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March 2008 • VOLUME 31 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
I teach and train professionally, and I have students who ride in a variety of disciplines – hunter/jumper, dressage, pleasure riding, endurance, etc. – and one cowboy! The cowboy is a middle-aged man who has only been riding horses for 5 or 6 years. He actually has cows on some land he owns (unlike many of the other local cowboys), and he works his cattle on horseback. He is subjected to a fair amount of peer pressure from his cowboy buddies who have ridden much longer than he has, and who think in a rather old-fashioned way (from my standpoint). They tell him things like “Show that horse who’s boss,” - “When you tell him to stop, you MAKE him stop,” - and “Don’t let him get away with that nonsense”, etc.
This cowboy is a pleasure for me to work with because he really wants a relationship with his horses, and he is dedicated to exploring the depths of true horsemanship through an interactive feel with them. I began working with him on a regular basis about a year ago when he came to me with an un-started young colt he had bred and raised. He wanted to be involved in the breaking of his colt, and he didn’t want the colt scared or pushed too hard. So we began the process with that goal in mind.  While his heart and mind are in the right place, he does have a fair amount of fear that enters into his riding – mainly because he started out with horses who had some severe training issues that he was too green to recognize. He would get bucked off because of what I would call a hole in the horse’s training, yet his cowboy buddies criticized him for not getting right back on and taking control of the horse. I think they led him to believe that all horses acted that way, and the only way to prevent it was to get tough. For that reason, our starting of this young colt has been a slow progression as we worked through the colt’s fears and confusions as well as those of the owner. Despite that,
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