Basis Equine

01/08/2026

I don’t think Legs is too keen on this whole touching thing.

July 22nd. (Yes. Last week)

28/07/2026

The best young mare. 4th of July warm up laps. Ride # 10

27/07/2026

4th of July! Alca, ride # 10. The best three year old ever.
I’m obviously a few weeks late on this post. But yes, Alca and I joined our local pony club crew and strolled down Spring Street for our small town 4th of July Parade for her 10th ride. Not a lot of young horses that would have been able to handle this. She took it all in stride. Low flying airplanes, bag pipes, marching band, hundreds of people and many children. She was a calm and steady rockstar.

16/07/2026

New kid in the barn. Legacy, has been out of BLM holding for several months. He did not find success with his first trainer and has had this halter and drag line on for a while now. I am his second stop. I do not keep halters and drag lines on any of my horses, even the wild ones. The risks are not worth it in my eyes. He arrived here on Sunday night, and on Monday he allowed me to take it off. He has a small sore from it, but I fully expected worse.

I was not sure what I was getting into when I agreed to take him on for this client. So far I’m pleasantly surprised and I like him a lot!

01/07/2026

My first hackamore. Paracord over lariat core. I’m very proud of the nose button. Less so on the heel knot. Let’s just call this a first draft. Worn by my first draft 😉.
More to come for sure as I really enjoyed the process. Eventually I’ll be ready to tackle a new material and try rawhide!

28/06/2026

This valley feels pretty magical.

22/06/2026

Good intentions don’t replace good technique

As the horse world increasingly explores intention, relationship, and the emotional side of horsemanship, I sometimes worry that we risk overlooking something equally important: technique.

If you want to become a musician, you practice scales. It isn’t always exciting, but it creates the foundation that allows expression, creativity, and artistry to emerge. Once the technique is solid, you can create something uniquely your own.

Horsemanship is no different.

Good intentions matter. The desire to be kind, connected, and understanding matters. But our horses don’t experience our intentions directly—they experience what is communicated through our bodies, our timing, our tools, and our feel.

If we haven’t developed the technical skills to support those intentions, the message can become unclear. What feels soft and thoughtful to us may arrive to the horse as confusing, inconsistent, or even unsettling.

I’ve spent countless hours with teachers refining seemingly simple things: how I hold a lead rope, a flag, a lunge line, how I pick up a rein, how I organize my body before asking a question. Repetition of small details can feel tedious, but those details shape the conversation we have with the horse.

The intention was always there. The challenge was learning how to communicate it clearly.

Practice your scales. Be willing to examine the basics and receive feedback on them. The horse people who become truly effective are rarely the ones with only good ideas or good intentions. They are the ones who combine intention with skill, and who keep refining both throughout their lives.

Relationship, emotional awareness, and understanding can set the direction. Technique is what allows us to communicate those things clearly. One without the other leaves the conversation incomplete.

Photo by Jesse Cardew

16/06/2026

This!! Hind end disengagement can be a useful tool as a safety maneuver. You can take all the power out of the engine. I was already headed away from it in my training and then I rode a couple horses I would call “disengaged to death” and that rapidly changed some long ingrained ideas for me.

One of the quickest ways to identify someone who can’t ride is to watch their groundwork.

If every problem is solved by disengaging the hindquarters, you’re not training a horse. You’re avoiding the problem.

Somewhere along the way a bunch of people who couldn’t get things done from the saddle decided they’d do everything from the ground instead. Now we’ve got an entire generation of horses that can yield their hindquarters, lick their lips, and walk circles around a person all day, but fall apart the second someone asks them to actually perform.

The hindquarters are the engine.Yet these people spend every day teaching horses how to disconnect the engine. Then they wonder why the horse won’t stay straight, won’t stay between the reins, won’t hold a circle, won’t stop correctly, won’t spin correctly, won’t leave on the right lead, and can’t stay connected to a steer.

Well no s**t.

Every time you tipped the horse’s nose, you taught him to throw his ass away from pressure instead of carrying himself through it.Now every turn becomes a turn on the forehand.
Every correction creates more disconnect. And years later you’re trying to fix a problem you created in the first week.

The natural horsemanship crowd loves talking about softness, but most of them have never had to run one into a stop, turn one at speed, rope off one, or show one with money on the line. Because if they did, they’d realize performance comes from engagement, not disengagement. Disengagement is a tool. It’s not a philosophy. And if your horse spends more time yielding its hindquarters than driving off them, don’t be surprised when the horse is just as ineffective at its job as the person training it!
Written by Dusty Harvey 🔥