Rocky Springs Ranch

11/25/2025

Horses have helped so many people. Thanks Bob for sharing this story.

After a divorce and being without a farm for the first time in many years, I got involved with a gifted PhD therapist who taught me a lot. Together we started an equine therapy program in a locked mental health facility for boys. I did this work for six years. Here is one of many stories I have written about those years.

Horses are powerful as healers. I think most of us who have spent our lives with them have done so largely to feel that feeling of simple strength that somehow makes the tough parts of life OK. Most of the kids in the locked facility Equine Therapy program couldn't get enough of it once they let it in.

There was a kid named Brian, 15 years old, 6' tall, size 14 sneakers, locked up half his life. He was expected to be transferred to an adult locked facility when he reached 18. He had one coping skill, violence. I put Brian on a big muscled unshakeable mare,

Moonlight, a big bay Thoroughbred mare, the kind that will not stop grazing when you go out to get them, so you have to bend over, snap the lead by the ground and raise their head. I had to tell Brian not to jerk her head up too hard. He was very strong.

One time the other boys had taken their horses from the pasture to the barn ahead of Brian. Brian and his horse had not moved a foot. After some angry words and some hard tugs on the rope, Brian started punching Moonlight in the shoulder. The mare was unphased. I yelled to him from 20 feet away, "Be careful, if you punch the shoulder bone you will break all your fingers". He halted a punch halfway to the horse and screamed, "What should I do?" Clinicians call that kind of stopping violence and self regulating a breakthrough.

I told Brian to gently pull the horse off balance to the side and get her walking in a circle. Brian, with surprise, yelled "It worked". Another breakthrough. After 3 or 4 circles he asked, "What now?" I told him to keep circling and put his hand on her as they walked side by side. Then for fun I said, "Say "nice horsey", which he did over and over in a mechanical voice. The picture of Brian, his body relaxed, walking slowly next to that horse, with his hand on her neck was the image of a miracle. The "nice horsey" was the cherry on the sundae.

Eventually I told him to walk out of the circle to the barn, which got another surprised, "It worked." When his therapist got my session notes, she called me and said that was the first time in his history that he resolved a conflict without using violence. Weeks later she told me that Brian, who had refused to speak in group therapy for years, would speak if she asked him how it was going with his horse. She said you couldn't shut him up. In time he was transferred to a transitional housing unit and eventually home to his family.

Years later after nice horsey, they taped Brian's Senior Prom picture with his date up on the cabinet behind the front desk at the locked facility. Moonlight changed Brian's life.

11/25/2025

Thank you Bob for a great article again. Your explanation of being a good trainer and using a method of training as the horse needs it and the possibility of intensity is spot on. No two horses are the same, but they are still horses and need to be trained like horses.

It doesn't matter if you are starting a young prospect or training a horse in the canter pirouette, the horse in training determines the type of training they require. There are three approaches or types, Partnership, Leadership and Supremacy.

Before I get into these types, I want to be clear that bribing horses with treats is not a horse training method. While countless social media "experts" advocate for various forms of treat training, the truth is using treats to train creates a barrier or obstacle between the trainer and the horse.

Riding or driving horses requires a physical connection that in its highest form is unity of balance and motion. We don't have that when training dogs or other animals. Treat based training can be effective with many animals but not with horses because the treats become a distraction from the training process. The treats become an intermediary between the trainer and the horse when an intermediary of any kind, including the intense use of whips, etc. work to separate, not unify the relationship between the horse and the trainer.

Of the three types of training approaches, Partnership, Leadership and Supremacy, we begin applying the principles of Partnership. Horses, being herd animals, have an impulse to be part of a group. To accomplish Partnership, we access this herd impulse that horses can have between us and them. We access this by developing our own "horseness" while we subordinate our human impulses. We create a herd of two, us and the horse.

Developing our "horseness" means thinking and feeling like a horse. Horses have far fewer emotional or intellectual impulses compared to humans, so we limit these impulses in ourselves to meet them where they are. For example, we are not a horse's "mom" or any other human concept of human relationship. Instead we must become like them, physically centered.

This means subordinating our illusions of how horses relate. They don't want or need to be your child. They need instead to be taught to understand where they are in the pecking order of the herd. In a herd of horses teaching includes kicks, bites, threats and intimidating looks or sounds from fellow herd members.

In spite of these equine physical teaching methods, the herd remains unified for mutual protection from predators. Many amateur horse trainers reject the physicality of how horses teach other horses as being cruel. This rejection is a form of humans anthropomorphizing horses. Horses that are bitten or kicked into respecting the herd order do not pout and leave the herd. They stay and accept their position or rank in the herd according to the rules of horseness.

But not every horse that finds themself in a herd with a human trainer accepts the human as the leader. Many horses are genetically programmed to be the herd leader. They believe that you, the trainer as leader is incorrect. They believe they are the leader of the Partnership. With these kinds of horses, the focus of training must shift from establishing a partner relationship to a relationship of clear Leadership by the human trainer. And to be the leader of a herd of horses, you must have sufficient horseness in order to lead effectively.

Once leadership is established and accepted by the horse in training, we can return to a more partnership, fellow herd member connection.

Lastly, some horses are firmly committed to being the leader in their herd of horses and in the human-horse herd of two. What results, as in the pictures of the horses pictured at the bottom, is a contest of Supremacy of leadership. In my first paid training job, the head trainer, Chris Heinrich, told me never get into a fight with a horse that you cannot win. Losing that contest only teaches the horse to become a better fighter.

Most amateur horse trainers don't have enough hoarseness to win a contest of leadership using Supremacy. They shouldn't try. I am not going to explain this level of training except to say that the trainer must control the context of the training. And it doesn't hurt to know how to use a wiffle ball bat, a harmless child's toy, in training.

I hope that if you think this is a useful post you will share it. The quality of horse training is in decline as more people relate to horses primarily projecting human concepts of relationship onto horses. It doesn't occur to them that we must relate to horses as they are, not as what we imagine them to be.

11/16/2025

Darn good time on this run