What is Natural Horsemanship?
These days many people are talking and debating about “Natural Horsemanship.” We are trying to define what is and isn’t natural; and what does and doesn’t belong in “Natural Horsemanship.” I don’t know who came up with this term, or what their intent behind the term was. However, to truly understand the phrase we must first understand the words within the phrase. The word natural is derived from the word nature. Nature consists of many different opposing forces that create the whole cycle: life and death, growth and destruction, serenity and upheavals, love and violence, splendor and distress, contentment and fear. On one hand, nature can be very cruel. For example, watch a mountain lion stalk and kill a fawn. It doesn’t make any of us feel very warm and content inside, yet it does make us feel very respectful, very small, and in awe of the whole of nature. Does the fact that the lion (in this case) killed the fawn make him wrong or evil? In nature’s eyes neither the lion nor the fawn
The term “natural horsemanship” was coined1 by one of the art’s more recent practitioners to put a name to methods of training horses based on a thorough knowledge and appreciation of equine behavior; thus, cooperative communication and understanding in the development of unity and harmony with the horse is the goal, rather than dominance or force. The art is not new: the Greek general and horseman, Xenophon, penned the basic tenets of what we now call natural horsemanship in his treatise The Art of Horsemanship, written in 360 B.C. Since then, there have been many “schools” of horsemanship based on forming a partnership with a horse that include horse-friendly and horse-considerate methods. The recent proponents of the art of natural horsemanship include the late Tom and Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Ronnie Willis. They, in turn, have influenced many of the current clinicians and practitioners of natural horsemanship (though the art is often called by different names) including Sammy Ry
Natural horsemanship is a discipline of horse training which believes that trainers should work with horses, using gentleness, body language, and trust to establish a relationship, rather than against the horse, with brute force. Numerous people work within the framework of natural horsemanship, developing their own personal styles and passing them on to the riders and horses that they work with. The common thread between trainers who appear to have radically different natural horsemanship techniques is that they build a friendly relationship with the horse, rather than an adversarial or tense one. Trainers believe that natural horsemanship techniques result in a calm, agreeable horse who cooperates with his or her rider in a partnership. As the name implies, natural horsemanship focuses on the natural traits of horses, looking at the ways in which horses communicate with each other. There is a heavy emphasis on body language, which is used as a communication tool by horses from a very
Natural Horsemanship (NH), sometimes referred to as “Horse Whispering,” really has nothing to do with literal whispering, though it’s probably still a good representation of what NH is all about, because “whispering” connotes a “softness” approach, and that indeed is what NH is all about. But, it’s also more than that.
