07/15/2022
I love this and totally agree 🥰
On Monday, Christine Fras asked a wonderful question. I was going to reply to her directly, but I found myself typing so many words I thought I’d put up the answer as a post.
Thank you, Christine, for the question. I loved answering it. And you gave me the opportunity to pay tribute to all the people who have got me here. Every word I write is thanks to the wisdom of people who have been here before me, doing the work, thinking the thoughts, putting the horse at the heart of everything they do. I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Here is the question:
‘Is there a name for this type of work/philosophy? My child really loves to ride and wants to work with animals in the future. I think this would benefit them as they move beyond high school.’
Here is the answer:
What a great question. It doesn’t have a name that I know. I just call it good horsing. The horsemanship I have learnt comes down from the mighty triumvirate of Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt. Tom Dorrance taught Ray Hunt, and Ray Hunt taught Buck Brannaman, who is probably the best known person doing it today.
The person I found who changed the way I look at things is called Warwick Schiller and he has a brilliant online academy where you can subscribe and watch hundreds of training videos. Warwick saved me from shame and despair. I was on the verge of giving up when I found him, because the red mare was rearing and spooking and plunging about, hurling her head and terrified of everything. She was scared and I was scared and I didn’t know what to do about it. Warwick gave me a structure and method to move slowly forward. He gave me hope. I became so enchanted by all this that I went on an odyssey of learning.
I was lucky enough to work with two magnificent horsemen in real life - Robert Gonzales and Justin Colquhoun. Then I discovered the fabulous Jane Pike at Confident Rider, who also runs online courses, and who changed so many of the ways I look at myself and the world. She had a transformative effect, and I use the ideas she taught me every day.
Anna Blake also opened my eyes, with her dauntless advocacy for the horse. She challenged me, and I’m endlessly grateful for that. And I’m always finding new people to learn from, most lately Amy Skinner, who writes beautiful posts almost every day and whose every word is golden.
In other words, it takes a village. What unites all these people is that they are there for the horse, not for their own glory. That was perhaps my biggest change: I was showing up for my mares, not for my own self. There’s the lovely paradox of good horsing, right there: if you go down to the field asking ‘What can I do for my horse?’ you end up getting everything you need. You are not demanding; you are giving. But that is how you get. If you devote yourself to their happiness, they will offer you more than you could have dreamed.
What delighted me and fascinated me, about halfway through this grand voyage, was that I started to see that I did not need to change my horses, I needed to change myself. That was when I cast the net wider. I get a lot of my philosophy from people who didn’t give a fig about horses - the Stoics, professors of neuroscience, experts in the human psyche. The more I can find my own Place of Peace, the more I can give that to my mares.
You asked about children. Another wonderful question. I’ve had a posse of young girls for the last few years, most of whom did not have horses of their own, so I invited them to come and play with the red mare. Some of them came to me as young as eight or nine. A lot of the work we do is very slow and might not seem particularly exciting to a child. But if I was having children in the field with my thoroughbreds, I had to teach them these basics, to keep them safe.
So I started to think of ways to take these foundational horsing principles and make them fun. I use my imagination; I ask them to use their imagination. We have invented a lot of games. What amazed me was how they took to it. It’s not galloping about across country, jumping everything in sight, which is what I loved to do when I was their age. It involves quite a lot of very grown-up qualities, like patience and empathy and managing expectations.
Yet, they all got it. We had one or two drop-outs, but I’ve found that they love getting to know the mares on a profound level. They take a huge amount of satisfaction in giving the horses what they need. They will quite often choose not to ride, if one of the mares is a bit jangly or scratchy, and do some gentle work on the ground instead.
At the heart of this philosophy, for me, is the idea of being friends with your horse. Of being a friend for your horse. And children adore that idea. We get more satisfaction out of finding the best of the sweet spots and scratching it, so our mares fall into a swoon of pleasure, than in cantering or jumping.
It’s a way of being. I always wanted to win stuff. I’ve written about that here often. It’s what I grew up with. Now, the only silver cup I want to win is the one that says: every day, I am a better human for my mares. If they have joy, I have joy. And then we all win.
#}