They will leave their herd to be with that transient human that is not a part of their herd. And it is only when you have taught your horse this that it will give its all for you. You don’t want to pander to your horse’s herd instinct any more than you want to pander to its flight instinct or its fight instinct. A good horse would rather be with you than other horses, it would rather not flee, and it would never dream of fighting with you.
Through the millennia horses have been selected for these traits. The story of Muhammed and the foundation Arabian mares has those thirsty horses in the desert turning back from water to answer the call of their humans while all the other horses, that were not used for breeding, ignored the call and went to the water. Whether the story has any basis in fact or not, the existence of the story shows that it has long been recognized that a good horse will abandon its herd and turn back from its very survival to please a person.
It is this aspect of their natures that we should revel in. Because it is this aspect of their natures that works best for both of us.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
:|
* I once attended a “theory session” with Charles de Kunffy (a very accomplished horseman from Hungary) who said that the biggest problem with riders in the US is that they don’t ride enough horses. That you can’t learn effective horsemanship by owning one horse that you work with all the time. This, too, is a recent trend that I believe contributes to the proliferation of badly behaved horses; novices owning horses.
Karen Sullivan
day under direction like the Spanish Riding School Riders, OR take
endless clinics from the current fad trainers is that step you up a
ladder of $$$$$ with very little practical accomplish, or taking years
and years of pony club.
Some of the best and most common-sense AND instinctual riders that
manage to have great relationships with horses, accomplish their
riding goals and have a darn good time are teenage girls in shorts,
with a halter or hackamore.....
....while some riders in their 60's and 70's who have been working at
it all their lives still don't have a clue, can't manage their
horses, and will never make that relaxed, seamless connection that
others achieve by jumping on bareback and heading out into the
world....
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On 11/18/17, k s swigart <kat...@att.net> wrote:
> Kathy Mayeda said:
>
>
>
>> However, it's not the method, it's the implementation of the
>
>> method and the attitudes of the students that can be problematic.
>
>
>
> Personally, I disagree. It IS the method. It is very popular in 'natural
> horsemanship' circles (or more accurately circuses because that is really
> what they are) for its gurus to have 'competitions' where they show off how
> little time it takes for them to get on a completely unstarted horse and be
> riding it around in a halter and lead-rope within a matter of hours, or
> even
> minutes.
>
>
>
> This is a parlor trick (one that I used to perform, mind you, which is how
> I
> know it's a parlor trick). The horse is no more broke to ride at the end of
> such a session than it was at the beginning; however, they are creating the
> to
> people who are trying to buy a short cut.
>
>
>
> The problem is that few people are natural horsemen, and it is an INNATE
> talent; it cannot be learned, especially not from a person. The techniques
> currently being marketed under the brand of 'natural horsemanship' can only
>
>
> THIS is the relationship that a good horseman should foster and develop. It
> is THIS relationship that has served both humans and horses well for
> thousands of years (remember, all the horses that had no humans to care for
> them and had to depend solely upon their herd became extinct).
>
>
>
> To deny this unique relationship that horses and humans have with each
> other
> is to invite failure. And while 'natural horsemen' may say they are acting
> like a horse (and some of them might even be ignorant enough to believe
> it),
> they aren't. To work successfully with horses, you have to be the HUMAN in
> the relationship. Because it is THIS that will keep the horse you are
> riding from bolting or jumping off the side of a cliff just because it saw
> a
> deer or a bicycle or because there was another horse 'acting up.'
>
>
>
> To your horse, you ARE a human; there is no avoiding that; no horse is so
> stupid it doesn't know that. Being a GOOD human in the relationship is what
> will keep your horse from behaving badly. Because if you aren't a good
> human
> in the relationship, you will be a bad human in the relationship and the
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Lynn White
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k s swigart
From: Kathy Mayeda [mailto:klma...@gmail.com]
> I can't argue much with Kat, except that the ones that
> do natural horsemanship are unlikely to be the same people
> with out of control horses out on the trail or an endurance ride.
I completely agree that the people out of control at endurance rides are unlikely to the “the ones that do natural horsemanship.” Horses out of control at endurance rides can be laid almost entirely at the feet of the AERC, which will be the topic of a separate post for which I will change the subject line.
Just as I was careful to change the subject line for my post yesterday on ‘Natural Horsemanship’ (i.e. I was no longer addressing Julie’s question of whether the rise of natural horsemanship contributed to the rise in the number of out of control horses on the trail or at endurance rides. In the post that answered that question I stated that ‘natural horsemanship’ was as much a symptom as it was a cause).
As an aside, I will address whether or not the ones who ‘do natural horsemanship’ are likely to be the same people with out of control horses on the trail. I agree that they are not the only ones out of control out on the trail, but there are a lot of them, because I have encountered many of them, even though I try to avoid such people as much as possible.
