Have you ever met anyone who was self taught a foreign language by book alone? Neither have I.
I also have never met anyone who learned how to train their horse and to ride by book lesson alone – and was successful at it. Success.
I’ve received several requests to write about my impressions of Clinton Anderson and his Down Under Horsemanship… but the truth is that if I were asked to give my impression about every clinician out there my blog would be full of the same repetitious posts warning of salesmen. In my mind, not only Clinton Anderson but, almost every clinician out there is little more than a salesman working away to sell a product and turn a buck.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many who are good-hearted and honestly believe in what they are selling, and then there are others who know that what they are selling is a pile of rubbish but continue selling it anyhow.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been teaching my horses to perform various tricks since I can last remember… the key difference is whether that is ALL you do. Certainly not all trainers who specialize in trick horse training focus all of their attention on the tricks, and that is particularly what caught my eye in this video.
When I think of training anything, to me it means that there was something lacking in whatever you are training to begin with. They don’t know how to do something, and so you train them how. But a horse already knows how to be a horse and there is little we ask of him that he doesn’t already know how to do.