Why Horses?

Hanna & Sarah riding 'Baby Girl' working on Vaulting outside Shanghai, China

Somebody very smart told me when I was a horse crazy 9 year old that 90% of working with horses is caring for them - 10% is riding them. It was through experience I learned the sense of accomplishment that accompanied this ratio of work to play.

So, why horses?

Frankly, because horses are not like people.

Horses are very large, very strong and very fast animals. In fact, horses are larger, stronger and faster than any human. They are not pieces of machinery you can master with 100% accuracy and service every 5,000 kms, nor can we dominate them physically. They require daily care and consideration (as do many farm animals) and domesticated rely on people to provide for their well-being and protection. Through the daily provision of this care situations arise (without fail) due to our differences that challenge our coping abilities and require us to adapt and learn in order to be successful.

We are predators (even the vegetarians!) in the natural world and have evolved as such. Horses are prey (food for predators) and have evolved as such, however - unlike people - horses have never forgotten their place and it remains their nature to be wary of people.

With eyes located on the sides of their head horses see virtually 360 degrees 100% of the time - they see differently than us. Being prey animals horses live in herds for safety - they live differently than us. Built to outrun those who would threaten - they react to danger differently than us. With 95% of communication through body position / gesture - they speak differently than us. As highly instinctual beings - they think differently than us.

As horse people it is our responsibility to learn how a horse communicates, reacts and what his body language is telling us at all times. It is their prey nature that enables us to learn so much from them and our understanding of their nature which allows us to work with them effectively.

We must remain in the moment, present and aware of what the horse is conveying - so we can remain safe, achieve our objective and work in an effective manner; we learn leadership to instill trust in the instinctually skittish horse; we develop self-esteem through success with working with a 900-1500 lb animal; we develop self-respect and boundaries through training the horse to respect our space (and learning what 'our space' is), we learn to understand control - how to obtain it, maintain it and relinquish it; we learn about congruence between our emotions and our bodies, the perceptions of others and the effects; we learn about empathy and how to understand how people and animals think and feel; we learn responsibility for another living being; we learn accountability as the horse reacts to our actions; we learn the value of patience as the long way is usually the fastest when working with horses; we learn self-confidence through our ability to protect, guide and care for something more than 10 times our size and we do all of this in every action of care, every moment we are with a horse.

There are very few other animals or relationships that can offer the same amount of learning opportunities.