Often they are leading the horse down the trail on foot holding onto the lead rope (half of which is wrapped around their hand and/or feet because it is too long) of a horse that is spinning around them while holding their carrot stick in the other hand doing nothing other than get in the way*. They are an even bigger menace when they group together for the club trail ride. Many of them do such things. If I know about these events in advance, I just stay out of the park that day.
Furthermore, I have seen people with perfectly good trail horses turn them into out of control idiots by ineptly doing ‘natural horsemanship’ with the horse. As an example, I know a guy who acquired a perfectly good ‘husband horse’ for his first horse; a 15+ year old Missouri Fox Trotter mare that could be taken out on the trail once a month and just stand in a paddock the rest of the time (which is what her former owners did with her) in the curb bit that she had worn for her entire life. For a year he hacked around on the trail on this horse happily and safely going along on his well-broke trail hack.
And then a ‘natural horsemanship’ friend (who he trusted as more experienced) told him that the curb bit that this horse had been going along in happily and safely for her entire life was not the right piece of equipment because it was ‘unnatural’ and cruel, and started the man and his excellent trail hack in ‘natural horsemanship clinics’ with a ‘certified Pirelli clinician’ and club meetings where they watched their videos (yes I have seen some of these video and attended some of these clinics) and drank their Kool-Aid.
Within six months this horse was running amok on the trail. Nobody wanted to ride with him because his horse was running up their ass or spinning around in circles on the trail while he tried to do a ‘one rein stop’ or to ‘disengage its hind end’ (another idiocy of ‘natural horsemanship’**), but there was no way in hell he was going to put the horse back in that curb bit because curb bits are cruel and unnatural and you shouldn’t need them or…God knows why not. ‘Natural horsemanship’ took a perfectly good trail horse and turned it into an unmanageable menace. This is not the only example I have of this.
However, the purpose of my post of yesterday was to point out some of the underlying flaws in the ‘natural horsemanship’ methods. Including its underlying premise.
I will be so bold as to assert that ALL horsemen—no matter what their innate ability, no matter how early or late in life they may take it up, and no matter how much time they are able to dedicate to it—will have much more success in controlling a horse if they understand that it is the nature of horses to want to please people. If you have one that does not have that as its underlying nature, not only is your horse useless, it is a dangerous menace, and it should be killed (and the reason there aren’t very many of them, even among the BLM mustang population, is that throughout history people have understood this concept and horses of that nature have been removed from the gene pool).
Years ago there was a study done with respect to the correlation between a horse’s heart rate and the heart rate of the rider. As part of this study they hooked both the horse and the rider up to separate heart rate monitors and had the riders ride the horse up and down a stretch of road. They told the riders that on the fourth time they passed the person on the side of the road that that person would open an umbrella with the intent of find out how the horse’s heart rate responded when it was ‘spooked.’
Almost invariably both the horse’s heart rate and the rider’s heart rate jumped as they passed the person on the side of the road the fourth time. But here’s the kicker. The person on the side of the road DIDN’T open an umbrella. The person on the side of the road didn’t do anything different at all the fourth time the horse and rider went by. The ONLY difference was that the rider was expecting the person to open an umbrella.
Clearly what the horse was responding to was the rider. It was the rider that was telling the horse to be afraid; it was the rider that caused the horse’s heart rate to elevate.
Once you understand that your horse is driven to please you, all you have to do is communicate to the horse what you want and the horse will do it. It is enormously empowering once you realize this. It is in your horse’s nature to do what you ask. And once you understand this, you will stop making lame excuses about your horse’s bad behavior and blaming it on its nature (or on the other park users, like bicyclists, or inhabitants, like deer) and acknowledge that your horse’s bad behavior is entirely of your own making.
If you don’t know how to communicate what you want to a horse and don’t really want to have to learn, you need to have a horse that will just do what it has already learned to do from somebody else and ignore you. This is what a pack horse or a dude string hack is…or a ‘husband horse.’
If you want to learn to communicate what you want to a horse, you need to have a horse that will do what you ask if you ask right, but will not do anything dangerous if you ask wrong. This is the description of a school horse.
School horses come in all shapes and sizes; having ones to learn from will give you the confidence you need to learn the art of horsemanship. But in the same way that the wrong handler can ruin a green horse for the rest of its life, the wrong horse can destroy the confidence of a novice rider for the rest of their life.
