Another great one from Anna Blake.
Do you remember the very first time you heard the term Natural Horsemanship? I loved the sound of those words together. It felt holistic and honorable, and well, natural.
And there was a gap between what I thought those words should mean and what the work looked like in real life. The concept of pressure and release was supposed to be an improvement over traditional methods. Not some much; my favorite training quote from Xenophon in 430BC,
For what the horse does under compulsion… is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer.
Instead there were frantic horses running in circles or horses so shut down that their eyes were dead. The human had an arsenal of signature halters, whips and ropes. Extreme tack designed to make up for our shortcomings. To be fair, we…
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