Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Equine/Horse training/Archive 1

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This page is an Archive of the discussions from WikiProject Equine/Horse training talk page (Discussion page). (2005) - Please Do not edit!

Hi there!

Just thought I could propose another name to the list of modern horse trainers. There's a russian guy, called Alexander Nevzorov. He trains horses in an absolutely new, revolutionary way. It's worth to check out his website: http://hauteecole.ru/

Shagya

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Ed, hi,

I just got a nice message from a lineal descendent of the guy named Powell who is mentioned in the real horse whisperer's book, i.e., in the book by John S. Rarey. So I had a look around and discovered that the original horse whisperer article that you started and I worked on has been gutted of any real content, has links to a bunch of non-existent articles, etc. And the article had no mention of Monty Roberts.

Personally, I don't think any of the present-day crop has anything that goes beyond what Rarey said, so it's all the same to me if nobody is motivated to write anything about the other experts. Roberts had one discovery that is a true contribution. Unfortunately for my peace of mind in trying to ride herd on articles on this general subject, he is also a showman and has a lot of fame and money. So there are people that love him and people that hate him, and mostly they want to write about what a saint/devil he is. I don't have the time, and I don't have the motivation, to research the specifics of the training methods of any of these people. If we are going to have articles on them as trainers, then that kind of content ought to be the focus. If somebody wants to write another article on the fame and infamy of Monty Roberts, then it ought to be a biography -- and it still should be NPOV.

It looks like several articles that I tried to patch up have been deleted at some point and I didn't even know about it. That's a good thing, IMHO, because many of them were filled with stuff that wasn't properly cited. I didn't feel like deleting that stuff because it was at least quasi-plausible and I didn't want to spend my life reading, e.g., all of Roberts's books to prove he had at least never said some of those things in print. From now on we should insist on citations from the very beginning.

I hope everything is going well with you. Thanks again for fixing up the article titles I messed up. P0M 17:57, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm glad you're in touch with the Powell's descendant. All I know about Roberts is from watching a documentary where he demonstrates "link up" in just a few minutes. Plus reading his fascinating auto-biography where he mentions meeting actor James Dean, mentoring troubled young men, and learning how the mare disciplines stallions. Plus how he rebelled against his father's cruel methods and developed his own way of "gentling" horses instead of breaking them.

My interest is primarily in horse training, with a bias toward the most humane way of doing it. All those movies and children's books about the kid and his beloved pet horse: My friend flicka, the black stallion, national velvet, Black Beauty. I want to believe horses and people can be friends.

If you have time, let's both take a fresh look at the horse training series. It's been a couple of years, right? Uncle Ed 19:47, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

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Somehow we have to keep out the ad hominem aspects. Monty Roberts has become very controversial, with strong partisans on both sides. I would like to keep things pared down to who advocates what training methods if at all possible and do that in all cases.

IMHO, none of these people has done anything remarkable except for Roberts, and what he did was discover a communication modality that was totally unknown (even though even I had observed it, presumably along with millions of horse lovers from even before the time of Xenophon). The rest of what Roberts does is in line with what Xenophon taught. Powell and Rarey and the Native Americans who invented "sacking out" have explicated things that Xenophon only hinted at. Rarey had his special method, the one that is depicted in the Horse Whisperer movie. Note that both his method and the method of Roberts are really only needed in the case of horses that have been abused or for some other reason have learned very negative feelings about human beings.

If we keep our selves to high standards on what can be quoted and cited we should not get into NPOV problems. If we link websites that praise Roberts we will face a demand that we link articles that excoriate him. If somebody wants to do an article on "Monty Roberts and his conflicts with X, Y, and Z" I guess that would be o.k., but it would be of biographical interest not of horse training interest.P0M 23:43, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

POM, you wrote "IMHO, none of these people has done anything remarkable except for Roberts." As I see it, such a remark is quite foolish. Do you really believe it? --Lil Peck 23:56, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I think so. I meant that the basis of all of this stuff is all pretty much the same as far as I can tell. I haven't read all of the many sources you just put in, of course. But let's take Podhajsky for instance. I really respect that man because he never claims that he is the great innovator, nor does he write about his perfect abilities to manage any horse that comes his way. And I don't think he fails to give due credit to the people in the long tradition before him. He is (was?) a remarkable man, but I don't think he would claim to have made more than incremental improvements. There is, IMHO, nothing in Roberts's work that one couldn't find somewhere else -- except the part about horse communication. And of course now many people are probably claiming that they discovered it first. The same for Margaret Cabell Self, whose book I read when I was a teenager. It was absolutely reliable as I recall, but she was very consciously passing on a tradition in the best words that she could find to use. She makes a point of sketching out the history, good and bad, of the main trainers in history. The same for Littauer. He did have some very different ideas about what riding is for, what one should concentrate on in training riders who are not going to hunt foxes or lead cavalry charges. But he very clearly put himself in the great tradition of people who knew how to get the best out of horses without abusing them.

On the other hand, anybody who can jump a five-foot barrier is remarkable to me. So is anybody who can run a 6 minute mile, let alone a less-than-four minute mile.

I just put in some time divisions to try to make it a little clearer that there is a great tradition here. It's easy for modern adherents to think that their teacher has created the whole thing. P0M 00:35, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

One other thing. If we establish what was discovered/invented and when, then we don't need to recite the history of the wheel for each modern adherent. If they have made remarkable advancements, then those innovations ought to form the core of the account of their work. P0M 00:38, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Lil Peck 02:23, 3 October 2005 (UTC) I asked about your assertion "IMHO, none of these people has done anything remarkable except for Roberts," but from your reply I wonder if I misunderstood what you intended to say. To me, it looked as if you meant that no horse trainer other than Roberts ever contributed anything of any importance. Is that what you meant?

I have doubts that Roberts is correctly credited with having "discovered" some of the things about equine behavior that he credits himself for in his first book. It has been shown to my satisfaction that Roberts did not study mustangs in the wild. I also find some of the things that he professes about wild horse behavior to be untrue, based on what real authorities report about them. It should be easy enough to track down from whom Roberts might have learned the parts that he got correct. Tony Vargas, for example, I believe is still living.