From my observations of the many (not all) people I have seen who have bought into ‘natural horsemanship’ these techniques do not build confidence in them, but rather diminish it. And those that have not been diminished by these techniques are those that are willing to step away from them when they aren’t working for them (which is often). This doesn’t mean you have to abandon all the ideas entirely.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
* Another problem with the ‘natural horsemanship’ trend is the advent of 12’ nylon lead ropes. It is too long for a lead rope and too short for a longe line. There is never a good time to be 12’ from your horse’s head. Nor is there ever a good time to be holding onto something made out of nylon, the other end of which is attached to a horse. Consequently, these lead ropes cause all kinds of problems for the people that use them: they are unwieldy as lead ropes because they have to be gathered up to be useful if you don’t want them wrapped around your feet, or you end up with your hand in a bight, or you are too far from your horse’s head so you get kicked in the teeth, or you lose your skin to a rope burn…
And there never was a more useless piece of equipment for a novice (especially a female one) than a ‘carrot stick.’ If you hold it by its handle it will give you tendonitis (i.e. tennis elbow), the ‘lash’ on the end is too long to be useful and is just something else to get wrapped around your feet unless you gather it up and wrap it around your hand, and the lash on the end is too heavy to be able to be “flicked.” People who are really adept might be able to use them effectively, but this means it should only ever be sold as a piece of equipment for advanced users, and never to beginners.
** If you want to successfully communicate with a horse, disengaging the hind end is the LAST thing you want to do. Good horsemanship is about engaging the hind end, not disengaging it, and if you teach the horse to disengage its hind end, the horse will use it as an evasion technique. Keeping in mind that the horse is motivated to do what it thinks you want, if you teach your horse to disengage its hind end it will think that what you want is for it to evade you. Once you have lost control of the hind end, you have lost control of the horse.
Kathy Mayeda
From: Kathy Mayeda [mailto:klma...@gmail.com]
> I can't argue much with Kat, except that the ones that
> do natural horsemanship are unlikely to be the same people
> with out of control horses out on the trail or an endurance ride.
I completely agree that the people out of control at endurance rides are unlikely to the “the ones that do natural horsemanship.” Horses out of control at endurance rides can be laid almost entirely at the feet of the AERC, which will be the topic of a separate post for which I will change the subject line.
Just as I was careful to change the subject line for my post yesterday on ‘Natural Horsemanship’ (i.e. I was no longer addressing Julie’s question of whether the rise of natural horsemanship contributed to the rise in the number of out of control horses on the trail or at endurance rides. In the post that answered that question I stated that ‘natural horsemanship’ was as much a symptom as it was a cause).
As an aside, I will address whether or not the ones who ‘do natural horsemanship’ are likely to be the same people with out of control horses on the trail. I agree that they are not the only ones out of control out on the trail, but there are a lot of them, because I have encountered many of them, even though I try to avoid such people as much as possible.
Often they are leading the horse down the trail on foot holding onto the lead rope (half of which is wrapped around their hand and/or feet because it is too long) of a horse that is spinning around them while holding their carrot stick in the other hand doing nothing other than get in the way*. They are an even bigger menace when they group together for the club trail ride. Many of them do such things. If I know about these events in advance, I just stay out of the park that day.
Furthermore, I have seen people with perfectly good trail horses turn them into out of control idiots by ineptly doing ‘natural horsemanship’ with the horse. As an example, I know a guy who acquired a perfectly good ‘husband horse’ for his first horse; a 15+ year old Missouri Fox Trotter mare that could be taken out on the trail once a month and just stand in a paddock the rest of the time (which is what her former owners did with her) in the curb bit that she had worn for her entire life. For a year he hacked around on the trail on this horse happily and safely going along on his well-broke trail hack.
And then a ‘natural horsemanship’ friend (who he trusted as more experienced) told him that the curb bit that this horse had been going along in happily and safely for her entire life was not the right piece of equipment because it was ‘unnatural’ and cruel, and started the man and his excellent trail hack in ‘natural horsemanship clinics’ with a ‘certified Pirelli clinician’ and club meetings where they watched their videos (yes I have seen some of these video and attended some of these clinics) and drank their Kool-Aid.
Within six months this horse was running amok on the trail. Nobody wanted to ride with him because his horse was running up their ass or spinning around in circles on the trail while he tried to do a ‘one rein stop’ or to ‘disengage its hind end’ (another idiocy of ‘natural horsemanship’**), but there was no way in hell he was going to put the horse back in that curb bit because curb bits are cruel and unnatural and you shouldn’t need them or…God knows why not. ‘Natural horsemanship’ took a perfectly good trail horse and turned it into an unmanageable menace. This is not the only example I have of this.
However, the purpose of my post of yesterday was to point out some of the underlying flaws in the ‘natural horsemanship’ methods. Including its underlying premise.
I will be so bold as to assert that ALL horsemen—no matter what their innate ability, no matter how early or late in life they may take it up, and no matter how much time they are able to dedicate to it—will have much more success in controlling a horse if they understand that it is the nature of horses to want to please people. If you have one that does not have that as its underlying nature, not only is your horse useless, it is a dangerous menace, and it should be killed (and the reason there aren’t very many of them, even among the BLM mustang population, is that throughout history people have understood this concept and horses of that nature have been removed from the gene pool).
Years ago there was a study done with respect to the correlation between a horse’s heart rate and the heart rate of the rider. As part of this study they hooked both the horse and the rider up to separate heart rate monitors and had the riders ride the horse up and down a stretch of road. They told the riders that on the fourth time they passed the person on the side of the road that that person would open an umbrella with the intent of find out how the horse’s heart rate responded when it was ‘spooked.’
