The Horsemanship Lessons That Changed My Life

In this excerpt from his new book Horses, Humans, and Love, author Tim Hayes shares the early moments of his horsemanship journey where he learned key ideas that would inform his development and growth as teacher and clinician.

Natural horsemanship taught me that a successful relationship with a horse required three mandatory elements in order to work: love, trust, and respect. This is also true for humans. You can love and respect your wife, but if you don’t completely trust her, your marriage will not work. You can love and trust your horse, but if you do not respect his individuality (not all horses are the same), your relationship will most likely be frustrating and might even be unsafe.

To establish love, trust, and respect with a horse the way another horse would, we must relate not just physically (via body language on the ground, physical touch when riding) but mentally and emotionally. To truly achieve this, our relationship must always begin by interacting with groundwork, which is the same way horses create relationships with other horses.

I discovered that having an interactive relationship with a horse could reveal a lot about a person’s thoughts, feelings, and psychological state, including mine. Over time I also acquired a belief that horses possessed an inner quality that sometimes seemed more spiritually evolved than humans did. It was why I was so drawn to some of the beliefs and traditions of the American Indians. American Indians believed the horse, like every living species on the planet, should be treated with dignity, kindness, love, respect, and compassion, for together we are all part of the same miraculous “oneness.” If this is so, then humans, even with our presumed superior brains and intelligence, could nevertheless learn from horses…about ourselves and perhaps all humanity. We might learn things so simple yet so consequential they could actually help us in our own survival as a species.

As I learned about and from natural horsemanship clinicians, I found that almost every one of them acknowledged Tom Dorrance as their mentor. But I couldn’t find any clinics listed with him, and given his age, I began to worry that maybe he had retired.

True Unity [Tom’s book] said Tom lived in Salinas, California, so I decided to be proactive. I got his home number using local directory assistance, called it, and a man answered.

“Hello,” I said. “Is this Mr. Tom Dorrance?”

“No.”

“Is Tom there?” I tried again.

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, “my name is Tim Hayes. I’m calling from New York City, and I want to ask him if he has any clinics coming up.”

The man put the phone down, and I could hear him faintly in the background say something like, “Tom, someone wants you to do a clinic in New York City.” Then I heard people laughing.

“Hello,” a woman suddenly said into the phone. “I’m Margaret Dorrance, Tom’s wife. That was one of Tom’s brothers. Can I help you?”

Mrs. Dorrance was softspoken and very kind as I repeated my inquiry. She said Tom was doing very few clinics but a friend of his named Joyce was putting together a small private gathering with Tom in the nearby town of Merced. She gave me Joyce’s number and said I should call and ask if I could come—and if I could use one of her horses.

A month later, I checked into the Merced Best Western.

Tom was unlike any “expert” I’d ever experienced. More like a horse than a human, he used very little verbal communication. He watched you and your horse and either said, “That’s good,” or “Maybe think about trying such and such,” or he’d translate what the horse was “saying” to you from how the horse was behaving. He smiled, laughed a lot, and most of the time sat peacefully in his golf cart. There are so many possibilities for why horses do what they do that Tom’s first response to almost every question he was asked was, “That all depends.” Sometimes it seemed like he wanted so much to explain what he knew of the horse but couldn’t find the right words.

One of Tom’s most widely known and practiced concepts was what he called feel. He would always tell me that to understand and communicate with my horse, I needed to feel him. One of Tom’s most famous sayings on the horse-human relationship was Feel for him, feel of him, then feel together.

I left California, returned to New York City, and continued my patchwork horse journey at Deep Hollow Ranch, the Chelsea Equestrian Center, and whenever possible, trips to the Blacks’ ranch in Idaho.

Mark Rashid, a Coloradan who had written a remarkable book in 1993 called Considering the Horse, didn’t refer to himself as a “natural horsemanship clinician,” and was open and honest about his aversion to the terminology. However, the philosophy and methods of horse training that I found in his book were identical to everything I had been learning and wanted to continue experiencing. In his very first chapter, Mark writes about being a young man and going with his boss to watch a traditional horse trainer “break” a new horse. The trainer, who had come with two helpers, began the session by blindfolding the horse and then tying him to an old-fashioned “snubbing post,” which is usually a solidly fixed post in the middle of a corral to which a horse is tightly secured. The trainer explained this was how he could force the animal into submission so he could mount and ride him.

As Mark watched this event, he heard his boss (who soon became his horsemanship mentor) remark, “How do you suppose the horse feels about all this?”

I have never forgotten how amazed I felt when I read this question.

That a horse could think, much less have an opinion, was something that had never entered my mind. It didn’t occur to me that all successful relationships require two willing partners, and a horse, just like a human, was a thinking, feeling, sentient being. Whether or not one called what Mark Rashid and others were doing “natural horsemanship” was not what mattered. It was having compassion for all beings that was imperative.

This excerpt adapted from Horses, Humans, and Love by Tim Hayes is reprinted with permission from Trafalgar Square Books. You can purchase a copy here.