09/03/2024
So very true
Pat Parelli's concept of pressure release is simple. He said, "There are four phases to applying pressure. Each phase becomes progressively and smoothly more insistent, pushing a little harder and making it increasingly uncomfortable for the horse if he doesn't move. The instant the horse responds by moving away, or even tries to respond, immediately release all the pressure!"
The problem I have with his teaching is how it was aimed at do-it-yourself amateurs who didn't have the judgement, based on experience, to read the horse. For example, "pushing a little harder and making it increasingly uncomfortable for the horse if he doesn't move", what does that mean? What is "a little harder?" And what is "increasingly uncomfortable?" I've known some horses that "a little harder" meant getting a 2x4 and others that it meant taking a step toward them. Likewise, I have known horses that for them "increasingly uncomfortable" meant they were ready to kill me, and others that meant they'd turn their head to look at me.
Even with all his videos, books and clinics, his cookbook recipe-like approach lacked any real requirement for judgment. "Making it increasingly uncomfortable for the horse" is not how I think about it. Instead, I want to see curiosity first. Also, how does the average person gain the judgement to perceive when a horse "tries to respond". That takes a lot of experience and without it, knowing when to "immediately release all the pressure" is a very difficult moving target to hit.
Parelli tried to create a do-it-yourself, packaged horse training system that would make everyone a horse trainer. Instead, he invented a new discipline, groundwork, that before Parelli was a step in training that prepared a horse for a discipline. It's like teaching people how to make bread dough that they never put in the oven to bake, and they keep doing it.
One side effect of his system was that Parelli undermined local horse trainers who became "obsolete" to the millions of newly minted backyard horse owner trainers. I remember when I started getting calls from horse owners who tried the Parelli method and could not make it work, but they still wanted his system for their horse. They'd call me about training their horse and they insisted I use the Parelli method. When I tried to explain them that would be like a chef microwaving a prepackaged meal, and that I made meals from scratch with selected ingredients, they hung up.
Parelli's wake can still be felt today. We have thousands of people for whom groundwork as their discipline and nothing else. We have thousands of horses are bored by the system's repetition. We also have a shortage of well trained horse trainers after Parelli undermined the credibility of the profession with his "anyone can train a horse" marketing principle.
But most of all Parelli's method, that lacked any required judgement, caused young people to stop learning how to truly read horse behavior, and that led to all kinds of relationship fantasies and made up ideas on everything from equipment to horse care. Well meaning people were taught to follow a recipe and nothing else. This is a big problem today. Situational awareness, when training a horse, is the foundation of real horse training and with any packaged system, the situation is an assumed to be a one-size-fits-all "average horse" when each horse is a little or a lot different.
Parelli setback horsemanship. I run into his mindset today in people who never heard of him. His simplistic, often hollow ideas are now a widespread and have become a generally accepted perspective on horse training, and it's wrong. It's wrong because it doesn't ask the right questions.
Horsemanship begins with asking questions. Apprenticing with an experienced horse trainer and watching how horses answer their questions is the opposite of a cookbook. It is committing to a process with a completely unknown outcome. It is an exercise in detachment from expectation. It is a meditation on being present with a very different species.
How anyone could think that they could slice and dice horse training, stuff it in a package, and think it would work, had to be nuts. Or, someone saw a void in the lives of so many idealistic horse lovers prone to illusions about horses, and the relationship with horses, and they got a business idea. They filled some bottles with snake oil, and they sold it.