Almost invariably both the horse’s heart rate and the rider’s heart rate jumped as they passed the person on the side of the road the fourth time. But here’s the kicker. The person on the side of the road DIDN’T open an umbrella. The person on the side of the road didn’t do anything different at all the fourth time the horse and rider went by. The ONLY difference was that the rider was expecting the person to open an umbrella.
Clearly what the horse was responding to was the rider. It was the rider that was telling the horse to be afraid; it was the rider that caused the horse’s heart rate to elevate.
Once you understand that your horse is driven to please you, all you have to do is communicate to the horse what you want and the horse will do it. It is enormously empowering once you realize this. It is in your horse’s nature to do what you ask. And once you understand this, you will stop making lame excuses about your horse’s bad behavior and blaming it on its nature (or on the other park users, like bicyclists, or inhabitants, like deer) and acknowledge that your horse’s bad behavior is entirely of your own making.
If you don’t know how to communicate what you want to a horse and don’t really want to have to learn, you need to have a horse that will just do what it has already learned to do from somebody else and ignore you. This is what a pack horse or a dude string hack is…or a ‘husband horse.’
If you want to learn to communicate what you want to a horse, you need to have a horse that will do what you ask if you ask right, but will not do anything dangerous if you ask wrong. This is the description of a school horse.
School horses come in all shapes and sizes; having ones to learn from will give you the confidence you need to learn the art of horsemanship. But in the same way that the wrong handler can ruin a green horse for the rest of its life, the wrong horse can destroy the confidence of a novice rider for the rest of their life.
From my observations of the many (not all) people I have seen who have bought into ‘natural horsemanship’ these techniques do not build confidence in them, but rather diminish it. And those that have not been diminished by these techniques are those that are willing to step away from them when they aren’t working for them (which is often). This doesn’t mean you have to abandon all the ideas entirely.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
* Another problem with the ‘natural horsemanship’ trend is the advent of 12’ nylon lead ropes. It is too long for a lead rope and too short for a longe line. There is never a good time to be 12’ from your horse’s head. Nor is there ever a good time to be holding onto something made out of nylon, the other end of which is attached to a horse. Consequently, these lead ropes cause all kinds of problems for the people that use them: they are unwieldy as lead ropes because they have to be gathered up to be useful if you don’t want them wrapped around your feet, or you end up with your hand in a bight, or you are too far from your horse’s head so you get kicked in the teeth, or you lose your skin to a rope burn…
And there never was a more useless piece of equipment for a novice (especially a female one) than a ‘carrot stick.’ If you hold it by its handle it will give you tendonitis (i.e. tennis elbow), the ‘lash’ on the end is too long to be useful and is just something else to get wrapped around your feet unless you gather it up and wrap it around your hand, and the lash on the end is too heavy to be able to be “flicked.” People who are really adept might be able to use them effectively, but this means it should only ever be sold as a piece of equipment for advanced users, and never to beginners.
** If you want to successfully communicate with a horse, disengaging the hind end is the LAST thing you want to do. Good horsemanship is about engaging the hind end, not disengaging it, and if you teach the horse to disengage its hind end, the horse will use it as an evasion technique. Keeping in mind that the horse is motivated to do what it thinks you want, if you teach your horse to disengage its hind end it will think that what you want is for it to evade you. Once you have lost control of the hind end, you have lost control of the horse.
Karen Sullivan
>>
> I have found that the biggest critics of the NH methods have never bothered
> to spend much time watching any of the trainers' philosophy videos or read
> any of their books. Most of these critics have been people who grew up on
> horses and have little feel for how humans learn. They get set in their way
> and nothing will change their opinion about horse training. That's all I
> will say on that.
>
> -Lynn
>
people who have gravitated to NH (Parelli especially) were raised with
horses, and in Pony Club for many years learning things in a rote way,
with little real world experience. Then they are suddenly are older,
less confident, less physically fit and also less capable. They turn
to NH as a way to solve their inadequacies with horses, looking for a
magical fix, and then lose all common sense and practical abilities
they ever had. It then turns into some sort of "stages" or levels
you much pass through of endless ground work and stupid games before
you are ever able to ride you horse. ...again, lets compare it to the
teenage girl in shorts who rides bareback all over town and manages to
make her horse behave in whatever situation arises.....These NH
groupies make excuses as to their horses ill behavior because it has
not progressed through $$$ levels, and is not expected to behave,
either. God forbid that any person handling their horse reprimand it
for being dangerous or disrespectful to a vet or farrier....