As for what is "remarkable" in a life spent with horses: all of the trainers I added to the list have made remarkable contributions!

Let's get to work and get these things documented. P0M 03:21, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I enjoyed watching a documentary on Roberts 5 years ago, and I bought his autobiography. But my only concern about him is that he brought Gentle Training to the public's attention. I'm not concerned with getting to the bottom of issues like (1) Did he originate the ideas he takes credit for? (2) Was he really as nice a guy as he says?

This project is about horses, and how people can learn to have good relationships with them. It is only peripherally about any one person. I will propose some avenues for us writers to explore, on the project page. Uncle Ed 14:12, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Problem is, Ed, that other trainers had already brought "Gentle Training to the public's attention". Gentle training was never a new or novel concept. The vaquero tradition, for example, has been around for centuries and is based, like classical dressage (also around for centuries) on preparing the horse in small increments and phases that make training easy for the horse to understand and achieve.

Modern communication methods seem to give folks the impression that some of this stuff is new, when in fact it is only new to them personally. Nothing of any importance existed until they watched their first horse training video.

Patrick is familiar with the work of Powell and Rarey. I am more familiar with the work of Professor Beery, because when I was a kid, his horse training courses were still being advertised and sold in horse publications at that time. Pat Parelli and John Lyons were the first, as I recall, to take advantage of modern media as a way to get their methods before an international audience. They were both already "superstars" before Monty Roberts saw how successful they were and decided to follow suit.

Monte Foreman's articles of the 50's and 60's were extremely influential and all had to do with how to co-opt the natural abilities of the horse for his cooperation in training. His articles were organized into a book. I read the book while babysitting for a cowboy-vet student and then purchased my own copy and used it to become a local champion rider with my mare Dawna. Today, the book is available in a version that was cowritten with Patrick Wyse. Monte Foreman used movie photography to analyze equine movement and then drew beautiful illustrations from them. Many of his articles had a graphic novel appearance because of his effective use of the illustrations.

--Lil Peck 14:43, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Gentlemen, how are we to proceed with this project? What is the protocol? --Lil

Our debate about whether MR should be credited for discovering hooking-on led me to do some cursory research about Dr. William Linfoot. I will go ahead and start a Linfoot wiki page as a place to store what I've found so fair and y'all can help organize it better later.Lil Peck

A rancher friend of mine told me >Linfoot was the first I ever heard of to put on clinics like Ray Hunt, Clinton Anderson, John Lyons, Craig Cameron, (and others) do today. Linfoot would put on demonstrations where he would ride an unbroke horse in 30 minutes as I recall. ... I think I remember him saying he was part American Indian (forget which tribe) and he was using methods taught to him by that side of his family. Personally, I think that Beery is probably the source of information for most modern horse clinicians. Tom Dorrance said he learned a lot of what he did from the Beery books... and, of course, he strongly influenced Ray Hunt... who influenced everyone else we have today.> Lil Peck

Cooperation

First of all, let me say that I really appreciate both of you letting be on the team with you. I know nothing about horses except the little I've picked up from reading novels and watching movies. I've only skimmed MR's book. I don't understand Xenophon, Rarey, etc.

I'm glad also that we are concentrated all the discussion here on the project page, instead of doing a Meatball:ForestFire where discussion gets divided up into so many different threads that you wind up making the same point all over the place and never can be sure who has read what!

That said, I wonder if I can help by working on (or at least listing) the following aspects:

• who was the first to write about a certain aspect of horses' instinctive behavior: like mares & stallions, body language aspects like turning your back, cocking an ear, etc.
• who was the first to write about various aspectos of horse training using / based on these natural instincts - particularly those which involve no force, no ropes, no violence ("gentling"?)

And also, perhaps more broadly / less controversially:

• names of pioneers in the history of horse training + famous horse trainers, along with what methods they used / advocated
  • maybe - what each of these guys and gals claimed to have observed / discovered first (but this overlaps with above)

Finally, I'm glad to have Lil here, on the "other side" of the Roberts thing. I'm probably biased because I heard about Roberts by seeing his bio book and "real horse whisperer" video long before I even came to Wikipedia. It never occured to me that he might be telling only one side of a story.

I want to make this (1) about the horses, (2) about how horses and people can interact harmoniously, and (3) only peripherally about who learned or taught what over the years. Uncle Ed 16:25, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Ed, I appreciate being welcomed into this project. I am weak on writing in a professorial manner so I have a lot to learn from you and Patrick about how to do that correctly for this project. Just point me where you think I should go, with regard to topics, etc. You two are wikipedia experts and I have much to learn.

I find myself to be intellectually challenged by this project, which hopefully will help to delay the development of senile dementia. (And here I resist the urge to use smilelies, which seem to be inappropriate for wikipedia.)

Fascinated by the origins of the hooking-on/join-up demonstration, I have begun to delve into the history of one of its first documented practitioners, Dr. William Linfoot. I have requested reprints from articles about him that were published in the 1960's. I will see if it is possible to get copies of the films that were done of his demonstrations.

I have ordered a copy of a biography about Matlock Rose, who is a living legend who is still riding and training cutting horses.

Dean Smith, another living legend, is in my home state and I can easily get articles about him, and I might also be able to go interview him in person. I first attended one of his seminars back in the 60's; he is still a popular clinician and trainer, about training and particularly for training cutting and reining horses. --Lil Peck 16:52, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Based on my haphazard reading of novels and viewing of movies, I'm fairly sure that non-verbal communication between people and horses was NOT first discovered by Monty Roberts watching Mustangs in the mid-twentieth century. It MUST have happened centuries earlier, if not millenia.

