[jasonizzy]

you go girl you got it right everyone is a trainer these days and now you have to be natural or you might be doing something wrong and maybe your horse may not respect you. You seem to be doing just fine keep doing what you are.

[Sharpspal]

Originally Posted by littlecelticpony

No, I disagree.
Like I said a few pages back, horses are inherently natural. Methods that work do so because they play into the horse's natural nature. Natural methods produce natural responses.

WE are natural! Don't forget that! We aren't horses but we're still living, breathing beings, just like they are. So we live in a more advanced society than 100, 200, 300 years ago. That shouldn't make us forget what we are.

Er.... Did you even understand my post?

[littlecelticpony]

Originally Posted by Sharpspal

Er.... Did you even understand my post?

Yes. But it's obvious you did not understand mine. That's fine.

[Blistering Winds]

Actually, Shakti.....there is a lot of "good" in the last few posts. Not the BEST, but there is some good in them.



For once in my life, I'm staying out of the heated part of the topic, but I got to throw some gas on it. **Snickers**

You cannot stop what hasn't happened!

I 100% disagree.

I derail so many things that haven't "happened" it is sickening. From being kicked, reared up, struck out, etc. Depending on who I'm working with and what type of background we are dealing with.

You CAN stop what might happen. HOW you stop it? easy. Read the warnings. If the horse pins his ears, move his hips away from you. move his front away from you. MOVE THEM. One that moves first, is lower in the pecking order. it is a sign of respect, regardless if they WANT to respect it or not. If you can move them, the fight diffuses down. And you don't GET to the kick, bite, strike, whatever.

Defuse it before it happens, and horses learn what is acceptable to do and when they do the unacceptable, punishment follows, and they put 2 and 2 together and figure that moving away when they dislike the situation is much "nicer" and "easier" on them than to strike out at you.

[JBandRio]

If you keep a horse from breaking gait, then you stopped the end action before it occurred. You read that the horse was thinking about breaking - he slowed down, or came above the bit, or got hollow, whatever the signs were. So yep, you sure can stop something from happening.

[Banat]

[quote=MaggieSue;2192244]You cannot stop what hasn't happened! quote]
Of course you can stop what hasn't happened. It's called being an good horseman- you anticipate a situation, you read the horse and you direct the horse before their thought becomes an action.
When my horse drops his nose in the dirt, makes some circles/paws at the ground he is going to lay down. If I don't want him to lay down I ask him to pick his head up. Effectively stopping what hasn't happened!



now I feel like I should follow this up with Ripley's Believe it... or not!

[MaggieSue]

When my horse drops his nose in the dirt, makes some circles/paws at the ground he is going to lay down. If I don't want him to lay down I ask him to pick his head up. Effectively stopping what hasn't happened!

this isn't even close to my situation.

You CAN stop what might happen. HOW you stop it? easy. Read the warnings. If the horse pins his ears, move his hips away from you. move his front away from you. MOVE THEM. One that moves first, is lower in the pecking order. it is a sign of respect, regardless if they WANT to respect it or not. If you can move them, the fight diffuses down. And you don't GET to the kick, bite, strike, whatever.

And IF he would've been doing those things-I would've stopped it-HE DID NOT-AND AGAIN I WAS THERE-YOU WEREN'T.
And since I have had horses for 20years and worked on hundreds of others doing massage and working with them, and this is the ONLY TIME I have even been even close to being kicked-I have a feeling I'm doing something right!

If you keep a horse from breaking gait, then you stopped the end action before it occurred. You read that the horse was thinking about breaking - he slowed down, or came above the bit, or got hollow, whatever the signs were. So yep, you sure can stop something from happening.

Please don't tell me you're comparing this to my horse kicking. That was a totally different thing JB. And if you had any sense, you'd know that. This is getting to the point of ridiculous. I don't fall for all the 'right brain/left brain' predator stuff either, the horses learn from repetition, same as we do. Few horses have been in the wild, so they are no longer prey to anything. Natural horsemanship is anything but-unless you turn a horse loose on the prairie...it won't be natural.

[jessetjames]

few im not the only one that has to smack my horse to back up. if my horse wont back up i wont just sit there. ill do the same thing as you do trickpony (and hope nobody sees me and yells at me lol

[wyldterv]

Originally Posted by cd_horton

Why must we all label ourselves and others as NH followers or non-NH followers...ones skill and technique as a horseman/woman can only be found in one location...THEIR HORSE....when I see a really nice horse willingly working for its handler...the last thing that comes to my mind is..."wonder if that is a NH trained horse or not?"

I don't lable myself as any stylized trainer... I use pressure and release methods which since the dawn of man and horse relationship has been what works..... HOW much pressure and what kind I apply depends entirely on each individual horse I personally giggle at the 'hype' put into the TERM 'NH' but have been using many of the principals of it for YEARS and YEARS (can we say 32 now, eek, lol)....

The key to any successful relationship between a prey (horse, sheep, cow, deer, antelope, Elk, etc) and a predator( man, wolf, cougar, Dog, fox, hyenia) is that the PREDATOR learns how to DIFFUSE their threatening body language to the PREY (the horse) AND they also learn to read for the very subtle signs that the prey is ready to bolt or to fight and again, diffuses that situation... THAT is TRUELY "Natural" horsemanship... learning to read "Horse" and diffuse the predator 'speak' of our body language and actions so that the horse reads us more as prey as well instead of outright predator...

AND to the person who said that they "don't buy into that predator, right side, left side" way of thinking??? (I believe it was Maggie Sue, who after 20 yrs of owning horses and working for top vets for over 10 yrs SHOULD already know this ) It is NOT a made up load of balongy... it has scientific basis behind it... MANY MANY studies have been done on how the prey/predator relationships interact. If you do NOT choose to recognize that a prey animal *(the horse)* thinks and reacts on an ENTIRELY different logic basis then we humans do, this is where you can get yourself into trouble at some point in time.

Animals do communicate to us in very subtle ways. Sometimes we read those signals clearly, sometimes, for various reasons, we don't see the signals and end up getting kicked or if it is a dog, bit.... but 100% of the time, even if it's only a 1 second warning, a warning is issued. With my old Appy who I had to work so hard to rehab, she'd come up and be all lovey with any man and then in a mere nan-second she'd tighten her lip, flare her nostrils and KICK.... It took 3 times of that behavior before I saw clearly her signal and was able to correct the fact that she was even THINKING it was OK to act in that manner around ANY human male (she never did it around women).... AND while they're busy communicating to us, they're also busy reading us to see if they're going to end up with a consequence they don't want to deal with.

Training is training in all reality... SOME of it is good, some of it is down right silly and some of it is really really unsafe and a bad deal for the horse and the human both. You can label it anything you want, but the reality is that NH is just a form of Pressure and release which in truth is the basis of the majority of all training techniques.

Some people use the pressure and release of side reins, some of draw reins, some use the pressure of a whip to get forward motion going with teh relase being inthe fact that the whip is not 'chasing' the horse. Some use a bit, a halter, if you think about how you interact with your horse, it is Almost ALL 100% a form of applying SOME kind of subtle (to NOT so subtle) pressure and then the release of that pressure when the horse reacts in the manner which we want.

The BIGGEST difference in NH over some other styles of training is that the ideology of NH is to set up the horse to make the RIGHT THING EASY and THE WRONG THING HARD.... in other words, you TRY to set them up to succeed and get an instant release from pressure when they choose the right action.

[Haas Horse Farm]

Very well put. The other thing we often forget is horses all have a sense of humor and do not treat all humans equally.