By Pat Parelli
I first read The Black Stallion books when I was around ten years old, and one of my favorite books in the series was The Horse Tamer. The story is about Alec Ramsay's uncle, who had this uncanny but very natural way with horses. He went around to different towns, putting on demonstrations with the most challenging horses. This is where, in a way, the term horse whisperer came from. John Sullivan was a real horse tamer and a bit of an outcast. He would put curtains around what he would do, and when they'd open the curtains, he would whisper in the horse's ear. Then the horse started behaving the way he was supposed to.
Shortly after I started reading the book, my father took me to Reed's Horse Auction in Hayward, California. They advertised that Dr. Billy Linfoot would tame a wild mustang to draw a crowd. Within 30 minutes we all saw Dr. Billy Linfoot, our veterinarian, sitting on a wild mustang's back sideways, conversing with us as though the horse had been ridden thousands of times. This lit a spark in me to become a horse tamer. So, all my life, I wanted to be a first rides specialist and a horse tamer. I wanted to be a horse trainer, but what I really wanted was to become a really good horseman.
So, what is the difference between taming and training? To me, taming means that the horse or animal, any animal, unequivocally believes that humans will never act with predation in mind. In other words, we'll not kill them. For example, if you've ever raised any barnyard animals and the chickens let you scratch them, the lambs come up and rub on you, the calves come up to say hello, you’ve tamed them, whether you meant to or not. What happens, though, is that at some point the billy goat gets so tame that he starts to challenge you, and he stands up on his hind legs and presents his horns. He’s so tame that he thinks you are in the same herd, and he’s going to figure out who is who in the zoo. In other words, who's highest in the pecking order. The same can happen with horses. But the flip side of that is the horse who is never truly tame.
To me, when done well, taming is the process of convincing our horse that we are truly partners, not predators. Unfortunately, many horses go into training who have never been fully tame and are still skeptical and don't unequivocally believe humans are partners. That horse’s training will never be optimized to the same degree as a horse who’s truly tamed.
You may be wondering when is the best time to tame a horse, and the answer is right when they're born; it's a process called foal imprinting. In the first 168 hours, if you invest a lot of time with a young foal, you will not only tame them but also develop a deep bond with the foal. You could go five years without seeing that same horse, and he will still allow you to come up and handle him. But most horses don't get foal imprinted by a human, or if they do, it doesn't get done properly, and most people only invest a little bit of time with their foal in those first 168 hours of life (168 hours = one week). Now I'm talking about hours, not minutes, and not here and there, but to seriously look at an investment of many hours, as many as 30 invested hours during the first 168 hours of your foal’s life.
Now let's take a wild raised horse, whether a feral horse or a horse of registered stock that has never been handled; how do you tame that horse? It's about the same way you'd tame a deer. You have to convince him that you're there as his friend in a symbiotic relationship. One of the easiest things to start with is to provide their water by hand one bucket at a time. At first, I had many horses and wild mustangs only drinking if the bucket was 10 or 20 feet away from me. Then, finally, they'd go from 20 feet to 10 feet, from 10 feet to 5 feet, from 5 feet to 2 feet, from 2 feet to drinking it out of my hands with me rubbing them on the head.
So this is where you start, but there's more to it than that. You have to be able to get to the point where you can touch a horse everywhere on his body without encountering any can't, won't, don't, or yeah but spots. There are many ways to do this. I was lucky enough to study under Maurice Wright in Australia. He learned the Jeffery Method of taming a wild horse directly from Kell Jeffery. He loved this process so much and wanted people to learn it, so he kept wild brumbies on his station to teach people how to practice on these untouched horses.
I've never seen anything with horses that is a one-and-done step actually work in the long run. Everything is a process, and we need to understand that taming is a process and the end goal of the process is teaching a horse, and proving to the horse, that we're his partner, not his predator.
So what is training, then? If taming is the process of developing trust then training is teaching a horse to yield to and from pressure and apply it to a purpose. There are two types of training after taming: foundation and specialized. So, as we start talking about the difference between taming and training, it's very simple. One is about trust, and the other is about yields.
Foundation training is the cake, and specialized training is the icing. Here’s the prescription: if you really want to have the perfect partner, make sure your horse is 100% tame. Anytime you see a horse react instead of respond, in other words panic, pull back, or rear, buck, shy etc., these actions represent that he's acting like a prey animal instead of a partner. But when we follow a program and teach a horse how to read and rate situations, to be confident, and instead of using flight from fear, to gain a skill called impulsion (mental and emotional collection brought together), then we are well on our way to building a perfect partnership. But always remember, taming is first.
