Being a good mentor is the highest of achievements any of us can hope for. It's like the Nobel Prize of Horsemanship. What is our life's work worth if we can't pass our knowledge on to successive generations? Being a good mentor is the most important thing we can ever do for making the lives of horses better.
Being Mentored By Harry Whitney
Harry has mentored many who are now professional horse people - Josh Nichol, Shea Stewart, Julie Carpenter, Simone Carlson, Libby Lyman, Anna Bonnage, Ty Haas - to name a few that I know personally. I hope Harry is proud of his contribution. He should be. And I hope each of us who has gained from his knowledge does just as good a job for our students.
Being A Good Rider Is Not Being A Correct Rider
Don’t blame everything that’s wrong with a horse’s performance on rider position. It’s a mistake to conflate correct position withy good riding. They are not the same thing. If you always look to faults in a rider’s position to explain performance problems you’ll often be looking in the wrong place and the fix may escape you.
The Value Of Studying Wild Horse Behaviour
Let me first say that there are very few true wild species of horses in the world. I guess you could call the Tarpan and the Przewalski and the Zebra true wild species of the genus Equus. But what most people call wild horses are just feral horses. That is, they are domesticated breeds who escaped captivity sometime in the past.