Recently on a rather large horse training message board, arguments ensued about particular methods to cure horses of certain vices. Being outspoken as I am (blame it on my Cuban/Italian heritage) I was heavily involved in this debate. My only concern during this debate was for the well-being of the horses. Let me give you one example…..

One of the questions was how to cure a horse that who at one time behaved fine for the farrier but lately had been misbehaving quiet badly. To my dismay, several ‘knowledgeable’ horse people gave advice to this individual that never once considered the root cause of the horse’s anxiety and problem. Instead they focused only on how to ‘fix’ his horse from misbehaving.

The advice that was given was to lunge the horse for 20 minutes, or more, until he would be too tired to act up for the farrier. Another person suggested using a heavy stud chain over the nose and yank on it to ‘correct him’ when he acts up……and yet another ‘horse trainer’ who was quick to explain to me that they had ‘been into horses’ for 35 years and who knows quite a bit more about horses, gave the advice that this person should use a twitch to control the horse. This trainer admitted that they themselves had used a twitch and even medicated their horses to calm them for farrier work.

I offered no method or technique to ‘control’ this horse but rather kept asking the owner that she should instead figure out the root cause of the problem. If she could figure the root cause she could address the problem directly and permanently fix this behavior. (read my other articles on Problem Solving and The Problem Between Horses and Humans)

Sadly, for most people it always comes down to mechanics, lack of interest in investing the time, inconvenience to the human, etc., etc., etc..

I was then sent a personal email message by the moderator of the message board admonishing me and explaining that the board was not there to shove personal opinions and training philosophies down others’ throats….and that “the natural way doesn’t always work with horses”.
I make no apologies when I say, what a completely ignorant and uneducated statement that is.

I guess the millions of dollars in revenues from videos on natural horsemanship, printed materials such as books, newsletters, magazine articles and complete magazines devoted to natural methods is all in indication that the natural way doesn’t always work.

Perhaps RFD-TV should discontinue those clinicians who have regularly scheduled weekly shows by natural trainers.

I suppose the hundreds of clinics, seminars, demonstrations and symposiums are all a waste of time, energy and money by the clinicians and the participants alike. Clinicians such as Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Curt Pate, John Lyons, Mark Rashid, Craig Cameron, Karen Hagen, Gail Ivey, Leslie Desmond, Bryan Neubert, Brad Cameron, Dennis Reis, Peter Campbell, Frank Bell, Wil Howe, Craig Hamilton, Pat Parelli, Pony Boy GaWaNi, Josh Lyons, Leslie Neuman, Richard Winters, Emily Kitching, Dianne Longanecker, Chris Irwin, Pat Puckett, Chris Cox, Klaus Hempfling, Clinton Anderson and countless others must all be wasting their time, right?

Let me state this….

NATURAL HORSEMANSHIP WORKS…

ON EVERY SINGLE HORSE…

EVERY TIME!!!!

So what does all of this have to do with the subject title of this article?

I often have someone who will tell me that their horse won’t load in a trailer and that they have tried using a technique that they saw Parelli or Clinton Anderson use to trailer load a horse on RFD-TV…or they imitated a certain technique that they saw Buck Brannaman perform on one of his videos. They still can’t seem to get the horse to respond properly and ended up having to resort to bribes, butt ropes and 3 hours of mental stress and emotional strain…for both the human AND the horse.

And yet, when I take this horse in hand, within a few moments the horse is responding perfectly. Now I will tell you that I am nothing special. I hold no ‘magic’ which transforms horses into obedient and willing partners.

The difference is that I make a huge conscious effort to understand the underlying principles involved in a certain method or technique. I also pay particular attention to what the root cause of the problem may be.

This ensures my ultimate success at reaching the desired outcome. However, since no two horses are alike, we need to be able to figure out when a particular technique or method is not right for a particular horse and then adjust to fit the situation (training principle #7).

It is the principles that make the techniques and methods work, not the techniques nor methods themselves. This is hard for some people to grasp but it is a simple truth.

If all it took was simple technique, then we would all be doing the exact same technique and we would be having the same degree of success with every single horse. There would be no variation. No need for it because we would have the perfect technique. In other words, we would all be doing the John Lyons technique, or the Pat Parelli technique, or the Clinton Anderson technique, or Frank Bell or GaWaNi PonyBoy technique. Whose ever technique it was that worked 100% of the time, that’s whose technique we would all be using. Even the other ‘big name’ trainers would be using those techniques.

But this is the real world, and in the real world (and the horses we deal with) we deal with varying personalities (or should I say “horse-n-alities?)

Of course, to understand the principles involved, one must be willing to invest TIME (training principle #1) and work through, and with, FEEL- the true language of the horse. (training principle #4)

TIME is what makes the difference when teaching a horse something new. Horse ‘A’ will get the proper response in two minutes….horse ‘B’ will get it in 2 hours….horse ‘C’ will get it in 2 weeks and will worry and fret over it every time you attempt to teach or review that particular technique or method.

If you have never had an opportunity to watch the video entitled “Greetings” with the late Tom Dorrance…or had a chance to see the video on the taping of an episode of Horse World with Larry Mahan interviewing Tom Dorrance, you should take the time and effort to watch it carefully. You will see that Tom was not a physically intimidating individual, yet he could read a horse and turn ANY technique or method into a successful outcome yet others around him struggled. Even if they imitated him down to the smallest detail, they were just going through the motions. Then here would come Tom Dorrance and say to them….”you’ve got to wait on them” or “ you’re okay but you’re rushing it too much” or “give him space, he is thinking about it”

The technique or method was correct but the student didn’t understand the principles involved and how to work with FEEL, and so what happens is that they resort back to applying to much pressure too fast and sometimes eventually give up on this ‘natural and better way’ with horses and go back to getting the job done with the old abusive methods.

