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Finding Peace with Horses

Horses of History:  Bucephalus

2/24/2016

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One HELL of an Endurance Horse
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How many fathers do you know would give an unbroken, unrideable  horse to their twelve year old son and tell that boy: you tame him, you can have him.

The horse was named Bucephalus, King Phillip of Macedonia was the father, and the twelve year old boy was Alexander, the future conqueror of much of the known world at that time.  Alexander, as the story goes, was so astute that he noticed that Bucephalus was afraid of his own shadow, so he turned the him into the sun and also took off the cloak he was wearing, which was flapping in the breeze.
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True story or just a legend, we will never know;  but is this one of the earliest recorded instances of how to deal with a spooky horse?  Certainly it shows the value of careful observation and good common sense as they apply to horse training
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Look Dad - no shirt, no shoes, no helmet!

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Book Review: True Unity - by Tom Dorrance

2/17/2016

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Why Tom Dorrance is a Must Read

Tom Dorrance is legendary; many people believe he is one of the greatest horsemen who ever lived; certainly the greatest horseman to come out of the American West in the early 20th century, along with his brother Bill and their friend Ray Hunt. 

His books have a reputation for being hard to understand; esoteric, even mystical. Tom himself says “When I am trying to put it into words and am right there where the horse can respond, and the person still doesn’t get it, it’s pretty hard to think of words that will take care of it in a book.”

This could very well be in part because “True Unity” isn’t a book about how to train horses, it’s about how to BE around horses, which for someone like Tom was a state of being almost too intuitive to describe, both in person and on the written page.
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Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt, and Tom Dorrance.
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Don't 'Richard Gere' Your Horse

2/10/2016

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​A Few Thoughts on Feel and Timing

We all remember that scene in An Officer and a Gentleman:  Sargent Foley/Lou Gossett Jr.  is screaming at Zack Mayo/Richard Gere, trying to get him to DOR (drop out) of Navy Flight School.

Foley:  I want your DOR!
Mayo:  I ain’t gonna quit!
Foley:  You can forget it, you’re out!
Mayo:  Don’t you do it – don’t!  . . . .   I got nowhere else to go! 


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So here’s the corollary to horse training:  if we start out at the highest level of pressure, and the horse doesn’t respond the way we want him to . . . 
                                                   . . . . we got nowhere else to go!

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7 Tips for Dealing with Anger

2/3/2016

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How to Handle Being Pissed Off

​Do you ever click on an internet link that you know you shouldn’t open?   My “don’t click on that!” links include animal abuse, especially stupid and cruel treatment of horses.  The link I recently clicked on against my better judgement was a video of a woman riding a horse and you could hear the voice of another woman who was supposedly the trainer. 

The horse started to buck, and the “trainer” started to yell:  “Hit him!  Hit him in the head, it hurts more!”  The rider began hitting the horse, and the trainer and other voices on the video were heard urging her on to beat the horse.  It was disgusting.

I had an immediate emotional gut reaction.  I wanted to take a whip and hit that so-called trainer in the face;  how do YOU like it, bitch? 

My heart ached for that horse, surrounded by humans who wanted to beat and hurt him.   But what am I supposed to do with that anger, other than let it seethe inside me, which I know won’t change what happened to this horse.  To carry anger at a video clip populated by total strangers is akin to drinking poison in the hopes that those strangers will get sick and die.

But what CAN we do with our anger.  Isn’t it often justified?
 

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What I want to do when I see someone abusing a horse.

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