I started my career with horses working at a riding school in Sydney. The owners of the riding school would invite folks from a local disability organisation to come on a Sunday each month to ride some of the school horses.
This is a chapter from my book, Old Men and Horses. The books (Old Men and Horses, and Changing The Tide) contain a series of short stories about my path to horsemanship under the guidance of two old men who were twin brothers, Walt and Amos.
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”.
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.
"If you lower their head, you will switch off the flow of adrenalin that causes all this fight or flight behaviour and you'll turn on the flow of endorphins that creates a calmness in the horse."
