Wild Horse Guy, you remind me a lot of my barn owner. I have never seen the man lose his cool--a few seconds of, "no, this is what I wanted" and he's soft as can be the millisecond the horse responds. He's the guy the 'trainers' send the horse to after they deem it 'untrainable.' Jim holds no ill-will toward the trainers, either--he just says, "well, I do make a lot of money off dem guys' mistakes
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Thanks for the comment, you hit on several important points there. It's true, I did use two extremes as examples but I think the reality is that most horse people are somewhere in between. I reckon what I'm trying to say is that they tend to be not enough in-between, in other words not balanced. If soft is a 1 and hard is a 10, they'll be a 7 or a 2 but what we should all strive toward is being able to go from a 1 to a 10 and back to a 1 in a split second.
What you said about your horse being bored with the same old routine is right on, in my opinion. Exercising his mind and allowing him to express his unique personality is as important as exercising his body. I think it was Tom Dorrance who said near the end of his life "never knock the curiosity out of a colt".
Growing up, my mom called this being the Boss Mare. She was very introverted, but a genius with horses, and if she could have gotten into the Rock Star Horse Training World, she would have called it the Boss Mare Way.
hmm i dunno. i don't see why treating/interacting with horses that way should belong to any one "style" of horsemanship. it's just plain old good horsemnaship and no matter what your discipline, if you're a good horseperson, you'll follow it. that's why i've never bought into the NH hype. NH people definitely don't have the monopoly on "reading" horses, becoming the "boss mare" or trying ot understand a horse's motivations. that's what any true horseperson should do.
I agree 100%. I think the idea of NH is just marketing. You give what's essentially just plain good horsemanship, slap a label on it, and then you can market it and sell it to people who're too ignorant to realize this.
I agree with everything you said, but I can't help thinking that "natural horsemanship" is just "good horsemanship" packaged up in a new name and sold by some as a gimmick to gullible people with more money than sense.
I tend to think of the dominance model as following more traditional styles. Since Dominance Theory has been almost entirely, if not entirely, thrown out by animal behaviorists and ethologists (this includes the Boss Mare line of thinking), it gets lumped into the Old Way of thinking for me. Watching herds is a good idea, but I think you'll find that if you know a little something about animal behavior, dominance and submission aren't really applicable.
If the behaviourists are right, then presumably if you combine watching herds with avoiding any assumptions about heirarchy and structure you will be able to throw out ideas of dominance and submission out on your own behalf.
Also the last few posts by jacksons_five are an account of spending a few days doing this with Lucy Rees, which made for interesting reading. I think it's a shame she didn't really update again since.
Lots of people would (and have), but the average person not only doesn't have the background of understanding to analyze animal behavior, but the common layperson also tends to highly anthropomorphize animals, attributing certain things to them that simply aren't possible
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What you said about your horse being bored with the same old routine is right on, in my opinion. Exercising his mind and allowing him to express his unique personality is as important as exercising his body. I think it was Tom Dorrance who said near the end of his life "never knock the curiosity out of a colt".
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I agree 1,000% with what you just wrote!!
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lol seriously though. I know what you mean, in fact your mom sounds a lot like my mom. So much so that I'm now wondering if we're related haha.
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Also the last few posts by jacksons_five are an account of spending a few days doing this with Lucy Rees, which made for interesting reading. I think it's a shame she didn't really update again since.
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