Whole Heart, Whole Horse: Building Trust Between Horse and Rider SC, Mark Rashid

Many horse train­ers, even those who claim to fol­low the so-called nat­ural horse­man­ship ap­proach, take the po­si­tion that horses that fail to obey a human's re­quest are doing so as much out of per­ver­sity as ig­no­rance. That's not Mark Rashid's view. In his words, »If we un­der­stand that horses can't sep­a­rate the way they feel from the way they act, then we can start to see that un­wanted be­hav­ior isn't bad be­hav­ior at all. More times than not it's just the horse ex­press­ing the way he feels at that par­tic­u­lar mo­ment in time.« Whole Heart, Whole Horse fo­cuses on this idea, cov­er­ing such sub­jects as gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion from the horse; turn­ing rider/trainer mis­takes into pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ences; de­vel­op­ing re­al­is­tic bound­aries be­tween you and your horse; un­der­stand­ing how and why horses re­lease en­ergy from real or per­ceived trau­mas; and reach­ing a com­fort­able bal­ance point be­tween horse and rider. Rashid an­a­lyzes de­vel­op­ing soft­ness, con­sis­tency, de­pend­abil­ity, trust, and peace of mind in both horses and hu­mans, as well as how to be­come a leader whom your horse will will­ingly want to fol­low and work with. Full of ex­am­ples that ex­tend be­yond the train­ing pen, Whole Heart, Whole Horse of­fers good sense and in­for­ma­tion that will make you a more as­tute, ca­pa­ble, and sen­si­tive horse­man or horse­woman – and human being. This book is in exceptional condition for a pre-owned book.