A couple of observations about "Natural Horsemanship"

It's fascinating that gentle and go slow are common themes in the various descriptions people have offered for what they think Natural Horsemanship is.

I think these two themes account for a large part of Natural Horsemanship's appeal to people who are ineffective with their horses.  Gentle and go slow validate for a timid person that their timidity is actually a "good way" and... unless they achieve some better understanding... encourages them to continue on their path of being ineffective and creating another "STOMP-A-SAURUS".

Interestingly though, it isn't just Mary Milquetoast rationalizing to herself who uses those words in talking about Natural Horsemanship. Other people -- successful, competent practitioners who have made emotionally stable, well-schooled horses also find those words on the tip of their tongues when they describe what they do. I think the reason is not because those are the important concepts of Natural Horsemanship but rather the ways in which NH differs from the most common abuse scenarios we all see around us. Which is to say, the horse-beaters and face-haulers who pretend to practice dressage and the mouth-rippers and gut-spurrers who call what they do reining or team penning. Saying "NH is gentle and slow" immediately sets it apart from those kinds of behaviors.

Personally, I think that gentle and go slow are SYMPTOMS. Side-effects. Not core techniques. They are the natural result of following the essential principle that informs what NH is about. Namely:

Natural Horsemanship is HORSE TRAINING BASED ON AN ACUTE UNDERSTANDING OF HORSE PSYCHOLOGY and BIOMECHANICS.

If you're proceeding based on such an understanding, what you're after is teaching the horse to do what you want in a manner that is efficient, trauma-free and creates a reliable, willing partner. This doesn't mean you have to go slow. You don't have to be gentle. It's just that for most horses, and most people, going slow and gentle is most always the most effective approach.

However, I can cite example after example which clearly illustrate that the more acute your understanding and accurate your reading of a horse, the faster you can go and get a better result for both you and the horse. Since Buck Brannaman is my favorite exemplar, I'll use him. One of the things I've seen him do time after time is to take a green horse or a seriously screwed up older horse and in a matter of minutes help that horse get things straightened out and find a better way to behave. The change for the horse is SO radical that it does seem like magic to an outside observer. There is no magic though. Just accurate application of simple principles based on careful observation and acute understanding of how this particular horse's head is working. Buck figures out what's troubling that particular horse, finds which path of communication still means something to the horse, and uses that path to show the horse that there is a way for the horse to escape what's bothering him. He starts with any small successful communication he can have with the horse and builds it into something big and robust very quickly by observing honestly and responding accurately.

By this definition, Natural Horsemanship is just a convenient, popularized label for a practice of understanding and interaction that can occur in any tradition of horsemanship. All the other aspects are just style, trappings, marketing or personality cult.

There is a style that is intrinsic to well-practiced Natural Horsemanship. It isn't ONLY found there; other disciplines, when well-practiced feature it too. However it's most often seen in NH because NH tends to attract the sort of people who favor this particular style. By contrast, in other disciplines it may take a very long time to master the "trappings" of the discipline sufficiently to get to the point where it's possible to practice this same style effectively.

This style I'm talking about is the approach one takes when teaching a horse to do something. There are a lot of basic ways to approach teaching. Many people start from a point of view that says "Well, this is just how my horse is." Beginning from this point of view, they often have a terrible time trying to effect change. We see this a lot in new horse people and Mary Milquetoasts. We see a lot of these people out there with carrot sticks and progress strings getting nothing done and falling off their horses every time the horses spook at a plastic bag blowing by.

There's also the style of "I don't much care what your idea WAS, your idea now MUST BE THIS". We see a lot of these folks in dressage. It's a control-freak point of view and appeals to lots of folks whose lives are otherwise out of control. It fits nicely with all the spiff "Dominant" clothing and riding bats and such that are prominent in the dressage community. These folks want to control something absolutely and they've nominated their horse as the controllee regardless of what the horse has to say about it. These folks often get the job done and get their horse to do what they want, but they wind up with a horse that's stiff and hard and insecure and shutdown and not much of a partner. A horse who spooks at nothing and dumps them when they're outside the dressage ring. This isn't unique to Dressage. We also see this type in western competitive riding and the legions of messed-up, psychotic team penning horses and breakaway roping horses bear witness to the damage that can be wrought by a "Yee Haw, Git it DONE, DAMMIT" mentality.

But the "better way" style I'm really talking about... The style you see sometimes in the very best dressage riders and the quiet old cowboys and often in Natural Horsemanship, is a style where you first figure out where your horse is at, then you figure out where you want your horse to be and then you align yourself with your horse and lead your horse to the new way of thinking one step at a time, allowing each step to be the horse's own idea.

Tom and Bill wrote about this, and Ray talks about it as "First you let the horse's idea become yours, then you let your idea become the horse's."

This is really a Taoist point of view. To paraphrase Lao-tse: To change the course of a river, you don't block the flood. It would only overwhelm you. Instead you align yourself with it and move with the flow and then it only takes a small effort to nudge it sideways until eventually it flows in a new streambed.

