I agree with those who note that Parelli is not a “training
system” but rather, a way of looking at and – hopefully –
understanding your horse’s behavior and then coming up with a method to
encourage your horse to do your bidding. A small, but illustrative, event
this past Sunday may better explain what I’m getting at. My son and
I were tacking up our horses. Lucas was working with Diego, my wife’s
horse. Unbeknownst to me, he had brought along a new bosal rather than
Diego’s normal cowboy halter. I just finished saddling Hermano when
I saw Luke struggling to get the unfamiliar bosal on Diego. He was
clearly frustrated because every time he came close to Diego’s head with
the halter, Diego reared. While Diego wasn’t threatening him, (his feet
weren’t trying to strike out, but it was clearly a dangerous situation
for both the horse and my son.) Meanwhile, Luke was tugging and swearing
as only a 25-year-old testosterone-prone young man can. There was a time
I might have found myself doing the same. But thanks, in large part, to the
Parelli program, I quickly understood that Diego wasn’t being ornery, as
my son had concluded, he was scared of something brand new being put on his
head. So I went over and took the bosal from his hand, calmed the horse
down and began calmly rubbing it all over his body then his neck and finally
his face. Then I asked the horse to lower his head and I simply slipped
the strange halter on. No fuss, no muss. Now this was no great feat
of horsemanship. And it wasn’t necessary to have learned Parelli to
do it. But to Luke, it was like a miracle. I explained to him that the
horse simply needed to be reassured and shown that the halter was harmless. It
took all of a minute and a half. Now there was no Parelli lesson showing you
how to put a strange halter on a suspicious horse. Instead, the lessons
are about reading the horse, understanding it motivations and then developing a
technique to assert your will. To me, that is the real value of Parelli.
