Poking Fun

In a recent fluff piece I told you guys I wouldn't be dissing on the Natural Horsemen any more.

My concern is I may have misled you. I meant individually. 


During a short, entertaining, yet brutal foray into the world of knee jerk reactionistas FHOTD I learned picking on an individual in order to criticize a philosophy or opinion doesn't do anything but divert the real meaning behind the criticism.  


For example, if I start a post with the statement, "I have serious disagreements with the Natural Horsemanship Movement," and I am inundated with comments like, "Pat Parelli shone his glowing beacon of light on me and my horse, and not only enlightened me but all the little children in three third world countries," it creates an argument I not only don't want, but never, ever, have any intention of having.

Personally, I wrote a post on FHOTD, "I hate nose bands,"  and the crazy insults just started rolling in. It seems I am an ignorant, stupid, uneducated fool who can't ride, can't think, never actually trained a horse, has never seen a dressage horse, a hunter jumper, an English saddle, a reining saddle, wait, there's more, can't spell, can't write, beat my children and dogs and am a long time hoarder of Mongolian Cremello Paintalusians.

Was I surprised? Well, no. I was feeling a bit combative and decided to go trolling, so I very thoroughly deserved what I got. Trolls.

The thing is, a few people read what I wrote, thought about it and went ahead and tried their horses without a nose band. Many of them actually got my point, they focus control to the head of the horse, not the feet, a training approach I disagree with. They didn't see what I wrote as a personal attack, but as an opinion, maybe worth thinking about. How those few managed to put all that together in the middle of all the yammering I'll never know.

So it got me wanting to clarify. I want to poke fun at theories, groups, ideologies, anything that strikes my fancy in the horse world, with the understanding I'm not after any one person, unless of course I really do know this person, then God help them.

There is a point to this post BTW. It is to point out some of my problems with NH movement. Because, boy howdy, I do have them.

The first and foremost would be cookie cutter colt starting methods.

Any time you get a large group of people together, with varying levels of experience, temperament and resources, all trying to get a handle on horses in the exact same spot, you have to begin teaching in specific steps.

Teach A, to get to B, to get to C and so on.

There's really no way around it.

Then you need specific types of equipment to get everybody with the same program. So why not color your horse whacker orange and create some kinder gentler lingo to go with it so your gentler souls will buy it? Why not tout the panels you use to create a round pen (known in the olden days as a breaking corral) as a much needed accessory, conveniently sold by you, as the only way to start a horse? This is, after all, only good business, added on top of getting your group into a like minded place, which will help you get your training method across.

But here's the root of the problem.

Horses don't follow cookie cutter rules.

While one young colt may very well accept being broke (excuse me, gently introduced into joining heart and soul with their human companion) in three days with a bunch of other hapless youngsters, others might not.

If you're selling a method, it ripples the waters of your horse man ship to have them not conform. So there has to be answers.

Go back, reintroduce the basics - the exact same way - and keep at it until the miscreant catches up.

If this doesn't work, it must be the owners fault. The trusting, check writing owner who believes every word coming out of your mouth, and knows if they truly understood the mind of their little horse, they would have gotten it by now. Because it sure works on the videos and the books and the RFD channel...

But how can a horse person, inexperienced enough to be at one of these clinics in the first place, know any different? Nobody taught them they need to read how much their horse can absorb at one time. Or how much repetition said horse will put up with before turning the whole process back on them and developing a vice.

Nobody taught them the way to safely start a colt is by having ridden and learned about horses on at the very least, one, older, safe mount that can give you the time to learn to read them. So it must be their fault right?

Repetition is taught as the way to work through this. Ground work in the round pen is the key.

Except again, nobody tells you that repetitive motion, say continuous round pen work or  teaching them to yield, left, right, left, right on the end of a ten foot lead will totally trash their legs.  As in cripple them. Faster than a speeding reining trainer on a two-year-old, quicker than any rollkur dominatrix with a double bridle and definitely sooner than some old ranch hand that slaps a saddle on em, bucks em out and heads out to ride the herd.

Cathy Atkinson republished a great FHOTD post on conditioning polo ponies on FB yesterday. I seriously recommend reading it.

http://fuglyblog.com/2011/01/08/best-of-fhotd-conditioning-its-not-just-for-your-hair/

There's not a circle or round pen in it.

The only way to avoid the potential disappointments and hazards of blind NH training is to have alternative experiences to draw from.

Smart marketing encourages consumers to stick with a name brand. It's how we roll I'm afraid. The marketing behind the NH movement takes basic, sound training practices and turns them into tricks, magic, deep secrets which can only be learned through the guidance of the clinician.

This in turn, encourages many of us to miss out being horsaii, to miss the delight and joy that comes from learning from your horse, because we're tangled up in the mess of cookie cutters thrown at our feet.

So there's problem number one.