On This We Stand

The New Horsemanship Movement stands on three pillars, natural horsemanship, natural hoof care, and natural horse care. The goal of New Horsemanship is to increase the number of new horse owners and to insure that those new owners understand how to properly care for their horses. New Horseman believe that artificial barriers to horse ownership must be removed.
Chief among these barriers is the artificially high cost to purchase, train, and maintain horses that the established horse world has created as the appropriate model for horsemanship.
Inflated purchase prices are a direct result of the dominance of competitors in various equine events, who have been successful in convincing too many members of the non horse owning public that a horse's value is somehow tied to its purchase price. Competitors make up a rather small portion of the horse owning public, but because of the tremendous amount that they spend on assorted equibusiness products, their power in the industry is disproportionate to their numbers.
The lynch pin of New Horsemanship is its reliance on natural horsemanship as the only appropriate technique to properly develop an optimum relationship between horses and humans and is the only system of training techniques currently known that optimizes the horse's potential for happiness. Most significantly, New Horseman view success with natural horsemanship as being fully with in the reach of both young people and those with no prior equine experience, provided that they obtain proper assistance and instruction.
Natural Hoof Care and Natural Horse Care go hand in hand in that both significantly reduce the cost of horse ownership and both provide horses with greatly improved health and performance. Neither Natural Hoof Care nor Natural Horse Care focus on savings by determining "what frill a horse can do without," but instead focus on how to produce the healthiest and happiest horses possible.
New Horsemanship recognizes that it is, in fact, the oldest of horsemanship, and hearkens back to a time when young people were respected enough to allow them to start healthy colts who lived bare footed on grass, shrubs, and, yes, weeds.
New Horseman recognize that the answers to the problems of the future can often be found by studying what has worked in the past.