• VOLUME 49 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Klaus Hempfling - Killing our Horses The Natural Way




KH: When I started to write my first book, Dancing with Horses, I had been with horses for only something like one year. So I was a newcomer and a beginner and I had not in reality had much experience with horses. So now, when I look back, for me it's like I designed and created shoes in a way which were still too big for me. Dancing with Horses, though, was more or less a book that I had to write because I couldn’t buy it. I had to write it for myself because I couldn’t find what I was writing there. I was sure about what I was doing. I was sure about what I was writing, but I was also in reality a beginner.

It was quite a big risk in a way. Looking back to Dancing with Horses, it's absolutely still valid for me, and everything that I wrote there is the fundamental base for all my work up to now. But this next book is different in a way because I’m now looking back over 20 years of experience, 20 years of so many meetings with horses and horse owners, such different horses from all over the world. So this time the book is, in a way, more practical. It's related to so many cases which I have had. We have some horses here which we have been able to accompany with photos from the beginning to at least their first small and healing processes.

So this time I've tried to create a book where I could finally set down more or less everything I can say about what I do with horses. This was the idea, accompanied by pictures, a lot of paintings, and drawings; I think there are around 70-80 drawings in there. So together with Dancing with Horses, this book is more or less the complete manual of what I’m doing. There is nothing more I can say about my work in practical terms.

I started more or less as a teacher. I started as somebody reporting what he has been doing from the early beginnings, as I was then, starting in Dancing with Horses saying, wow, look, I’m a beginner. I have no idea. I’m maybe like you are. So I went to different stables and I tried to find out what on earth they were doing there, and with my not-knowledge, with my not-experience, I just opened so many doors with this naïve view of somebody who is just trying to live a natural life, being an artist, being just a happy person. But I couldn’t cope with what I saw, with a lot of things which must be painful for horses, which must be undermining the dignity of these unbelievable beautiful beings. So this was the start of my career. This was the start of Dancing with Horses. I said, well it can’t be like this, so something else must be there, something else described in history, in mythology . So I gathered my thoughts together logically and tried to do it in another way, in a more simple and in a more natural and more grounded, authentic way.

When I started, many of the horses which I worked with had been mistreated in a physical way; they had been beaten.

To my mind in these last 20 years, the horse world has changed tremendously - most horses I had came from the world of sports, they were used as prestige symbols, as sports instruments. So - more from the material world. Just material. I’m just using it like a sports car and if it doesn’t work well enough, I can change it; I can sell it; I can slaughter it; I can buy another one. If it isn’t working I can punish it, I can beat it, etc. This way may have actually been more normal then than the way things are nowadays. Take the way of using the whip, the way of being cruel to the horses, beating them, etc. I have the feeling that maybe this is not so much the case anymore, at least when I look at the horses which are being brought to me now.

What I can see now is a shift from that kind of physical mistreatment to a mental mistreatment.

So for example, when I look at the horse we had here in the last clinic, Harmón, he had been physically mistreated, but not so much with a whip. In the past, I had so many more horses which were scared of whips, etc, trembling when you came close to them with these kinds of instruments. I could immediately feel, and you can immediately feel, what kind of mistreatment has happened with these horses. You can heal these horses very quickly.

Why can you heal them? Because inside of this mistreatment, you have a consequence. It means the person, for example, might be a cruel person, he might be an unthinking person and he’s not aware of what he’s doing but he has a goal in his mind. He says, I would like to win with this horse. I would like to bring this horse to a certain level where I can earn money with it, where I can perform in a certain way, so that I get prestige, etc. So that’s a picture of whatever kind of specific goal to achieve; exercises should be possible with this horse. And if the horse responds or does not respond as required, he will know it, he will maybe get rewarded for it; if not—he will be punished with reins, with spurs, with shouting and also with a whip. There’s an implicit consequence . It says, I want you to do this and you’re not doing it—this is the consequence for that.

So when I get these horses, I can see their suffering, they’re scared, etc. But at least they had a consequence inside of this system.

So I can get into the situation very quickly and in some minutes - this is my job so I may say this, and it has been observed by so many thousands of people. So in some minutes I can explain to the horse, look at all these things: they’re not valid or meaningful with me because I’m looking first of all to your necessities and I would like to cooperate, to work together with you instead, so let’s together find out the best way for you, the best way of growing, the best way of polishing your talents and bringing them to flower, to fruition, etc. So this is what we’re doing. The horse will understand this pretty well. I can quickly take away the fear of the instrument, the whip; then I can explain to the horse via communication of body language with the whip that I’m using it for communication issues, etc. So this is one thing.

Then this changed over time.

Now I get more and more horses which are in situations where people just want the best for them; they want them to be happy. They could never think about beating the horses - or even if they have, at the end of the day they were doing it with a bad conscience, with a bad feeling. But finally when the horses were aggressive or whatever, wow, the limits were overstepped and then they had to beat them, they had to shout at them. But this is not a system. It has nothing to do with "if you’re not doing what I want, you will be beaten. If you’re not doing this I'll beat you." Because when you have a system, we can more or less cope together. But here, there is no system.

So this kind of group, horse people group, which I have begun to receive, let's say in the last 10 years, so many more of this kind of horse work with people who were very careful, very emotional, partly sentimental, and who wanted to get the best out of their horses. At the end of the day, they had to punish the horse because if they didn't, there was no way of coping. But this punishment just comes out of the blue for the horse because they’re trying and trying and then suddenly they overstep the limit and enter a place where the horse owner has no more resources and they are overwhelmed. No good words, nothing that helps. Then they also become pretty aggressive or angry or sad or they’re overwhelmed with their emotions.

Inside of this line, however, the horse very seldom has a consequence coming from a method; there is no clear consequence within the method. I don't use a method, whereas these dressage horse people; they have more or less a method. They say a horse should do it like this, like that, and the horse has to learn this and that; of course the methods vary from person to person, and the consequences are sometimes more, sometimes less clear or unpleasant. But these other riders, they don’t have a method. They just want to have nice company and they want the best, but inside of their punishment, inside of their way of treating the horses, there’s no consistent consequence any more. So it might come or it might not.

The second thing is that even those people who train horses, even if in a brutal way, do very often have a certainty, a very clear way of approaching the horse. It signifies 'here I am; this is what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing because I have been doing it for some time. I know what I want and there’s also a consequence in my way, in my way of approach, in my way of explaining myself.'

But more and more in the horse world, I find people working with horses but with no consequences, and so their horses are being treated in a very vague way. So these people don’t have anything; there’s no method anymore; not a good one or a bad one - there's none whatsoever. But also really no consequence, no personal fundamentals, let's say personal strength, personal inner consequence or a real grounded and solid emotional frame, so to speak. So finally, everything with a horse is very vague; no method, no starting, no beginning, no ending point; where do we want to go; what is the horse about, etc., with the result that the horse becomes depressed. This kind of depression, this is something which is pretty new. Let's say it started in the last ten years and it has been growing and growing to a point that meanwhile I’m receiving three out of four horses which are mainly depressed. Mainly in the situation where they have not been receiving any frame any more.

This is far more difficult to heal.

Now we also have a third group of horses which are coming pretty much out of something we call horsemanship or horse whispering or whatever, which is mainly based on the idea that I have a predator system