The best definition of horsemanship I’ve ever heard came from a ten year old girl that had signed up for one of our summer camps. Her mom shared this with me. When her daughter said she wanted to be in our horsemanship camp (which consist only of groundwork) mom asked her if she didn’t want to be in a camp where she could ride instead of just doing groundwork. Her daughter’s response was “NO, I WANT TO LEARN TO SPEAK HORSE.”
That’s all horsemanship is, learning to speak horse. Another way to look at it is horsemanship is learning how to communicate with the horse and here’s where most people miss out. They don’t take the time to listen to the horse. Remember, in order to communicate with someone or an animal you have to listen to them as well as talk to them. Humans have a tendency to want to be in control and make things happen and it’s that human trait that causes us to miss out on the opportunity to listen to our horses.
Horses have a very clear & simple communication system in which they primarily use body language to communicate with each other. Most of us humans never take the time to understand that language because we are so busy trying to perfect our technique and make the horse do what we want.
The primary focus of Triangle Horsemanship is to help people learn to communicate with their horses. Take a look at our logo where it has the horse & human apart at the bottom of the triangle and together at the top and the caption reads “Bringing horses and humans closer together.”
Remember this, if you take the time to “learn to speak horse” then you can teach your horse to do just about anything as opposed to making him do some things. Learning to communicate with the horse is where the magic begins to happen so don’t fall into the trap of developing technique ahead of communication.
