DressageArena.org

So called "natural horsemanship" really amounts to nothing more than good old fashioned solid, basic training.

The popular clinicians these days have each put their own twist on it and given it a name. They all do basically the same thing but use their own brands of equipment. Sad that they can market a whip, call it a carrot stick or whatever, and charge mega bucks more than it’s worth just because they endorse it.

Sometimes, the modern day natural horsemanship can involve a lot of ground work and playing with your horse. To each his own. Ground work definitely has it’s merits but should be a means to an end (riding), not a place where you get stuck in the training.

I know some people feel very passionate about "natural" horsemanship and will defend their favorite clinician as being the "best". There are a lot of good trainers out there doing some very good work with horses that don’t have a name for what they do.

i suggest looking it up on youtube

First of all, there is nothing new about so-called "natural horsemanship." It’s very simply training horses with an understanding of how they naturally think, using that understanding to get the horse to want to do what you’re asking him to do (essentially, pressure-release) and this has been being done for hundreds (actually thousands) of years in Europe.

You do not need:
Expensive and cutely named training tools
Expensive, slickly packaged dvds and booklets
Caps, jackets, t-shirts with a trainer’s name on them
Esoteric knowledge of certain contrived "games"

What you do need is an understanding of how horses think, which you can get by:

Spending time with them and using your own brain
Watching and talking to a trainer who has this ability
Watching DVDs produced by certain trainers
Reading any of the hundreds of excellent books that have been written on the subject of horse training, beginning with Xenophon’s "The Art of Horsemanship" on through Littauer and Klimke and on through to Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt and into John Lyons and Chris Cox (did he write a book?).

That all said, any training method is fine as long as it doesn’t include coercion or pain, and the result is an obedient horse who is more calm, relaxed and cooperative than when the training began.

I usually take bits and pieces from natural and traditional training techniques. I love the end product that you’ll see from naturally trained horses, but sadly I don’t have the time nor the resources to do it and neither do other people.
I also find that natural horsemanship is a little more straightforward, when taken back to the foundation every single thing you do is based on a pressure/release system. If it’s not pressure/release it’s not natural- as that is the system horses used in herd behavior. So mixing up the two of traditional and natural makes an easy to understand method and quicker on the trainer’s part if it need be.

*By traditional I mean anything that doesn’t directly relate to natural horsemanship. Like training devices and reinforcing the alpha/respect status (not violently).

i like it (: it’s very basic though. there generally isnt any training equipment involved other than a halter, lead rope, and maybe a lunge whip. it’s basically just a calm way of getting your horse to trust you.

For one thing there is nothing natural about a person riding on a wild animal, it is not natural for the Animal or the human. So there is no such thing as Natural Horsmanship if so Horses would be born broke to ride.