Ħ Some aspects have been known since the first human failed to comprehend the significance of two ears pinned back and a threateningly open mouth with big teeth showing. The particularly "I want to negotiate my return to the herd" thing was not written about by anybody between Xenophon and sometime in the very late 20th century, as far as I know. Roberts's book was the first place I read about it. One question is whether he learned it for himself, and another question is whether somebody else knew about it first. Then there is the possibility that he will turn out to be another Carlos Castaneda.

Systematizing it, getting it down to a matter of 30 minutes - if genuinely possible - MIGHT have had to wait until the 20th century. Although again, I'm not so interested in who discovered what first as I am in what was discovered and how we can all learn about it now.

Ħ I don't think we can write about it without mentioning discoverers when known.

I heard that two men independently invented the telephone and that one beat the other to the patent office by a matter of hours! Newton and Liebniz independently invented integral calculus.

Ħ But there are also cases, as in the discovery of DNA, where one person gets cheated out of fair credit.

A lot of different people worked on inventing the airplane, and the car is certainly no one person's invention any more than the computer is. (The Wright Brothers were just the first to figure out how to control the darn things in flight, by twisting the wings - an idea which led to ailerons if I'm spelling that right.)

Ħ And cases where industrialists with expensive lawyers have stolen inventions and taken credit of them for themselves.

Roberts seems to be the fulcrum somehow, so I guess we can't brush him aside. But as long as we don't get hung up on proving that he's good or bad, pioneer or fraud, decent chap or unscrupulous showman, we can use the article about him as a starting point - or better one of several "focal points" that tie together some of the other articles.

Ħ I agree. We can explain what he teaches people, how he trains horses, etc. Those are matters of fact. We ought to put him in the tradition of Powell and Rarey. He quotes or paraphrases Rarey often, although I can't remember offhand whether he mentions him by name. (But who said, "A stitch in time saves nine?" I say it, but I don't know who said it first.) If his presumed ethological discoveries were made first by other people we can mention that without having to try to figure out whether his discoveries were independent.P0M 17:50, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually this project page is the real tie-in for us writers! I think we have a good team here, now let's start writing some brilliant prose!! Uncle Ed 17:16, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I think that a good structure for this article (and one that has worked for articles that have been long and/or contentious) is to have this article have some summary information on, e.g., Xenophon, and then an article on Xenophon that could explore him a bit more, include some biographical information that would place him in history but might not have direct relevance to harmonious relationships between humans and horses, etc.

If we do that, the answers to questions of "who was the first to..." will emerge naturally and clearly, and if we have proper citations there should be no questions about priority except in those cases where somebody has a predecessor who has not yet been properly credited. Listing our conclusions clearly and in order should make it easy for others to spot holes in our presentation.

I've divided the "horsemastership" people on the project page according to their time in history. That makes that part of the project a crude outline for a main article. The next step would be to have a paragraph or so on Xenophon saying that he lived from... to ... and taught..... and also that horses should be gradually introduced to more and more "clashing" environments while reassuring them and keeping them calm (see sacking out, and ....." That way we could list the highlights without having to obscure the general flow of thousands of years of progress with minutiae.

What you will find, in general, is that progress has been incremental. "Sending a horse away with a clothesline rope" looks very much like "sacking out". Is it an incremental improvement? Depends on who you talk to I guess. But it is a clear difference. If you combine it with the trainer turning his/her back to the horse and letting the horse decide to approach the trainer and nuzzle his shoulder, then it looks like a link between sacking out and something else.

If we take a non-historical approach to the question, "about horses" and "about how horses and people can interact harmoniously", we risk getting into original research -- deciding among ourselves what is valid and what is not useful. There are, for instance, strongly opposed statements on "sacking out." The reason is probably that there is a sensible way of using this procedure, and irrational and harmful ways of using this procedure (sacking the horse until it becomes frantic and then exhausted and unable to resist), and people that support it are thinking of one thing while people who oppose it are thinking about something else. Rather than saying "sacking out is a valid methodology," it probably will be more productive to say, "Mr. Black supports it because..., and Mr. Brown rejects it because..." P0M 17:18, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Patrick, imho, your approach is more scholarly and less interpretive than the approach that Ed has offered ("original research", as you noted). There is merit to Ed's proposal and I hope that he will consider independently writing an external article or book "about how horses and people can interact harmoniously". Lil

That's a good idea. There have been chapters in books and recurrent mentions in books devoted to more narrowly focused topics, but never a book about the whole sweep of that development. There are even wikibooks to be written on such topics. P0M 18:02, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Progress Reports

Lil

Gentlemen, I'm still very clumsy with wiki conventions so please correct my input as necessary.

I may be able to view a couple of films of Linfoot at work; and I have requested reprints of articles about him. Because the articles were published so long ago, that may turn out to be a blind alley.

I am awaiting a copy of the horse training book by Marvin Roberts that I purchased, which is very hard to find because of how long it has been since it was published.

I have ordered a copy of the biography of Matlock Rose and I have purchased an old copy of Western Horseman magazine that has an article about him. There are other articles, too. Matlock Rose is regarded by many people as one of the greatest horse trainers to have ever lived. It has been said that if he had specialized in a discipline other than cutting, that he probably would have been very successful in it as well. He is still riding and training even though he is now in his late 70's or early 80's. --Lil Peck 18:21, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Greetings POM and Ed.

A friend of mine is a teacher of teens who have been abused and deprived, such as you mentioned in your update, Patrick. Her work is very hard and sometimes dangerous and yet she is so compassionate with those young people. In private life, she is a breeder of fine show horses.

As a riding teacher, it seems to me that most horse abuse that we might see today is due to the inexperience or ignorance of the rider/handler. Some of the people that I teach, because they are novices, make too much of behaviors that are typical and normal for a horse. With more experience and practice, they learn what not to be concerned about and how to get the horse's cooperation in a positive way.

For example, it was raining today and so I hauled a trailer load of horses to an indoor arena for my students to ride there. One of the horses is a three year old filly who is still quite green. She is sweet and compliant and calm-natured, so her owners, a mother and daughter, were surprised at how "nervous" the filly seemed in the unfamiliar setting.

