What is “Natural Horsemanship"?
Natural horsemanship is the best training method for horses, but it doesn’t mean following religiously any one person’s particular technique. Natural horsemanship is a gentle training because it works with the horse’s natural behavior and not against it. This gentle, not forceful, training precludes the use of any mechanical devices.
Actually, everyone is a trainer: every time you are with your horse, you are teaching him something. Perhaps what you may be teaching may--or may not--be a good thing but, in the end, you are your horse’s ultimate trainer.
Natural horsemanship is communicating with the horse using body language. Horses have an innate knowledge of body language, which is reinforced by the mother to the foal from the time of birth. The foal must become familiar with this form of communication because it is used by the entire herd.
For the human, this body language is translated into learning to communicate with the horse by various ways in which you use your own body. How you use your eyes, learning the placement of your whole body or parts of it, what your tone of voice conveys, how to use “pressure” and “release of pressure”, how to understand what the response of the horse is---all of these must be learned in order to effectively communicate with —and, thus, train—your horse.
Some of the more difficult things to understand in natural horsemanship are, first, the concept of “pressure and release”: many people find it hard to relate to the fact that the horse learns NOT from the pressure, but from the release of the pressure and, second, the timing of release of pressure. Once a rider learns these concepts, training becomes a simple matter of consistency.
What many people do not fully understand is that time and patience play significant roles in the successful training of a horse. The horse has no sense of time and can only learn at his own pace, which generally does not translate to “instant” results. As Pony Boy says, “It takes the time it takes.” Patience is not only needed because our sense of time does not compute with the horse, but also because each horse is different and learns at his own pace. So what one horse learns seemingly quickly may not apply to any other horse.
And, finally, anger has no place in the training of the horse. The horse does not understand it and it is a futile gesture that serves only to impede the training, if not sabotage it.
