ridecamp@endurance.net: Re: Natural Horsemanship -- NOT

Re: Natural Horsemanship -- NOT

JOSEPH PETER UHLARIK JR (jpu@kaiwan009.kaiwan.com)
Sun, 5 Oct 1997 21:37:44 -0700 (PDT)

It bothers me to see Natural Horsemanship attached to the wheat in the box
concept. Simply put, that is not natural horsemanship.

I do not feel that this is the lsit to get into a long discussion about
NH. However, there is an e-mail list devoted to that subject. BTW, this
question of the box was discussed there weeks ago. It may be possible
to go through the archives for that list and dig up some or many or all
of the posts related to this box idea.

If someone is interested in NH, I would suggest join the NH list, and
look at material by Dorrance, Hunt, Brannaman, Monty Roberts (video and
in-person demos -- am not sure that his book gives that much about horse
training), Wolters, Parelli, Whitney and a few others. There is a catch
though that there are also some folks out there claiming that they use
NH. IMO, that is a partial truth. Some of the folks use NH some of the
time and resort to other techniques some of the time.

I suspect I could go on for quite awhile but I would feel more comfortable
doing it on the NH list. Things like what the horse was "saying" while in
the box; blatant warning signs; followup statistics related to the horses
subjected to the box method; tipoffs given by the "trainers" that were
significantly different than how a NH trainer acts near a horse that
is being trained. Now do not get me wrong. The trainers on PBS did not
do everything wrong. Therein lies the problem. How does one separate
out the few acceptable things from the blatantly poor (from a NH perspective)
things. From a pragmatic viewpoint, it is best (IMO) to simply go elsewhere
and start with someone that knows how to do it.

NH is a philosophy. It is an approach. There is an underlying concept.
The folks with the box completely missed this. With the wrong philosophy
it is doubtful that a person will develop the correct answers as new
situations arise. (If someone thinks that any two horses are alike and
the same procedures can be used in an identical way, that is a strong
tipoff that they have missed the underlying philosophy. Superficially
it might appear that things are identical but if the trainer is not
tuned into the horse that is being trained and working with it as an
individual, then the NH principle is not being applied. (That does not
mean that folks striving to do NH do not stray from the philosophy at
times, but the problem is then with the human and not with the horse. :-) )

Gee, folks, that is the short response.

Are you not glad that I am not going to send the long response????? :-)

Enough/Too much for now :-)

Joe jpu@kaiwan.com

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