How to Speak Horse

In the ring the other day I was preaching about how most of our horse interactions are like my grandfather traveling through Russia.

The Berlin Wall had recently fallen and he and I were visiting Russia to talk to people about the beauty of capitalism, or we were there to hand out Bibles. Or both. I tagged along to stare at art.

My grandfather would give someone a Bible as a way to start a conversation. When that didn’t work, he’d stick a dollar bill in the binding which seemed to aid his conversion rate.

He didn’t speak Russian. Very few people in the towns outside St Petersburg and Moscow spoke English, so my grandfather’s “conversations” went like this — the person stared at him blankly. He raised his voice. The person smiled and shook their head. His voice grew louder. He still couldn’t get through. He began to enunciate harder, louder, more exactly. But the louder he spoke English and the sharp execution of his words did absolutely nothing to get his point across. Frustration would build. The person would stare at him like a mad man and eventually wander off, them a dollar richer and my grandfather more confused. There was no meaningful exchange. There was no conversation.

That’s how most of us talk to horses.

Don’t be like my grandfather in Russia. Take some time to learn the horse’s alphabet, and then their words. Allow the horses to guide you. And after a dutiful time of learning, you’ll figure out how to speak sentences that you and the horse fully understand.

And then you can have a conversation.

Here’s a great quote from a book where Jean-Claude Racinet explains Baucher’s training principles as he understood him (interesting fact! Racinet spent time in the upstate of SC — the photo of him in the forward of his book shows him riding a horse in Anderson).

“It has been said that Baucher had powerful legs, but this does not hold water, since shouting won’t help if one applies in Greek to somebody who does not speak Greek.”

Make an effort to have a conversation in your interactions with your horse. Bribing and shouting can only get you so far.