Don and Pam Bowen
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k s swigart
From: Kathy Mayeda [mailto:klma...@gmail.com]
>> This is where your lack of knowledge of what the 12' rope is for. It's NOT a lead rope or a lounge line only. It is a line that a person should be able to shorten or lengthen depending on the task at hand. And yes, you do see a lot of bad rope handling, but it's hard to teach good rope handling skills, but rope handling is part of the Western traditions. … The(y) do NOT teach the rope to be wrapped around the hand. <<
I agree that the 12’ “lead line” is neither a lead line nor a longe line, but it is SOLD (quite expensively I might add) as a lead line. And it is one of the first things sold (at a ridiculous price I might add) to rank novices so they can mistakenly use it for a lead line and handle it badly…because they don’t teach how to rope handle at all. THIS is why you see a lot of bad rope handling.
It is absolutely insane to try to learn rope handling with a 12’ nylon rope the other end of which is attached to a horse. Rope handling is properly learned with NOTHING attached to the rope. And this is how ‘vaqueros’ learn it. They practice and practice and practice and practice with JUST a rope. But I have yet to see a single clinic or video where the person teaching it tells the people watching that they should practice with their rope for a year or so before they attach the rope to a horse (and yes I HAVE seen them, so if they exist, few people are getting them). In fact, many of the ropes come attached to the halter with no easy way to get it off leaving the impression that you HAVE to have it attached to a horse.
Having a horse attached to the other end of your rope is not going to make learning rope handling easier, it will make harder, and it will be nigh on impossible if the horse is misbehaving at the other end of the rope. When a horse is misbehaving at the end of a rope, the handler’s focus should be entirely on the horse, the rope handling needs to be second nature and require no thought.
In this way, rope handling is kinda like having an independent seat. It is best learned without being distracted by having to handle a horse at the same time, until it becomes second nature. If you don’t want people handling ropes badly forever, it needs to be Level 0, and until it is mastered people should not be given a rope that is so hard to handle. But they are…well…they aren’t ‘given’ them; they are charged outrageous sums for them creating the impression that they are better than the 8’ to 10’ cotton lead rope with a snap on it that you can get for $5 which is both easier and safer to handle and actually good for a lead rope.
> Again, you are making judgment based on the bad stuff
> you see and not on the actual program itself.
No I am not. I am making this evaluation based on what is being marketed and sold as an effective, step by step technique for any person to work with any horse. But it isn’t.
About ‘disengaging the hind end’:
>> This should be taught as an "emergency" stop only and not as an everyday maneuver. Even then, I think a pulley rein is more effective and doesn't take as much real estate to perform. I've seen a lot of wrecked polls in the Parelli program because of this. <<
You are seeing a lot of wrecked polls BECAUSE it is being taught to beginners as an “emergency” stop, which then becomes an “everyday maneuver” because these beginners are constantly being faced with emergencies, partially because they have no ability to sufficiently ‘control’ their horses without using it. So they wreck their horse’s poll, which makes it harder for anybody to ‘control’ the horse, let alone somebody who is just learning or even ruins the horse for its entire life.
>> It is also the source of my PTSD when I lost control of my Parelli trained horse on the trail. And yes to a certainly agree with you that riding with a group of Parelli people can be a trainwreck on the trail. Again, it's the people. <<
It isn’t just the people; the PROGRAM suggests getting together with all the other people in your group (often to the exclusion of anybody else) and going on a group trail ride under the mistaken impression that all the people who are there have better ‘horsemanship’ skills. Which they don’t.
>> Having said all of this, I am not a sucker for any one system, and by no means a purist. I take what I need and leave the rest. I obviously see all the holes in the program, and have pretty much not bothered by obtaining any "Levels" in the system because it doesn't mean anything to me. I just don't blame all bad horsemanship on natural horsemanship. Bad horsemanship is bad horsemanship. Period.<<
I haven’t blamed all bad horsemanship on ‘natural horsemanship’ either. I have merely stated that it is a contributor and have given my reasons, which includes the fact that while I completely agree that most of the people marketing it are good horsemen, they are NOT good riding teachers, and that their underlying premises are wrong.
One of the reasons I know this is that I am a ‘natural horseman.’ I could perform that stupid parlor trick long before it became vogue to show it off. Because I had no horse of my own while growing up but was “horse mad” I was relegated to jumping on horses in a field with no tack and riding around on them at the gallop, to riding horses that nobody else would ride…usually bareback, to…well…whatever I could get. I had no riding instruction from a person until I was an adult. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t ride. I could ride anything; I can learn from horses. And believe it or not, my first formal instruction in training was from a dog trainer (and yes, dog training is like horse training for the same reason, dogs are also by nature motivated to please people).
And I am a shitty riding teacher. While attempting to give instruction to my students I will tell them, “There, did you feel that? Could you feel that your horse was doing it right?” And if they tell me no, then I tell them I can’t teach them. Like all ‘natural horsemen’ I ride by feel, and I don’t know how to teach somebody who can’t. I tell these people that they need to get lessons from somebody else (like my jumper trainer). I don’t take money from people who can’t learn from me. I have even given money back to people who have shown me they can’t learn from me.
