The Holy Grail of Horsemanship

I know you got all excited reading the title of this article, but there is no Holy Grail of training horses. When I first became interested in training horses rather than just riding them, I thought there must be some magical SOMETHING that “good” trainers knew that was the key to their success. Surely, there must be some essential bit of knowledge, and once I possessed it when I too would be a “good” trainer.  I eventually learned that there is no such thing.

To learn to be “good” is not even really a realistic goal. What is a “good” trainer, anyway? To my mind it is someone who is effective at communicating with a horse, regardless of discipline. I have distilled that effective trainers have toolkits of knowledge that they can apply to horses as individuals to achieve results. As someone once told me, the difference between an amateur and a professional is that amateurs have the ability to do anything with most horses given enough time and inclination. Professionals MUST be able to do anything with almost all horses in limited time, regardless of whether or not they like the horse. This means a toolkit for effective communication.

No matter what a trainer is teaching a horse to do, there are several things we all have had to learn: feel for timing of aids on the ground and under saddle, an eye for movement, patience, and a love for the process.

Learning feel is what stumps some people. “Feel” is an elusive, ephemeral thing that always flits around just out of reach. If you are lucky enough to ride a great movement one day, you must develop the ability to code that feeling so that you can achieve it next time and the next. Feeling on the ground goes along with an eye for movement. Musicians develop ears, we as trainers develop eyes. When we are working a horse, trainers see and feel correct movement together and push the horse towards better balance on the basis of that information. Patience is the ability to let go of your days training schedule and spend four hours teaching a nervous baby horse how to load into the trailer, or spending 3 months getting a stiff horse to loosen the shoulder, or any number of potentially frustrating situations that horses constantly throw at us. The love of the process has to be the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Perfection is unattainable; there is no end to the process of training a horse. There is always one more thing to work on.

The pursuit of these skills and traits is the closest we can get to the holy grail of horsemanship.