Training of Our Horses
.
Training horses (and people) is the most important part of horse ownership. There's certainly no mystery to how we train our horses - we use a pretty strong combination of Monty Roberts with a bit of John Lyons. Monty comes from a horse family - his
.
I'm not pulling your leg here in any way!
We've gone there!
We've watched this incredible man of 75 years take an "unbroken" horse and have a rider on his back in a totally relaxed atmosphere, in full rig
.
in 22 minutes!
.
Click this line to check out what we saw in Harrisburg, PA, on June 8, 2002.
Miracles! There's no other way to describe it.
.
His father would have taken 2-3 weeks to do the same thing, but he'd have had a horse that was an emotional wreck. Using Monty's methods, we've got horses that work with us willingly and happily.
Our horses have so much faith in us that one of them actually rescued me out of a rather bad situation, but that's another story.
.
Anyway, first thing any horse owner learns is just how intelligent these creatures really are - they learn ANYTHING the first time, and they remember everything. If you whip a horse, he learns fear. If you join-up (to use Monty's terms) with a horse he learns kindness. One of our horses was severely beaten by his previous owner - it's taken us more than 6 months to convince him that we aren't going to do the same thing, and he's still not completely convinced, probably never will be. Two of our horses haven't ever even seen a whip - and never will.
This is the treatment we extend to our own guys and gals. Every one of them has his own personality and "phobias" that we've learned to deal with, every one of them has a somewhat different requirement for training. Kindness and understanding - that's the key to the whole thing. We can work with our guys for just a few minutes, using Monty's methods, and achieve the same (actually, better) results as a cowboy of the old breed would achieve in several weeks. The best part of it is that we have a horse doing what we want through desire, not fear of pain. Having a horse want to do things for you is a real joy and I implore anyone who has horses to adopt this method of working with them - it's worth it!!!
.
There's also a directory, below, if you'd like to press on to somewhere else.