April 2008 • VOLUME 32 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Challenging the Concepts of Join Up
As horsemen, we always need to keep our minds open and be willing to continue to learn. We can never stop on this lifetime endeavour.

Thus I find myself frequently questioning, challenging myself. I question everything again and again. From the basic aids that I use, why do I use them, are they being used the way they should, would there be a better way to do this, to questioning every training theory I have ever heard. Those that I follow and those I don’t.

Why spend all the time and energy on those that I don’t follow? Truly, if you think of it, that really doesn’t make any sense. Why waste the time and the energy? To me it is more important to continue to challenge my assumptions, especially those concepts that I disagree with, because I want to make sure that I just didn’t close my mind. Because in the end the ones that get hurt are the horses.

Being one to challenge everything I have read, tried and used myself, recently I began to re-examine my thoughts, beliefs on the concepts of Join-Up. There can be no doubt that the concept that we invite the horse to be with us, is one that appeals to me at a very fundamental level. It is a truth that I have found in various experiences throughout my equestrian experience. Some little things that left lasting impressions and some major breakthroughs with different training methods, including join-up. But including others as well. Other training processes that have brought home how incredible it is when we work with a horse that wants to be there by his own choice.

There is an incredible feeling when you know the horse is with you because he wants to be.

One of the things we are often drawn to is the concept of how this is natural to the horse. We are learning the same kind of interaction that happens in nature. Between horses that are free to run. Horses that are not bound by walls and by our own false imaginings.

But is this really true? Does the practice take us to a place where the horse truly understands us because we are becoming something he can understand because we are interacting and learning the language of the horse?

In the wild the horse is bound by no walls, no fences, no boundaries except for his own instinct for self-preservation.