I saw nothing remarkable about the filly's behavior. I longed her for awhile and then just held her with a lead rope out in the arena and let her stand with me while I coached riders through a horsemanship pattern. The filly relaxed and then her teenage owner was able to ride her and have fun with her.

The teenager's mom I put on a 24 year old retired show mare who has been-there-done-that hundreds of times. The mother will be a fine rider someday but at this time is self-conscious and tense. Because she is tense, she wobbles about in the saddle and then the old mare thinks she is being cued to lope or go faster, which frightens the lady, etc.

You can see how without instruction, such a rider might conclude that the old horse is being "bad". Such a rider might try to compensate by reining more harshly, getting into the horse's face and not giving any release from pressure, which would make things worse.

We put a longeline on the old mare and let the rider go in circles around us until she felt relaxed and comfortable. Then the longeline was removed and the lady was able to ride easily on the rail around the arena.

Something I try to impart to my students is not to judge a horse's behavior. That is, just accept what the horse gives us, and build on it. Don't classify the behavior as "good" or as "bad." It just "is." Kind of like the difference between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. Kirk would say "that's bad" and go in loaded for bear. Picard would say "that's interesting" and work around the problem. Maybe a better comparison would be zen meditation: when a thought intrudes, notice it and let it go away, rather than resisting the entrance of the thought.

I think most horse owners love their horse and want to do right by him. Some who have problems are overmounted or don't give their horse enough exercise. Others may have the opposite problem of being too timid with their horse, and "leadership abhors a vacuum."

Lil 04:02, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Father Flanagan used to say, "I have never seen a bad boy." I think he is right, but much of our society is ready to dump people in jail and throw the key away. I spent days arguing with people on the NPR forum after the Columbine incident. There were two main points of view exhibited there; (1) No gun control. (Read: Teachers should be armed and ready to blast away the kids who come to shoot the school up.) (2) Those kids should have been well beaten ahead of any time that they might have misbehaved. Then I got in a big argument with somebody who said that in order to make a horse a suitable mount their wills had to be broken, domination by the human had to be obtained, etc., etc., so what did I mean to say that beating kids was a bad idea. I preached Rarey, et al., and they called me a theoretician. Having never tried it for myself, I bought a 4 year old Arabian mare that had never been... Well, actually, she had never even been trained to lead, let alone to let somebody ride her. But Powell was enough, no need for sending away and letting back in, and certainly no need for the Rarey method. No bucking, either. But by that time the NPR Forum was long in the past. P0M 04:25, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Patrick, your mare is an interesting example, because she was already 4 years of age and had so little handling, and because she is an Arabian, and they tend to have big motors. I have a friend who also trained an Arabian that hadn't been handled much, but she was halter trained and she was just two years old when he got her. Les had never trained a horse before and didn't really have any idea of how to go about it. So he just used kindness and common sense and did fine with her. She is a very nice trail riding horse now.

As I see it, anyone who would deliberately and knowingly attempt to train a horse by fear and brute force has to be a sadist or at the very least, a narcissist (because narcissists lack empathy). I am reminded of abusive practices of the (unfortunately recent) past used by a few people to train horses for the specialty of Western Pleasure.

Western Pleasure went through a very ugly period in which horses were required to do a kind of crippled looking circus act movement that had to be so slow, even at the lope, that the horses were barely moving. There was nothing beautiful or natural about it. The horses were required to carry their heads so low that they became known as "peanut rollers." To force horses into this way of going so that their riders could be winners in the show pen, brutal methods became somewhat common:

• Draining blood from the horse before competition to make him tired and slower. I've heard that at the Quarter Horse Congress in that era, the dumpsters would have lots of horse blood in them. This practice was even observed at 4-H shows--what a terrible thing to teach to kids! Due to reforms in the Western Pleasure industry, this practice is much, much less commonplace now.
• Laying the horse down, tieing him up, and then covering him with a tarp and leaving him there for 24 hours. When the horse is finally uncovered and let up, he has developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome and apparently accepts the trainer as his "rescuer". Some "trainers" still do this. The good ones don't and don't even "need" to because of the class of horse they choose to work with.
• Drugging. Sadly, drugging is still rather common. Because of "designer drugs" it is can be difficult to test for drugs. Here again, the great trainers find drugs unnecessary because the horses they are brought, the cream of the crop, don't "need" to be drugged.
• Tail blocking. The horse's tail is injected with alcohol to deaden it so that the horse must carry the base of the tail flat against his body. This IS against the rules, yet is, as I understand it, done almost 100% of the time to the high level Western Pleasure horses such as the ones who perform at Congress and the Quarter Horse World Championship Show. The screwball idea is that this creates an appearance of greater collection. This is an "everybody does it" deal. You have your monied client and his $50,000 horse and you don't want to get beat by the other guy and his monied client and their $50,000 horse just because their horse has a blocked tail and yours doesn't. There are even licensed AQHA judges who conduct tail blocking procedures while away on their judging trips. Fortunately, the procedure seems to do little harm to the horses (they are still able to swish flies), but there ARE cases of horses who have had permanent damage to their tails! And it is CHEATING.

In the past few years, Western Pleasure has improved, due to activist work done by some of the trainers who really like horses, and due to pressure from the horse owning public. The regulatory bodies, such as the National Snaffle Bit Association and the American Quarter Horse Association, realized that if the industry was to continue to grow and to appeal to new horse owners, that they had to clean up.

Rules were put into place to reward more natural horses. Now, "forward movement" is required, rather than the crippled little hop-hop lope and the "tralope." The industry really has improved, but some outsiders still think the Western Pleasure horses move "too slow." As I see it, in the region I am in, the horses now look "trained" rather than too slow, which is OK with me. You may still sometimes see someone at lower levels show a horse in the old manner because they haven't gotten the message. Training a world class Western Pleasure horse is now more similar to training a dressage horse.