Doing this isn't easy and depending on how much of a change is required, may take considerable time. It also doesn't take nearly the forcefulness that simply opposing the flow does. Hence, the reputation of NH for slow and gentle.

However, rivers do have a pace to them... sometimes quite rapid. Changing their course does take effort. So if you don't bring determination, willingness to move quickly and a certain forcefulness to the project you will wind up being swept away by the flood just like those Mary Milquetoasts with their carrot sticks we've all seen and you will wind up being squashed by your STOMP-A-SAURUS instead of effecting concrete change in him.

So when you work with your horse, you need to bring it. When you say something, you need to mean it. However, the idea is to use only as much force as is necessary and to always give the horse a way out to avoid the force completely.

The way Ray Hunt and Bonnie Stoehn phrase it is: "When you want your horse to do something... or to stop doing something... you start by asking half as "loud" as the minimum you think is necessary and then you don't stop turning up the volume until you get the result you want. This always gives them the opportunity to surprise you by being better than you think but makes sure you never teach them that it's okay to ignore you because you don't stop until you get the desired result."

Buck's variation on this is "You ALWAYS start by offering him a good deal and then you turn up the heat until he takes it."

As an illustrative example (uh oh, ANOTHER Buck story :p)... A few years ago at the colt starting clinic where I started Captain Jack, a woman brought a beautiful agouti dun stallion to "restart". This woman's feel was so bad that she would beat this stallion in his blind spot with a stud chain when she wanted him to back up. She admitted she could only ride him when he was drugged.

In short, she had taught him to be an outlaw, and he demonstrated it by trying to put his shod forefeet through her head a number of times in the first ten minutes of class. Buck finally took the stallion off her hands and told her to go sit on the fence and contemplate the fact that this horse's behavior was her fault while he worked with the stud for a bit.

I won't go into a blow-by-blow but it took twenty minutes to get things straightened out. At the end of it, the horse wasn't "fixed" but he was on a better path that would lead him to success IF a better owner were to handle him. The process didn't look very slow or gentle though.  The first five minutes of that twenty were awfully... western. It was still a paradise of calm and gentleness compared to what that Stallion was used to though.

What Buck did was incredibly simple and was done purely with a rope halter and a treeline leadrope with a leather popper on the end. No tiedowns, no chains, no bats, no fancy or cruel gear. No drugs or gimmicks.  And he did it from the ground, in a manner that kept himself safe as long as his timing was good and his attention was on what he was doing.

He started by asking the stallion to move out in a circle around him. He did this by opening out his arms and providing slack in the leadrope in the direction he wanted the stallion to go in, and waving the tail end of the leadrope a little toward the stallion's rear end to provide a tiny amount of encouraging pressure. The stallion answered by trying to rear and paw his head off. Just as those front feet came off the ground, the tail end of that leadrope spun and came down on the stallion's nose as hard as Buck could crack him.

Then Buck opened out again and again asked him to go, offering a little pressure on the hind. Up went the stallion and down came the tail of the lead rope smack on his nose. The third time, the stallion only half-reared and Buck only had to yank downward on the lead with good timing and the stallion decided rearing wasn't the answer.

Then the stallion decided that kicking might work, so when Buck opened up the lead again and asked him to move out, he spun his hind end around to bring his guns to bear. Buck just yanked hard and sideways to disengage the stallion's hind end. (I mean HARD, but still not the same kind of hard as if you were to hit him in the hind, trying to accomplish the same thing.) The stallion had no choice but to disengage because if he resisted the sideways pull he'd cross himself up and fall. So as he disengaged, Buck gave him a momentary slack in the leadrope... rewarding him for disengaging as he had been asked to... and then opened the lead out, asking the stallion to move out the other way. The stallion of course tried to line up to kick again and Buck disengaged him again, and then slacked the line to reward him again for following his request even if the stallion was only following it accidentally.

After about ten or fifteen of these, the stallion finally took one step forward when the next opening was offered and Buck IMMEDIATELY took the pressure off and let the stallion chew for a couple of seconds.

It went on from there for another fifteen minutes but it was just successively refined versions of more of the same and by the end of it, the stallion would put his head down for him, let him pet on him, would walk, trot out, change gait and direction, back up, and do it all softly.

so..

Was this soft and gentle? Compared to what the stallion experienced at home, ABSOLUTELY. Compared to what a well-trained horse would experience? No. There was considerable force applied. Buck was *tired* after.

Was this abuse? Not a bit!

The key thing and the entire secret to success was that the *right* force was applied at the *right* time and the stallion ALWAYS had a good deal that he could take to avoid the force all together. What Buck did was not force him to submit or punish him for rebelling but show him that the right thing was easy and the wrong thing was hard and that there was an intelligence that could communicate in a meaningful way on the other end of the leadrope so it was worth the stallion's self-interest to pay attention and go along and if he did so, he would be on easy street.

It's also worth noting that there was none of this "I'm going to lunge him at a canter for a hundred circles to teach him not to..." nonsense. Each step of the lesson was direct, simple cause-and-effect that built one on the other to help the stallion learn what he could do to keep himself on easy street and out of trouble.