Let me give you one more example of not using principles and only focusing on the technique…

I was perusing the horse section of books at my local Barnes and Noble Booksellers and found a book that I thought would be interesting to read while sipping on some coffee….I won’t mention the name of the book but I will tell you that the title, and the book, focuses on ‘fixing bad behaviors in horses’. What I found in that book not only made me shake my head in amazement but also outraged me. How could we, horsemen and women, with all of the resources available to us today, still utilize methods that are abusive to horses?

Some of the ‘fixes’ in this book utilize ear pinching, twitching, using a twitch on a 6 foot long pole, war bridle, stud chain over the nose, stud chain under the chin, stud chain under the lip against the front teeth, using a stud chain that looked like a bicycle chain, and neck collars that look like someone’s picket fence from their front yard.

No where…and I mean, ABSOLUTELY NO WHERE, in that book did they even once attempt to ‘fix’ a problem by addressing the root cause. And not once did they attempt to assist the reader in discovering better and more humane ways of dealing with these ‘problem horses’. They went straight for the mechanical devices (techniques) and for the extreme way of ‘controlling’ the horse to ‘fix’ it in stead of trying to use figure out the root cause using the principles and concepts.

Just because we have always used these methods to ‘control’ horses, doesn’t make them right…nor should they be considered the normal way of handling horses…but this is the way 99% of the people are taught and this is what they come to know as “the norm”.

“Find the cause and the solution will present itself”
Mark Rashid

Had they first addressed the root cause of the problem, they could have then applied natural principles, along with proper methods, and had far much greater success at ‘fixing’ these problems. What are the root causes? Well, they have been covered in other articles on this site and so I wont go into them here but I will list them…

In order to apply the principles, we must first know the principles and have a good working knowledge of them. I did not invent these principles. They were taught by countless horses to horsemen who ‘discovered’ these truths through trial and error. When I first began studying natural horsemanship, I found the principles scattered throughout several books and writings too numerous to count. I would learn a principle from this book or another principle from that book. It became a headache to try to remember where I read them all. In order to remember them, I began to catalog them and place them in an order that was easy to remember.

These universal principles of natural horsemanship are as follows:

1. TIME!!!

2. Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult

3. Reward the slightest try and the smallest change

4. THINK, FEEL – remember you’re working with a mind so cause your ideas to become theirs

5. Be clear and concise about what you are asking and be sure that the horse clearly understands.

6. Set the horse up to succeed and YOU take responsibility if they do not

7. Adjust to fit the situation

8. Have hands that close slowly and open quickly (denotes pressure and release both literally and conceptually)

9. Be as gentle as possible and as firm as necessary

10. Always use approach and retreat

11. Less IS More

12. Know when to walk away.

Adhering to these principles, and concepts and applying them liberally with patience and understanding will result in more consistent success with horses.

Remember that the horse is made up of three components, each being equally important as the other….

PHYSICAL – MENTAL – EMOTIONAL

Just focusing on the technique works (notice I didn’t use the term “trains”) the physical component of the horse with little or no regard to the mental or emotional aspects.

Following the universal principles of natural horsemanship ensures that you give equal attention to every aspect of the horse; physical, mental AND emotional.

It is really simple to understand…just working the physical (techniques) does not always mean that you are increasing the mental and emotional learning abilities of a horse….

however….following the natural principles ALWAYS ensures that you train the mental and emotional first. By doing so, the physical is trained as the by-product of the mental and emotional training.

“Just as a horse’s body needs training for a particular task, his emotions need training too.”
John Lyons
Communication Through Cues Part 1 pg 161

Just to prove the point, and I don’t mean to stray off of the topic of this article too much, have you ever noticed that most behavior problems that horses tend to develop are in horses that are stalled too much? Ever wonder why that is? It is because physically, they may get ridden once or twice a week (or more), but mentally and emotionally they are confined into a small cubed box for the majority of their day…sometimes spending days at a time in solitary confinement. There are some horses that only know stall life. They get absolutely no mental or emotional development and so we see these horses develop weaving, cribbing, popping lips, self mutilation, head nodding, or relentless pawing. When they do get let out, they tend to run around like maniacs in their paddock and buck and kick. The owners tend to think of them as ‘high strung’ and wind up lunging them in mindless circles to ‘knock the edge off of them’. All this does is work the physical and once again, the mental and emotional gets ignored. And so the cycle continues…..

So the next time you are trying to problem solve a trailer loading problem, or a bucking issue, or a barn sour annoyance, etc., instead of going straight to the physical means of “fixing” the problem, instead figure out the root cause, apply the natural principles through proper methods and “cure” the problem. When your well meaning friends give you advice on how to “fix” the problem through mechanics or techniques, sit back and think on how this affects the horse and if what they are advising addresses the whole horse.

There are NO shortcuts in developing your horse as a partner. Don’t cheat your horse by making him brain dead.

And remember……

NATURAL HORSEMANSHIP WORKS…

ON EVERY SINGLE HORSE…

EVERY TIME!!!!

So as I close this article, let me leave you with these final words……

“The principles must always stay the same – but when it comes to style, technique, tools and equipment, they can be distinctly yours.
Feel. Timing. Balance. Make the right easy. Make the wrong difficult. Reward the slightest try. These attributes guide and influence every time we step toward our equine partners.
There can be no deviation from these principles for the true horseman.”

Richard Winters
“Do It Your Own Way”
The Trail Less Traveled Magazine June 2001