TRAINING TECHNIQUES:
POOLING OUR RESOUCES
by Charlotte Blackwell

There are many training methods out there for all of us to pay to learn to use. Some are good methods and other's leave a lot to be desired. Ultimately, we must choose the methods we wish to learn and how we choose to learn them.

Concerning some of these training methods, many are grounded in age old proven training practices. My husband worked as a real cowboy in the 1950's. The basic techniques that are being used by John Lyons and Pat Parelli are the same or similar techniques Bob and some of these popular trainers learned at around the same time (1950's)from an old cowboy named Billy Bishop, Tom Dorrence and other Californios. The experience changed Bob's life and the way he trained both horses and dogs.

Bob uses his persuasive and non-confrontational round pen training methods, sometimes called by others "resistance free", first learning them from his grandfather as a youngster and later having them reinforced in the 50's as a young cowboy and horse handler by the old cowboys he worked with at the time . When it comes to working with a young, unspoiled horse Bob has not had to use forceful or abusive methods in over 40 years of training. He says there are no shortcuts in training a horse properly, just lots of wet saddle blankets.

These same techniques which Bob has used most of his life work on any breed of horse. Bob used them on the Appaloosa cutting horse(a stallion) he won the Eastern States Cutting Championship with. He could ride the stallion anywhere and do anything with him. Neither do the techniques work on just a few select horses. Bob has trained many horses of various breeds and found the techniques to work consistently.

With some modifications they are also the same techniques he used in California to retrain horses which had been abused, misused, and made "unmanageable" by a combination of poor and inexperienced riders and incompetent trainers. A spoiled horse must learn to both pay attention and to respect you, so the techniques are not entirely the same as with a young inexperinced horse. The methods, however, really do work, but they are not new and not invented by some of the modern day purporters of these methods. Credit should be given to them, however, for recording what they learned about this ancient training technique, perhaps adding some variations, and presenting a method of teaching these skills to others.

Several years ago Bob went on a trail ride in which a rider's horse bolted off a cliff with its rider on it. (Fortunately, neither were severely hurt.) Of all the horses on the ride his (our foxtrotter, Widget) was the only one that was able to climb down the steep slope 20 feet to the horse and rider below.

After paramedics arrived and had everything under control someone decided that maybe they should get the tack off the horse and turn it lose. When Bob asked why, he was told that the horse "wasn't even broke to lead " and there was no way anyone was going to get on it and ride it out of the canyon after the stunt it had just pulled!

To the amazement of the onlookers who would have released the horse, Bob spent a few minutes with the horse and then quietly led the horse out of the canyon behind Widget without a problem or hesitation. This was done by using the techniques Bob had grown up with had reinforced and used as working cowboy,

I am no rider to speak of , that's for sure, but I have been the first to get on and ride two of our horses, and I would have to give the credit for that to a combination of gentleness of our bloodlines and the careful and well thought out job my husband has done with the horses on the ground and in the round pen before I ever got on them.

I'm not saying this for any reason but to show by example that the techniques are there for anyone to use and use successfully if they care enough about their horses to take the time to learn how to use them. They have been there for centuries, but just as now not all horsemen took advantage of the techniques even then.

Today, we have a few old cowboys around that have used these techniques. Some are trying to teach them and make a living from it at the same time and others just quietly use them on the horses they own or train. However, it's the horses that tuly benefit and deserve to benefitt from these ancient and time-proven training techniques.

Another observation from watching is that even though there are a number of popular clinicians making a living by teaching these techniques that each have their own twist that works for them. This is also true of those that have learned the techniques and simply use them for their own horses.

In my opinion, we have lots of people within our own breed that we can learn from and whatever their level of expertise we can usually all learn something from almost everyone when we start pooling information in a positive way.

As a musician I know that even the best musicians can learn something from the beginning musician in a jam session, and the really good musicians don't mind asking anyone of whatever level of expertise to show them how they did a particular musical lick admired in the other's playing. We can do the same things when it comes to our horses and we will all benefit when we support one another and pool our own resources.

When it comes to seminars, if you have the money, find one and go, but the ones who give these seminars don't have a monopoly on information. There are others using these same techniques who might even be your friends. So when we find these guys who actually were once working cowboys, and there aren't many of them left anymore, it would probably be wise if we made a point of asking them about the methods they are using now while they are still with us, or there might come a day when they won't be around to ask.

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