I love Western Pleasure horses; that is what I breed. I find them to be friendly and naturally compliant and sweet and calm. I find them to be very beautiful in form and movement, and their physical features and temperaments make them very versatile. A pleasure bred will also make a good candidate for other events such as Trail Class and Western Riding and Horsemanship, and they also make great family recreational riding horses and trail horses. My elderly lesson horse, in her prime, earned 94 Western Pleasure points. She was one of the greatest show mares to ever enter the ring. And no, I didn't own her then, she would have been way too pricey for me! I traded for her a couple of years ago. She has perfect conformation and even now with all the age and wear and tear on her, is very beautiful and very sweet. I just love her to pieces.

With regard to "bad people." There are people who are psychopaths or just plain evil. Their brains would need to be rewired if they were to be rehabilitated. I am also thinking of the cases of where brain injuries have removed impulse control and so on. At present, sociopathy and narcissism are incurable. (Philosophically speaking, if the physical/chemical structure of the person's brain is such that they do evil things, is the person's essence or soul also evil? The idea of reincarnation is interesting as it gives such a person another chance with a different brain. I find it helpful to take an antidepressant and I am a much nicer more pleasant person to other human beings when I am taking the medication than when I am not. Which person is the real Lil? I would like to think that the medicated Lil is the real person, because that is the person I choose to be.)

You mentioned the Columbine tragedy. I have the unpopular feeling of sympathy for the perpetrators. I was an unpopular child in school who was a target of animosity from the other students. I minded my own business and tried to stay under the radar, but the other kids sought me out to torment me. I wonder if someone had bothered to notice how the perpetrators were suffering and to show them some respect and friendship, if the tragedy may have been prevented. When I was a school child, my link to sanity was my horses. I suffered in school all day and then went home to my horses and worked with them until it got dark and so cold that I couldn't feel my fingers and toes.

I had about the same general personal history as you, and the same reaction to Columbine. Unfortunately, I didn't have a horse until I was about 16, but then I got a perfect part-Morgan about 15 years old. Not at all worn out, and perfectly unflappable -- even when kids tossed strings of firecrackers at us. Somehow in those early days I heard about John Rarey, but couldn't get his book. Later, in my university library I discovered a copy. Two years of riding for PE at the university and I got a couple summer jobs teaching equitation in summer camp. I learned a great deal about teaching people from interacting with horses, and a great deal about myself from teaching summer camp kids. P0M 05:14, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Progress Report: I have contacted a veterinary college library to see if they can help me find articles about Dr. Linfoot. Lil17:30, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Progress Report: The veterinary library found an article about Linfoot in a convention proceedings book. The editor of the proceedings, Dr. F. J. Milne, wrote a four page article about watching Dr. Linfoot's horse training demonstration of "breaking a wild horse from start to finish in something like 25 minutes." I photocopied the article at the library and will transcribe it for my website asap. Lil17:30, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Patrick and Ed, you might enjoy reading this biography for the fun of it: http://www.pkequestrian.com/training_bio.asp (although I remain skeptical about everything I read that is autobiographical, lol)15:23, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Ed

It sounds like we are in agreement on all major points and that there are no significant disagreements, even on minor points. We each come to the project with a different perspective, and with various "levels" of writing skill, experience, and book learning.

I was about to make the "suggestion" that from time to time we report progress made (or problems encountered) right here on ethe project discussion page, but Lil Peck beat me to it!

And of course, let's keep inserting links on the project page. Uncle Ed 18:24, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

P0M

I'm discovering something interesting -- or maybe it won't pan out after all. But here it is: I got the rest of the name of the person (Powell) that John Rarey quoted in his own book. Then it turned out that the book is actually on-line. That book in turned mentioned an even earlier figure who was Irish but appears to have gone to England and to have become famous there. Beyond that the source of this transmission seems to have been "a gypsy," and nothing is said about what the original secret was. The Irish guy, Daniel Sullivan, is apparently the first one to be called a "horse whisperer." Both Sullivan and Rarey gained their fame (at least primarily) not by training horses that had been raised on somebody's farm, habituated to people at least well enough not to be totally spooked just by being in the same pen, etc., but by solving problems with horses that had become vicious or fearful to the point that other people couldn't do anything with them. So they were famous for performing interventions that restructured the relationships between these horses and human beings.

Wow! This is like mediation. I'm a founding member of the Wikipedia:Mediation committee and (arguably) the most successful mediator, so you can see why I would find this interesting! ^.>.^ Uncle Ed 18:31, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Powell's part of Rarey's book has always seemed to me to teach all that one would need to know (i.e., basic ideas but maybe not all of the fine points that one might have to work out for oneself) to establish a good relationship with a horse and get it to let you ride without the "bucking bronco trip."

Rarey's method of rehabilitation seems to me to make good sense from the standpoint of what we know about conditioning -- especially the kind of conditioning experiment that demonstrates how people form maladaptive patterns of behavior that resist unlearning or relearning. (If the experimenter puts an experimental animal such as a rat in a cage with an electrified grid that the animal has to stand on, and then teaches the animal that it has to push a button every ten minutes to keep from getting shocked, then the poor animal will spend the rest of its life running over ten minutes to push the button. The experimenter can disconnect the electrical apparatus and the rat will never learn that it doesn't need to push the button any more. The reason is that it never will risk testing what will happen if it doesn't push the button.

You're about to touch on something I'm very familiar with, which is poignant and salient. In fact my own mother (Riva Poor) has an unpublished manuscript on Patterns of Dysfunctional Behavior which I stand to inherit someday as her literary executor. Uncle Ed 18:35, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

The same psychology is at work in the lives of many people who learned a protective kind of behavior that is dysfunctional in respect to normal society but was successful or appeared successful in dealing with an early abusive situation. It is also at work in the lives of soldiers who establish "rituals" -- things they feel they must do. Whatever was special about the time they got through a major crisis may be treated thereafter as something that they have to do in order to feel secure. For the rat to learn that it doesn't need to push the button to escape a shock, it would have to be prevented somehow from pushing the button.) Rarey's method puts the horse entirely at the mercy of the human being. The horse can no longer do whatever it was doing to try to protect itself from the humans that tormented it. Then it discovers that even though it doesn't do any of those things all it gets is a pleasant "grooming" by the human.