Natural horsemen learn from horses, not from video tapes.
People who are not natural horsemen learn from riding teachers on good school horses, not from video tapes.
As I stated in my first post in answer to Julie’s question, if you ask me, the reason there is so much more bad horsemanship out there today than there was in the past is that people are not learning horsemanship. And many of them are not learning it because they are trying to learn it from somebody who has no aptitude for teaching them and from one horse that is NOT a school horse.
The very fact that Kathy has acknowledged that the “problem is with the people who follow it” shows that even she knows that the program doesn’t work for many of the people who think they are following it. It is failing for them because it is being marketed to people who CAN’T follow it.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
:|
p.s. Most (not all) of my observations regarding ‘natural horsemanship’ come from the watching the Pirelli program, but I have attended clinics by John Lyons and Clinton Anderson as well. So much of my observations are based on evaluations of that program and its ‘certified instructors.’ Although I do have one friend who told me she stopped trying to learn by watching Clinton Anderson on RFD TV because the camera spent more time showing the banner ads in his arena than showing him, so it was useless.
This, also, is reason that these programs often fail. Good riding teachers do not sell products, they sell riding lessons; it is virtually impossible to do both. Consumer Reports recognized decades ago that if you take advertising dollars EVERYTHING YOU SAY is becomes unreliable.
Steve Barton
I’ve been following this discussion trying to make sense of it all. My feeling is there are inept or just plain bad horse handlers in all areas of horse activities.
I started riding in my mid 50s after I partnered up with a woman who was doing endurance. We live in a place where there’s lots of wild country and she was conditioning on her own which worried me. So a bought a young, completely green horse had 30 days put on him and then started riding with her. It was a terrible combination and I was a terrible rider, but because I’m strong and determined it didn’t take too long before I could pretty well control the horse. And in the process, I totally desensitized his mouth. I also did endurance for a few years with reasonable success with him and another horse.
About 6 years ago, I came across Buck Brannaman and my life with our horses changed. I rode in several of his clinics and listened and learned as much as I could. My horses are now pretty soft and generally safe and they are pretty high strung Arabians. I’m still not a great rider, but they respond to feel pretty well and we can almost dance at times.
As I understand it, Brannaman is a bit different than the “natural” horse trainers that have been being discussed. First of all, he would say that there is no such thing as natural horsemanship. Nothing we do with horses is natural. It’s not natural for them to have a large animal on their back. We tie them with and put on their backs devices that are often made from dead animal skins. We corral them and stable them. He also doesn’t really try to sell you anything. At all but one clinic I went to, he had nothing for sale. He does have a couple of books and some dvd’s, but selling them is not a significant part of what he does.
I think if a person really follows the training methods of Brannaman or Ray Hunt or the Dorrance brothers, they will have a good chance of success. And it does involve a lot of ground work.
I think that the issue is less with the “name” of the type of training that is done and more with whether the system actually works and whether those studying are really learning. It’s easy to put a bad label on a system but I think it’s really more complicated than this. Getting good at working with horses takes time, attention to detail, and the right attitude. Many are not willing to put in the effort to get there.
Steve
Ed & Wendy Hauser
a 12’ nylon rope
I am carefully staying out of this whole thread, as I know that I
am not either a good student or teacher of any physical skill.
However, I am an Engineer who knows a bit about ropes and fibers that make them. Nylon is a great fiber for making ropes, but only for certain uses. Sailors only use Nylon for anchor lines, never for any other lines on the boat. The reason is that Nylon is very strong, but stretches quite a bit before breaking. On an anchor line this property absorbs some of the shock from wave action which is a good thing. In our context, this can be bad because it stores a lot of energy when a horse pulls then eventually something goes snapping back hitting either the handler or the horse in a tender spot.
My personal choice is either Polyester (Dacron) or cotton. Cotton being the easiest on the hands.
Ed
Ed & Wendy Hauser
Brannaman or Ray Hunt or the Dorrance brothers, they will have a good chance of success.
Agreed. I have read or looked at some of their stuff and have learned a bunch.
Kathy Mayeda
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Kathy Mayeda
From: Kathy Mayeda [mailto:klma...@gmail.com]
>> This is where your lack of knowledge of what the 12' rope is for. It's NOT a lead rope or a lounge line only. It is a line that a person should be able to shorten or lengthen depending on the task at hand. And yes, you do see a lot of bad rope handling, but it's hard to teach good rope handling skills, but rope handling is part of the Western traditions. … The(y) do NOT teach the rope to be wrapped around the hand. <<
I agree that the 12’ “lead line” is neither a lead line nor a longe line, but it is SOLD (quite expensively I might add) as a lead line. And it is one of the first things sold (at a ridiculous price I might add) to rank novices so they can mistakenly use it for a lead line and handle it badly…because they don’t teach how to rope handle at all. THIS is why you see a lot of bad rope handling.
