“True Horsemanship Through Feel”
This is an excellent book by Bill Dorrance and Leslie Desmond. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning how horses think and how to communicate with them in a productive way. A horse’s self preservation instinct in natural and my grandfather always said it was almost impossible to teach someone feel. Each horse is an individual and reacts to peoples energy, he said “beware of anyone who makes a generous kind horse angry”. Horses read people just as people read horses.Bill says “There is always a rightful place for a horse to exercise his concern for self-preservation. It is important to remember that this is the horse’s right. When it’s up to the horse, he won’t do what isn’t natural to him anyway, and of course, self-preserving actions are right at the top of the list of things that are natural to him.”Self preservation is his main job. And it’s your job to learn how to handle those situations when they come up, and to get back that better feel you had going with the horse before his instincts caused him to stop feeling of you. That way you can finish the other job you had to do, whatever it was, and when you put the horse up you’d both be feeling good again. And there’d be no need to mentiona anything that wasn’t the best about that horse.”