I recently watched one of Mark Rashid’s DVDs, Ground Driving 101
, after renting it from Giddyupflix. I was interested in watching this DVD because I love Mark Rashid’s books and would like to start with some ground driving work with a few of the rescue horses. Overall, I was not very impressed with this [...]

Question: How long does it take to train a horse?
Answer: As long as it takes.
This is a follow up post to my previous post, In a Whisper or In a Shout? Training under Time Restraints, which discussed training unhandled colts in 2 1/2 hours.
Do you remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? [...]

Recently I watched a documentary film called In A Whisper. It’s a DVD of a colt starting challenge that was held in Fort Worth in 2002. The three trainers in the competition, Craig Cameron, Pat Parelli and Josh Lyons, each had 2 1/2 hours to start a two year old colt. The horses had [...]

Rosie and I recently started playing with a big green ball. It’s not quite as big as some of the ones marketed by natural horse trainers, but it’s still pretty big! The ball is actually an exercise ball I bought at a sporting goods store. I just hope it will be strong enough for the [...]

I’m no longer a fan of many of the teachings of the Parelli Natural Horsemanship program. However, many of the program’s ground exercises offer a good foundation for the young horse, especially if they are adapted with clicker training to reduce/eliminate the amount of negative reinforcement used during teaching. The Parelli friendly game is essentially [...]