The Horse Psychology Summit, Parelli Natural Horsemanship’s annual event, which takes place the first weekend of every March, celebrates the induction of the Parelli Program. The first weekend in March of 1982 was when Pat Parelli held his first horsemanship clinic, kicking it off with the opening line: “Horsemanship can be obtained naturally through communication, understanding and psychology, versus mechanics, fear and intimidation.”

This year, we invite you to join the Parelli Natural Horsemanship team as we host Parelli Instructors and students from around the globe to connect and bring the Parelli principles to life once again.

Imagine a world where grayscale was used to depict sunsets, and where zeros and ones were used to depict the complexity of the human experience. In the same manner, imagine a world of horse training that quantified the human-equine partnership with simple obedience and disobedience, respect and disrespect, or success and failure. What if the only measure of accomplishment in the equine world were how high a horse could jump or how fast he could complete a lap?

In the world of traditional horsemanship, Pat Parelli redefined the approach to equine clinics by bringing equine psychology and partnership to the forefront of the training process. What followed in the decades to come was a repeatable framework (i.e. the Parelli Levels Program) for horsemen and horsewomen to shift their perspective from human psychology in all of its linear progression to equine psychology.

Parelli made the seemingly elusive and intangible truths about equine partnership into a movement complete with measurable steps—Levels One, Two, Three and Four—for a clear pathway to success. This paved a new way to be a career horseman, with a holistic measure of success that brought the horse’s well-being to the forefront.