Rarey's book, however, doesn't actually explain things this way. In fact it explains things in terms of sort of demonstrating one's absolute superiority to the horse. And on top of that he also advocates some techniques for the early training of horses that to me seems unnecessarily rough.

So it is beginning to look to me as though Sullivan learned an empirical solution to coping with horses that felt such a great need to defend themselves that they became dangerous to human, and then that information was passed on to Powell and Rarey. Of the three, Powell seems to have been the most considerate trainer. (Maybe my opinion will change after I've actually read his book.)

The other part of this foray into history is that the old tradition of considerate training, gentle training, was showing up in the Spanish Riding School at around this time, and their tradition was such that it would not likely produce any severely abused horses so it wouldn't need a "horse whisperer's" methodology.

Meanwhile, there are even today people who are not part of either of these traditions, who may find a couple of trees or telephone poles 20-30 feet apart, tie a tractor inner-tube fairly high up in each of them, hook ropes with snaps to the inner tubes and snap the snaps onto the halter of a green horse that will then thrash itself into submission (if it is lucky). And there are plenty of other "main strength and awkwardness" methods, although for some strange reason the advocates of these methods seem not to be publishing these days. (Intentional irony, sorry.)

Good teachers like Margaret Cabell Self speak disparagingly of Rarey, or at least of people who go around "throwing horses on the ground" as their first approach to getting the horse to accept a saddle and rider. That seems to me to be perfectly natural since when she trained horses she undoubtedly never abused them and so never had a big problem to solve. On the other hand I suspect she never actually read Rarey's book, or she would have realized how sane and helpful it is in most ways. And I suspect that here we have some turbulence caused by two traditions coming together without anything to mediate between them. In the good 20th century trainers in the project list I suspect we have the result of a more gentle melding of the two traditions.

Unfortunately, hardly any of these ideas -- even if they could be true -- can go into an article since they involve "original research" on my part.

One thing that probably tie in with Ed's interests in this subject is that human beings sometimes exhibit the same "freaked out" behavior patterns because of abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome, etc. How is a teacher to deal with a student who is so terrified of other human beings, and has been so in need of defending himself against neighbors and maybe even his own family members that on the outside he looks like "bad, bad Leroy Brown with a razor in his shoe"? We would be a better society if we never produced abused individuals, never produced individuals who have learned to get their way by pushing other people around, etc. But the fact is that we have all kinds of bad outcomes of this general kind. Sometimes it is easier to talk to people about how to successfully interact with horses (who can be presumed not to have any diabolically hidden agendas) than it is to talk to them about how to interact with "bad kids." P0M 02:51, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Comment: A very few horses are simply not trainable. There have been two in my own experience. Both were very nervous and spooky and high strung. One of them was a "halter bred." She had breeding that was selected for a specific appearance rather than for trainability. Part of this is selecting for a small head on a large body. I suspect that this filly had a correspondingly small brain and may have been mentally retarded. I could never get her to hook-on, which was a ncecessary starting point in her case. I finally just gave up and sent her home. My personal opinion is that she was simply temperamentally unsuitable to be a performance horse, but perhaps by now another trainer has done well with her, I don't know.

I worked with another filly that was a fancy pleasure bred that was extremely nervous and spooky. It is unusual for a pleasure bred to have that kind of disposition. She was intelligent and to the best of my knowledge, had never been mishandled before I got her as a two year old. She was affectionate, and I could get her to hook on. The problem was, that this filly woke up in a new world every day. She seemed unable to retain what she learned one day into the next day. Each day, she would begin just as nervous and spooky as she had begun the day before. Who knows, perhaps she had some of kind of brain injury during birth or just a miswiring of the brain.

Sometimes, "alpha" horses do respond well to having a front leg hobbled up, or to being laid down. I worked with one mare that was aggressive and would charge at and kick at me. I think that was just her nature, that she had never been mistreated. I laid her down (which can be done in a nonviolent way with the safety of the horse in mind) and from there on she was extremely nice to work with and was one of my favorites. I found her to be very intelligent, companionable and brave and I think she would have been an excellent mount for even a child or a novice. Some people might think that I was cruel to have laid her down. I know that I was not cruel, but I do not recommend it as something that other people should do, because of the potential for abuse or harm to horse or handler.Lil18:07, 6 October 2005 (UTC) (Have I been too talkative? My apologies if so.)

No, not too talkative at all. It's good to see that some people are still using Rarey's method of "laying down". My mare needed a course of the Roberts method after she chased me around the perimiter of a three-acre pasture. She now knows that she is not to kick or bite, but I still have to caution her once in a while in first chilly days of autumn, and I think that's it's just in her nature to be the opposite of submissive. On the other hand, if I hurt myself she is the one who gets upset. I was taken unconscious to the hospital once, a year after I got her, and during the first weeks after I got back she was in obvious distress every time I prepared to go for groceries or go to work. Separation anxiety doesn't only happen to humans I guess. P0M 23:29, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

As a matter of fact, much of my Mediation work here at Wikipedia is a variation of what Monty Roberts does. *Sigh* I guess I should say, what Rarey discovered! I'm still having trouble giving credit where credit is due. Anyway, I haven't claimed credit for *my* independent discovery of the same thing, have I, now? ;-)

A user name Jack Sarfatti got himself banned earlier this month, but I helped him get out of trouble, and without once using a stick or tying anybody up. He had reverted to "old behavior patterns" but I showed him that he was among "good humans" now, and there's no more problem (so far). Uncle Ed 20:58, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

What kind of information has survival value?

