One friend asked me which of her horses I thought she should bring to the clinic. I replied that it didn’t matter to me because clinics are not about training her horses ….
When we make it about how a horse feels and how we best prepare their thoughts and emotions for the barrels, canter half-pass, or six-bar, we know we have evolved into a person worthy of the title “horse person”.
One of the things I have heard coming from the mouths of other trainers, instructors, and clinicians is, “I learned it from the horse,” or “Everything I know was taught to me by the horse.”
There are as many ways to train a horse as there are human languages. Put a horse in an arena and ask two hundred trainers how to work it, and you’ll get two hundred varied responses.
The reason why we have been able to work and exploit horses for our benefit over millennia is that they evolved to be highly trainable and compliant. We don’t ride grizzly bears, and we don’t plough fields with giraffes for good reason.
