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January 2008 • VOLUME 29 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Pluvinel’s Affable Horse How can we preserve that affable nature? Affable, as in gentle, gracious, friendly, companionable, wholehearted, kindred, happy? We can aspire to do it through means of a playful attitude. So that when we ask something of the horse in “training”, we do it in the spirit of a game, like a fun pastime. I can’t think of any other way that honors the horse’s nature, specially taking into account its captivity. When the spirit of our work is playful, it makes our heart light, it makes the trust grow and it makes the establishing of boundaries easy. Pluvinel’s choice of imagery, when he refers to the horse’s affable nature as a blossom, suggests, among other things, he’s thinking of its formative years, the equivalent to our human childhood. Meaning that, if it is “bruised”, it loses its wonder, if its natural lightheartedness is “killed” through oblivious and intentional abuses of power, it’s gone, because it doesn’t feel safe to go on blossoming into new “adventures”.
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