For other reasons I was just thinking about kids and why they test teachers. Usually we think of kids testing teachers to see what they can get away with. But I had an experience with one boy in disciplinary school where he was very definitely testing me, and it wasn't because he wanted to get away with something. These kids knew that I knew karate because I overheard one of the guidance counsellors trying to smooth my way in the school by spreading the word that I was a black belt. (I never reached that level, but she was trying to be emphatic I guess.) Nevertheless, this 15-16 year old, who may have been physically larger than I was or was at least about my size, persisted in trying to intimidate me. At first it was verbal, then it was verbal, loud, and at the physical range where he was actually "in my face". I ignored all of this. His next step was to throw a fist in my face. I wasn't worried about it because it was clear to me that it was an intimidation attempt and not a real attempt to rearrange my nose or darken an eye. So I did what I have been trained to do when dealing with a lower belt in the karate dojo. I asked him to "try that again." He was by now apprehensive since none of this was going as he had anticipated, I hadn't backed down and I hadn't counter-attacked. I reassured him that nobody was going to get hurt, he came in with a sort of half-hearted punch, and I used a "tai chi"-like technique that sent him flailing into the blackboard -- but at half speed, so there wasn't even any discomfort.

He was testing me, I believe, because he wanted to discover whether I was someone he could trust. He became a very good friend in a flash, for which I can thank my good teachers, and especially the first one who taught me that stunning technique. (I've used it in sparring with people who are better than I, and it's the only thing I have that can touch them.) What kind of information has survival value? Whether you can get away with something or not is actually a kind of negative information on the person. Frequently it indicates that "here is a person who doesn't care enough about me or about his community to bother himself." Otherwise it indicates, "Here is a person that I can ignore." But when it seems that the whole world is against you, then finding a person whom you can trust is a big deal.

I wouldn't credit Rarey or Roberts with this kind of approach that you and I have been looking at. The earliest one to write about it was Xenophon. He probably learned from his father or his family's horse trainer, at least much of it. In the end it really isn't important. On top of that, people can independently rediscover techniques and they deserve credit as very bright people too.

Rarey's special thing was discovering the method of making the horse lie down and then gently stroking all parts of its body and calming the horse while it knows itself to be completely defenseless. You may have heard the story of the gorilla in the Chicago zoo who had always lived in an indoor cage. The zoo got some extra money and decided to be nice to the gorilla by building him a yard outside his cage. They fenced in a nice large area, planted appropriate trees, maybe made a jungle gym, and then made a door in the wall leading to the gorilla cage. The gorilla was afraid to go out, and nobody was big enough to lead him out by the hand. He spent the rest of his life indoors as far as I know. That's a common problem in psychotherapy. A person has learned what s/he must do to survive.

To interject, this is precisely what my mother's book is all about: dysfunctional patterns of decision making (DPD). The child dares not give up the DPD because it saved him in a life or death situation! Uncle Ed 15:03, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Then the person is removed from the abusive situation that provoked the fear and the extreme defensive technique, and the problem for the therapist is to get the patient to give up his/her defense long enough to discover that it is no longer necessary. Actually, I doubt very much that Rarey knew why his technique worked. He understood the "Now I have demonstrated that I have you completely at my mercy and can do it again whenever I want," part, but he didnt understand the "and yet you are as safe with me as you were with your mother" part.

The technique that I will call the Roberts technique, since he is one person who has described it and has offered a rationale for it, and we can leave the issue of true discoverer for research to reveal, is much less dangerous to the horse and to the trainer. It involves "sending away" for bad behavior, followed by "keeping away" until the offending party indicates a willingness to negotiate "return to the herd", and then warmly reaccepting the formerly offending individual.

Precisely what I do as a Wikipedia admin! Uncle Ed 15:03, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

When applied to humans, face-to-face, the whole procedure may be completed within a few seconds. With horses it generally takes about 20 minutes. Like the Rarey technique, it is rarely required. The chances that one has a horse that bites aggressively, kicks aggessively, etc., are higher than the chance that one is dealing with a horse that has decided that humans are enemies. Biting and kicking to achieve dominance are normal activities. (I can think of a couple of Wikipedians who bite and kick, too.) In the herd, young horses try biting and kicking other horses and get disciplined by the herd. That's one reason that it is better to deal with a 3 year old that has run with the herd for all its life than it is to deal with a 3 year old that has been raised in isolation. The "Roberts" technique substitutes the human for the alpha mare doing her job in discipling herd members that are succeeding too well in biting and kicking. I guess the Wikipedia analogy to the "Roberts" method would be banning followed by negotiation and a memorandum if not a contract pertaining to readmission to the community. Or, probably more practically, events that would warn a contributor that he/she was may still be a de jure member of the community but was getting into the de facto position of non-member, followed by an expression of willingness to negotiate on his/her part, followed by a change in the de facto status of the contributor. Maybe that was approximately what occurs when you mediate. P0M 19:26, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Ed I like that, "the good humans!"

Patrick, I saw once how a teacher can bring out the worst in kids. When I was in high school, my sister-in-law was once assigned as a substitute to the English class I was in. She was a New Yorker and accustomed to tough kids and she had a 'tude of her own. Problem was, she came into the classroom all bristly and on the offensive, and because of that, her behavior motivated some kids to behave badly when they likely would have been fairly mild if treated with respect. I was so embarassed that I wanted to hide under my desk.

We had three teachers in my jr. high/highschool period who were the 3 vertices of a triangle: Miss Whitten (her real name), Miss Prussian, and Mrs. Lucifer. Nobody ever acted up in Miss Whitten's class, because they trusted her and wanted to merit her respect. Hardly anybody acted up in Miss Prussian's class because she attacked anything that looked like the slightest deviation from a submissive attitude, but she was absolutely fair (and if you dared probe beneath the surface there was a loving human being and nothing else down there). She too could be trusted. Mrs. Lucifer was arch, sarcastic, enjoyed putting people down (I suspect), and she regularly experienced little outbreaks of resistance. I myself was rebellious in her classes, rarely for any very good reason. I'm not sure whether I was probing to see whether she was trustworthy or was just reacting. Probably I'd already decided that she was untrustworthy and was willful enough to want to torment her back.

