Marketing and competition between the top earning clinicians has been the key behind getting natural horsemanship more widely understood by enlightened horse owners. It has also prevented too many dedicated people from learning to do what is best for their horse. Distracting arguments over whether or not crops, spurs, laying a horse down, and the use of snaffle bits were inherently cruel have driven too many people away from natural horsemanship. Efforts to prove that a given clinician is a hypocrite or uses cruel methods have made matters much worse.
A few years ago a grainy you tube image of Linda Parelli working a one eyed horse was deceptively used to accuse her of cruelty to the horse. A clear image of the training segment reveals that what actually occurred was a tremendous success in helping a terrified horse gain confidence while becoming less of a safety risk to herself and to humans. It was a great piece of work that was utterly inaccurately characterized by Parelli opponents.
Sound training must never to a back seat to superior marketing. Whether a training technique is popular and feeds into the emotional needs of horse owners should never be a consideration for people truly interested in natural horsemanship. The only issue should be the physical and emotional well being of the horse.
For too long colt starting was viewed, and taught,as a contest of wills with the only goal being the subjugation of the horse. Such a model appealed to the emotional needs of boys who were taught that the ostentatious use of violence evidenced a step toward manhood. All training problems were solved by the three hall marks of masculine thought of the 1950's--power, violence, and technology (e.g. "stronger bits"). In the old western movies a cowboy might kiss his horse, but only quickly and likely comedicaly at the end of the movie. Love had no place in that school of training.
That culture promoted a view that a horse had only two functions--to win competitions and to be sold for big profits. Such a culture short changed both horse and rider. Natural horsemanship gives us the potential to sweep all of that aside as long as we do not simply use horses to make a statement about ourselves or to try to fill a subconscious longing for what we might want in a particular stage in our lives.
I am afraid that we are at risk of doing so by misusing natural horsemanship and replacing it with concepts that sell and make its adherents feel better about themselves. The major point of divergence is on the question of how to best create confidence in the horse.
Traditional natural horsemanship has recognized that, as a prey animal, fear is a very functional emotion for a horse. However, when a horse is no longer faces constant threats of death or injury as it does in the wild it is one of the most humane and important training tasks that we have to, to the degree possible, help the horse to learn to control its instinctual terror and not be a slave to it.
In its starkest terms horse training can take three routes:
1. Go past that mail box because you fear the beating that I will give more than you fear the mail box.
2. Go past that mail box because I have taught you that doing so is in no way a danger to you.
3. Go past that mail box only because you decide that you want to and only do it when you feel ready to do so.
Of these three alternatives, I believe that only the second actually reduces a horse's level of chronic fear. Option 1 is certainly crueler than option 2. The third option, while giving the trainer a sense of moral superiority over other trainers, does little to give a horse confidence that transcends a particular moment in its training.
Parelli's first book, "Natural Horse-Man-Ship", was perhaps the most important training manifesto published up to that time that reached a substantial number of future trainers. It is filled with sound principles. His phrase, "Love, Language and Leadership", which could more inartfully be stated as "Communication, Affection and Discipline," summed up the core of sound horse training.
The soundness of a training principal is not tested by the number of people that buy a video demonstrating that principal. Truth, when placed in the market place of ideas is not altered by its packaging. John Lyon's three questions in evaluating a potential training technique remain perfectly accurate even though they lack rhyme or alliteration: 1. "Will it hurt the horse?" 2. "Will it hurt me?" 3. "Will the horse be calmer when I have completed the session than when I began it?"
There is no fourth question: Does the horse want to do it?
The question today facing many people that care deeply about humanely creating happy horses is simply this: Can I best create confidence and happiness in my horse by letting my horse decide what it wants to do and when it wants to do it or is confidence best created by showing a horse that it can do a range of things that it thought impossible or too dangerous to try?
I have wrestled with this key point for months and I have come to believe that confidence is only produced by overcoming perceived threats and that gradually waiting until a horse decides that it wants to do a given task does not produce confidence that reduces fear and anxiety in other aspects of a horse's existence.
The belief that superior training rests entirely on allowing the horse to decide what it wants to do is based on a a very slippery anthropomorphism. It is based on the belief that the horse's greatest wish is for autonomy. That is a dangerous mistake for a trainer to make. A horse's greatest wish is for security. Autonomy is only significant to a horse to the limited degree that it leads to security.
A horse can never learn to feel safer if it walks into water because it wants to to so. Such a horse has conquered no more fear than does a horse that bravely decides that it wants to eat grass. On the other hand, a horse that fears water but is directed into it regardless of its fears learns that water poses no threat.
My heart fell when I heard a clinician dismissively say that desensitization was bad because it produced horse's with no feeling. If I thought that the speaker had merely confused his terms and equated desensitization with "flooding", the primitive version of extreme sacking out that forced horse's into long term near-catatonic states, I would not have minded one bit. But he knew better.
Could it be that there is a bigger market to be reached by teaching novices that do not enjoy shaking a plastic bag, tarp, can filled with rocks, bouncing balls, etc, until a terrified horse learns to relax and ignore these "threats", that it is better for them to forsake such practices and to allow the horse to do that which it wishes?
Is the alternative to this New Age version of natural horsemanship the practice of torturing a horse into compliance? Of course not. The alternative is to simply fall back to the timeless truth that one should patiently train by making the right thing easy for the horse and the wrong thing difficult.
That does not mean beating and bleeding. It simply means pressure and release.
There is a fortune to be made by teaching this autonomy driven theory of natural horsemanship.
The cost will be born by the horses.
