Study Hard

Wake up, clear your mind and pay attention. This is an important announcement. To recap a bit: the primary purpose of this blog is to encourage others to teach natural horsemanship to kids and novices and encourage people to take on the challenge of training wild horses, colts, and "unwanted horses." Our secondary purpose is to work to help prevent the extinction of the wild Corolla Spanish mustangs.

I have looked at many of the "certification" programs that are available today. They have many great features and I criticize no clinician when I express the belief that serve the purpose of making money for the certifiers. They should be profitable. It is the American Way.

Unfortunately the cost of those programs and the associated training devices puts them out of the range of many aspiring horseman.

As has been expressed so often, what we do is not brain surgery. It is not magic. My little riders and I posses no mystical secrets. We simply seek to understand how a horse communicates, what makes a horse healthy, and what makes a horse happy. We then apply that knowledge to teach a horse to be our trusted, and trusting, companion. Everything that we do is done with an eye toward safety both for the horse and the trainer/rider.

We take this information on the road in clinics and we do programs on site. However, the digital age allows us to take this information to places that we will never go and to meet people that we will never see.

We are going to take full advantage of that digital highway by developing an on line program that teaches what we do. The program will be comprehensive. It will cover the following:
Our very dull, unexciting and safe method of starting wild horses and colts to saddle, from round pen to fifty mile in a day trail rides.
The importance of natural horse care.
The miracles that can be achieved with natural hoof care.
How we teach children and novices to not only ride, but to confidently train untouched horses.
And, lastly, how this knowledge can be used to develop and a program that will radically improve the quality of the lives of horses and children.

The program, entitled, "Saving Horses' Lives and Giving Kids a Life" will require a lot of work on the part of students but not a lot of money. There will be a required reading list which will include some of the great works written on natural horsemanship. Students who are using the program to train horses will be able to post videos of their work with those horses and we will suggest techniques to help the horse and trainer improve. There will be tests given with pass/fail grading. The key is to make sure that at the conclusion of the program the student understands and is able to apply the techniques that we use to teach children to teach wild horses and colts to be perfectly reliable trail mounts.

There will not be a complex system of levels and certifications. It will be very affordable. It will not be a theoretical study. It will be based on a proven model. It is designed to increase demand for horses by bringing new people into the horse world. It is a program that works every day in my horse lot.

Some of that proof is seen in the picture above. Those are my little riders on the wild horses that we trained together.

Details will be forth coming.