Step-by-Step... Yeah, Right!

I'm not trying to shoot myself in the foot here, since I am after all someone who writes books about training horses. However, I flipped open a catalogue yesterday and was dumbfounded by the number of books, DVDs, manuals, workbooks, and other materials on the market allegedly to help people train their own horses and to ride better.



By page 40 of this catalogue with products promising results, I thought to myself that either horse people need things explained to them in a thousand different formats OR we trainers must have a compulsive desire to write books even though we agree that nobody learns anything about horses from a book. My mentor, for one, gets really feisty about this topic. He spews and sputters and paces around in circles waving his arms, trying to make horse owners realize they need to learn things from their horses, not from a book.





I tend to agree with him, especially since training horses is a never-ending learning process. Even after a lifetime with them, old masters still something new every day from their steeds. However, I also have observed how blissfully full of hope most amateurs and riders are. No matter the frustrations and setbacks, regardless of the financial sacrifice and marriage turmoil, their hope never dies. They have a will to improve their skills and master tricky riding techniques. And where there's a will, there's a way, right?





This optimism must be what keeps those horse book catalogues in business. Despite the fact that the last five years' worth of equestrian magazine subscriptions haven't given a rider one morsel of tangible, measurable, useful information about working with her specific horse, she will keep renewing. Never mind that the last dozen training books purchased at a recent equine trade show was so confusing that she never got around to reading them. And those instructional DVDs about how to be a better rider in four weeks? Those were both boring AND confusing, so they're now collecting dust next to an old collection of Star Trek VHS tapes.



Yet the average horse owner still hopes that someday one of these books or DVDs or pod casts will give her just the information she's searching for. And that hour in the saddle every day will suddenly take on a new level of clarity and progress. So we trainers keep writing books and horse owners keep buying them.



We do have very good intentions in writing our books. We want to be useful and helpful and to give the average rider an "ah-hah!" moment. But the gritty truth is that each individual horse is SO darn different in nature, ability, and behavior that no matter how good a respective book might be, its message will never be 100 percent applicable too all horses. Thus, Jane Doe the average horse owner buys the book on-line because it has a groovy title or at a trade show because its author gave an inspirational demo and goes to the barn intending to follow its instructions line by line.



After perhaps the first chapter, she is very confused and frustrated. She has followed all the steps so far in, say, "Finding Your Inner Dressage Path" but now it's becoming clear that her Mustang-Belgian cross actually doesn't care too much for the counter canter exercises called for in Chapter 2. And if she can't get through Chapter 2, does she just skip ahead to Chapter 3 or 4? Confused, she picks another training book off her shelf to cross-reference and hopefully find an answer to her puzzlement. But this other book suggests a lot of lateral bending, which her horse only does well in one direction. So, should she do those lateral exercises in that one direction and then attempt the counter canter in that same direction?

Even more confused, she consults her magazine subscriptions and finds an article that sums things up this way: if she sits perfectly straight with proper weight in her seat bones, her horse will execute a nicely balanced counter canter all day long.



Later that day, with two books and multiple magazine articles splayed out on the arena fence, she sits perfectly and yet her horse still turns into a chomping, agitated beast when asked for a counter canter.



Huh. Now what to do?

At this point, she might consult her friend, who will confide that she is in the same quandary. The friend may suggest a few other books to contribute to further confusion, or she may simply throw up her hands and admit that she's given up on books and other such information. But to admit this is nearly sacrilegious in the horse world. To admit that you're no longer buying and trying to navigate your way through manuals intending to guide you to the Holy Grail of horsemanship is akin to admitting that you're flunking yourself out of the community. Surely, no amateur horseman can find his or her way along without the step-by-step manuals that actually only work in an imaginary time and place where everything goes according to plan. Surely, stumbling along on one's own cannot be as productive as getting mired in confusing instructional texts, can it? Not in an industry with so much hope, that's for sure.

Stumbling along on one's one is just that: stumbling. Amateurs' vibrant hope, however, is an invigorating spark that lures horse owners into continuing to try things they've already tried and proven not to work. Just because all they've met with so far is frustration and confusion, it doesn't mean one more book or DVD won't cure this streak, right? On this note, I highly recommend that everyone should purchase my forthcoming book about Equine Fitness in the fall of this year.