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Mike Sherrell said:

> "If you can win a battle of strength with any horse, that
> horse isn't worth having" is exactly wrong: in order to
> "have" a horse you will make it realize that ultimately
> it will lose a battle of strength.
I think we may be dealing with a gender issue here.

Most women are made aware pretty early in  their lives that if they want
to
have any measure of contol that they will have to figure out some way to
assert it without engaging is battles of strength, that they are almost
guaranteed to lose.

For me, Mike Sherrell's statement above is about the equivalent of
telling a
woman that in order to "have" a husband you will make your husband
realize
that he will ultimately lose a battle of strength.

Which to any woman would be considered patently absurd.

Fortunately, Mike is wrong about horses, and we can exert some measure
of
control over them without ever engaging in a battle of strength with
them.
In fact, if horses chose to exert their full strength in battles with
their
human handlers, the human handlers would lose every time.  You cannot
engage
in a successful battle of strength with something bigger, stronger, and
faster than you are.

And I will agree, if my horse isn't bigger, stronger, and faster than I
am,
there isn't much point in having it.

Personally, I go way out of my way to avoid engaging in any kind of
battles
with my horse.  Once I engage in a battle, one of us is going to have to
lose it.  If I lose the battle, the horse learns a really BAD lesson
(i.e.
"I can win fights with my human handler").

If it is the horse that loses the battle, then what I have taught the
horse
is to be a loser, to quit.

I want my horse to think that he is God, and that there is nothing he
cannot
do.  That way, if I ask him to leap tall buildings in a single bound, he
will try.  Horses that have been taught to give in, or horses that give
in
easily are not the type that will try in the face of adversity.

The last thing that I want to teach my horse is: "When the going gets
tough,
quit."

And if you ask me, horses that are TRUELY worth having (i.e. the ones
that
are "great") simply cannot be taught to give in.  So if you want to own
a
great horse and be able to get it to do what you ask, you are going to
have
to find some other way to convince the horse to comply with your wishes
than
engaging in battles with it, whether they be battles of strength or not.

kat
Orange County, Calif.
:)




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