It is absolutely insane to try to learn rope handling with a 12’ nylon rope the other end of which is attached to a horse. Rope handling is properly learned with NOTHING attached to the rope. And this is how ‘vaqueros’ learn it. They practice and practice and practice and practice with JUST a rope. But I have yet to see a single clinic or video where the person teaching it tells the people watching that they should practice with their rope for a year or so before they attach the rope to a horse (and yes I HAVE seen them, so if they exist, few people are getting them). In fact, many of the ropes come attached to the halter with no easy way to get it off leaving the impression that you HAVE to have it attached to a horse.
Having a horse attached to the other end of your rope is not going to make learning rope handling easier, it will make harder, and it will be nigh on impossible if the horse is misbehaving at the other end of the rope. When a horse is misbehaving at the end of a rope, the handler’s focus should be entirely on the horse, the rope handling needs to be second nature and require no thought.
In this way, rope handling is kinda like having an independent seat. It is best learned without being distracted by having to handle a horse at the same time, until it becomes second nature. If you don’t want people handling ropes badly forever, it needs to be Level 0, and until it is mastered people should not be given a rope that is so hard to handle. But they are…well…they aren’t ‘given’ them; they are charged outrageous sums for them creating the impression that they are better than the 8’ to 10’ cotton lead rope with a snap on it that you can get for $5 which is both easier and safer to handle and actually good for a lead rope.
> Again, you are making judgment based on the bad stuff
> you see and not on the actual program itself.
No I am not. I am making this evaluation based on what is being marketed and sold as an effective, step by step technique for any person to work with any horse. But it isn’t.
About ‘disengaging the hind end’:
>> This should be taught as an "emergency" stop only and not as an everyday maneuver. Even then, I think a pulley rein is more effective and doesn't take as much real estate to perform. I've seen a lot of wrecked polls in the Parelli program because of this. <<
You are seeing a lot of wrecked polls BECAUSE it is being taught to beginners as an “emergency” stop, which then becomes an “everyday maneuver” because these beginners are constantly being faced with emergencies, partially because they have no ability to sufficiently ‘control’ their horses without using it. So they wreck their horse’s poll, which makes it harder for anybody to ‘control’ the horse, let alone somebody who is just learning or even ruins the horse for its entire life.
>> It is also the source of my PTSD when I lost control of my Parelli trained horse on the trail. And yes to a certainly agree with you that riding with a group of Parelli people can be a trainwreck on the trail. Again, it's the people. <<
It isn’t just the people; the PROGRAM suggests getting together with all the other people in your group (often to the exclusion of anybody else) and going on a group trail ride under the mistaken impression that all the people who are there have better ‘horsemanship’ skills. Which they don’t.
>> Having said all of this, I am not a sucker for any one system, and by no means a purist. I take what I need and leave the rest. I obviously see all the holes in the program, and have pretty much not bothered by obtaining any "Levels" in the system because it doesn't mean anything to me. I just don't blame all bad horsemanship on natural horsemanship. Bad horsemanship is bad horsemanship. Period.<<
I haven’t blamed all bad horsemanship on ‘natural horsemanship’ either. I have merely stated that it is a contributor and have given my reasons, which includes the fact that while I completely agree that most of the people marketing it are good horsemen, they are NOT good riding teachers, and that their underlying premises are wrong.
One of the reasons I know this is that I am a ‘natural horseman.’ I could perform that stupid parlor trick long before it became vogue to show it off. Because I had no horse of my own while growing up but was “horse mad” I was relegated to jumping on horses in a field with no tack and riding around on them at the gallop, to riding horses that nobody else would ride…usually bareback, to…well…whatever I could get. I had no riding instruction from a person until I was an adult. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t ride. I could ride anything; I can learn from horses. And believe it or not, my first formal instruction in training was from a dog trainer (and yes, dog training is like horse training for the same reason, dogs are also by nature motivated to please people).
And I am a shitty riding teacher. While attempting to give instruction to my students I will tell them, “There, did you feel that? Could you feel that your horse was doing it right?” And if they tell me no, then I tell them I can’t teach them. Like all ‘natural horsemen’ I ride by feel, and I don’t know how to teach somebody who can’t. I tell these people that they need to get lessons from somebody else (like my jumper trainer). I don’t take money from people who can’t learn from me. I have even given money back to people who have shown me they can’t learn from me.
Natural horsemen learn from horses, not from video tapes.
People who are not natural horsemen learn from riding teachers on good school horses, not from video tapes.
As I stated in my first post in answer to Julie’s question, if you ask me, the reason there is so much more bad horsemanship out there today than there was in the past is that people are not learning horsemanship. And many of them are not learning it because they are trying to learn it from somebody who has no aptitude for teaching them and from one horse that is NOT a school horse.
The very fact that Kathy has acknowledged that the “problem is with the people who follow it” shows that even she knows that the program doesn’t work for many of the people who think they are following it. It is failing for them because it is being marketed to people who CAN’T follow it.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
:|
p.s. Most (not all) of my observations regarding ‘natural horsemanship’ come from the watching the Pirelli program, but I have attended clinics by John Lyons and Clinton Anderson as well. So much of my observations are based on evaluations of that program and its ‘certified instructors.’ Although I do have one friend who told me she stopped trying to learn by watching Clinton Anderson on RFD TV because the camera spent more time showing the banner ads in his arena than showing him, so it was useless.
This, also, is reason that these programs often fail. Good riding teachers do not sell products, they sell riding lessons; it is virtually impossible to do both. Consumer Reports recognized decades ago that if you take advertising dollars EVERYTHING YOU SAY is becomes unreliable.
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Kathy Mayeda
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k s swigart
Kathy said:
> They got really upset because one of them asked Buck
> if they spend any "play time" with their horses. He replied
> that his horses work with him and there is no play. Frankly,
> good minded horses like to work!
I don’t know whether it was Buck Brannaman who said “good minded horses like to work!” or if it was Kathy; however, if it was Buck, it is nice to hear that, though he put it in a different way, he agrees with me. That it is the nature of a horse to want to please people…when we ask them to do the things we ask (i.e. “work.”). If this is not the nature of your horse, you don’t have a “good minded” horse.
I contend that it is perfectly understandable why horses are of this nature. For thousands of years man has selected for EXACTLY that nature, not only by selective breeding, but by the fact that it was only horses of this nature that were captured in the first place (a tendency toward this nature existed in horses before the first one was ever caught and put to work by a human).
Even cultures that are willing to use horses for food do not breed or select horses for their meat production like we do for animals domesticated for meat purposes such as beef cattle and fryer chickens and pigs and meat goats, etc. Historically, in all cultures that raised horses they did so for the horse’s capacity to do work, and only those horses that showed themselves unsuitable for this purpose were eaten. Even horses that were suitable work animals themselves would not be used for breeding more horses if they proved themselves to be unsuitable for breeding that trait on.
This is SO ingrained in the nature of horses that it is possible to capture an adult animal that has been breed for generations in the “wild” without this continued selection process (i.e. a BLM mustang which may be the product of 100 years and countless generations of non-human selection) and within a few months have it carrying a person around the streets of Norco and jumping in the back of a pick-up truck while countless other horses are there not doing the same thing.
These are not the actions of a fearful animal, they are not the actions of an aggressive animal, and they are not the actions of a herd bound animal. It is ONLY when horses do not get human direction that they react with fear, aggression, or the need to do what other horses are doing.
Steve said:
> As I understand it, Brannaman is a bit different than the “natural” horse
> trainers that have been being discussed. First of all, he would say that
> there is no such thing as natural horsemanship. Nothing we do with
> horses is natural. It’s not natural for them to have a large animal on
> their back. We tie them with and put on their backs devices that are
> often made from dead animal skins. We corral them and stable them.
This is where he and I sort of agree, but sort of disagree as well. It seems we agree that there is nothing “natural” about what the “natural” horse trainers that have been discussed are doing (which is why I contend that their underlying premise is wrong); I disagree that it is not “natural” for horses to let us ride them, saddle them, corral them and stable them.
I contend that letting us do these things IS a part of the nature of a horse. A willingness to do so is a part of their genetic makeup, and it is a part of their genetic makeup because man has genetically selected for just such traits for millennia. An animal without those traits cannot reliably be put to work. “Put to work” is what humans have always done with horses.
Recently (in maybe the past 50 years at most, but perhaps even less time than that), people have started keeping horses as pets and some of them have been making the idiotic mistake of breeding on horses that have shown themselves to be totally useless for work so some of those traits are creeping into the gene pool; however, what is more prevalent is that people who don’t know what they are doing are teaching horses the wrong things or confusing them so the horses just don’t know what to do (i.e. they aren’t getting the human direction they crave).
Why do I bother to say these things?
Because I believe that ALL horse handlers will have more success with handling their horses if they understand that their horse is desperate to please them, a person. Horses want a HUMAN to tell them what to do. So much so that if we interact with them at all, they will do what they think we want. Successful horse handling comes from being able to effectively communicate your desires to your horse. Your horse WILL try to please you. Ineffective horse handling comes from rewarding a horse for the wrong things, or from telling it to run away at the wrong time, because it is still trying to please you.
To be good horsemen, we need to understand just how much our own behavior affects the behavior of our horses. The behavior of a horse is affected by the behavior of its human handler, because THAT is the nature of a horse. To deny this aspect of their natures is to deny what enabled humans and horses to conquer virtually the entire world together, and to do so in a way that neither could have done without the other.
We should revel in this aspect of our horses’ natures; they do, if we give them the chance.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
Kathy Mayeda
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Lynn White
Kathy Mayeda
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