I wish we had a more generic term to use for "the Roberts method". It could just as easily be called "the John Lyons method" or "the Ray Hunt method", ad nauseam. I suppose "round penning" is a fairly generic term. I suppose I can make peace in my mind with the use of "Roberts method" if I think of it as referring to Marvin Roberts, Sr., who used the method before his son did.

I too would like a better term. "Round penning" doesn't get to the essence of the method, since you can do it in pens of many shapes as long as you can stand in the middle and keep the horse moving around without too much trouble. "Sending away and letting back" is a bit clunky, but gets closer to the distinguishing element of the technique that I am talking about.

I think the reason it is usually effective is a simple matter of physiology. The horse gets to rest when in the vicinity of the handler and therefore the handler becomes the comfortable place to be. When the handler also gives the horse a good scratching at the top of the withers and so on, it becomes not only a safe place but also a pleasant place.

And what you say is pretty close to what Xenophon said about letting the trainer be the horse's source of security and freedom from flies.

I located and rented a video that show William Linfoot taming a horse. His way wasn't what one would call round-penning and yet obviously was very effective and humane. In fact, I can imagine that for some horses, the Linfoot method would be preferable, because it doesn't have one making the horse "go away".

I haven't seen it, but if you take away the sending away part you end up with the Powell method. There are only so many things one can do to make a horse feel more comfortable. The "wrinkles" tend to be gimmicks like tying one ear down, etc.

I purchased a copy of the out-of-print "The Jeffrey Method of Horse Handling" by Maurice Wright, who was a practitioner of Kell Jeffrey's methods in Australia. I've had time only to skim the book but it looks as though Jeffrey did something very similar to Linfoot.

A little peeve I have is the common assumption that "everyone" used to use cruel and barbaric methods (as seen in Hollywood westerns?) to train horses until the dawn of the information age/very recent history.

I think Monty Roberts "sold" that idea as part of his promotion of his own methods. I never saw or heard of abusive methods being used where I came from, but we had one master trainer within 15 miles and one farm where they stabled a triple-crown winner in his old age (along with many of their own fine horses). But I was shocked when I was shopping for a horse to buy here in N.C. I went to a nearby breeder/trainer's place where I saw a horse thrashing itself into submission between two trees. I walked out into the pasture with the owner of a couple dozen yearling colts, got mobbed by the colts (who liked to nip), and got a lecture from the owner about how deadly dangerous horses are. (Of course she hadn't done a thing to intervene when her colts were mobbing me, not that I really cared.)

In my own experience, with the people I've known, I knew this was untrue. However, I've been finding documentation here and there to support it. I have a small collection of documents now from earlier decades, as far back as 50 years or so, that describe how to tame and train horses in a gentle manner.

I believe that for some people there is a perceived need to dominate horses. Maybe other people have bad experiences with horses that have been abused and react by attacking at the sight of anything that looks to them likes aggressive action from a human. So they imagine that the horse is being "bad" and needs to come under the "spare the rod and spoil the child" law. And usually the humans are angry when they attempt to "lay down the law" to the horse. Other people may get an extremely intelligent horse that prefers not to be subjected to poor handling, who then learns to rear to dislodge the rider, etc. The rider then hears of some method like hitting the horse in the head with a Coke bottle when it rears.

However, I think the best way to be a humane horse trainer is to select good-minded horses, because they seem to be "born broke". ("Broke" used here as slang for "trained.")

We know in the case of humans that some humans seem to be born with certain kinds of problems. You might be interested in the book by Jeffrey Dahmer's father, who (if I remember correctly) says that he could see unusual characteristics in Jeffrey even at an early age, and also that he could see things in his own psyche that were similar but less intense, and that made him suspect that the genetic heritage he gave to his son might have been part of the problem. Some of the books I've read claim that the more intelligent the horse the more potential there is that they will decide on their own not to cooperate in doing things that are less than interesting and pleasant to them. I suspect that the more intelligent horses make better mounts providing that the rider always makes sure to be considerate.

BTW, I went back and looked up a copy of the old Feb. 99 issue of Horse & Rider that had the expose about (controversial guru) in it, to refresh my memory. It looked like very careful journalism to me (a non-journalist) and I can't imagine why (controversial guru) thought it necessary to sue H&R over it. (The case settled out of court.) I don't see anything in the article that says anything malicious about the man and obviously, time has shown that the article had no impact at all on his ability to amaze millions and to sell them his stuff. It appears that the writer gave (controversial guru) ample opportunity to speak for himself before the article was published, and that (controversial guru) may not have used that opportunity for optimum effect. As the man is spoken of nowadays by many folks as "a promoter of peace," one might think that it would be pretty cool if he responded to criticism in a manner such as the Dalai Lama might employ. Perhaps, Patrick, to use some of the philosophy inherent in the martial arts? It can be more effective to acknowledge, bend and flex than to attack.

One of the early 20th century Chinese philosophers says that if somebody points out his faults then that person is respected as his teacher -- regardless of what the critic's motivation may have been. It's great if you have not developed a defensive posture and can afford to take that kind of attitude. The alternative is to spend too much effort in defending yourself, and here we are back to the gorilla in the indoor cage. P0M 18:10, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Maybe the generic term is "horse whispering". But probably not. I don't think there *is* a generic term. We could make a table showing who calls it what:

Daniel Sullivan	horse whisperer	unknown
Willis J. Powell	horse whisperer	always non-threatening
John Solomon Rarey	horse tamer	laying traumatized horses down
Monty Roberts	horse listener	send away and permit return
Another transmission
various "tough" trainers,	horse breaking	break will of horse	encourage frenzied reaction

And I still say that the topic is interesting both for its own sake (to those of us who love horses) and for the insight it gives us about human social life. Uncle Ed 15:14, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I think the list above suggests an interesting way of organizing information. I haven't found my copy of Roberts's book yet, but I am subjectively quite certain that he has absorbed a great deal from Rarey. Perhaps there should be other people in the line between him and Rarey, or perhaps there is an alternative line of development that he takes information from. Anyway, in a separate line of development we could show the sources of the Spanish Riding School. A third line of development might well be the American Indian trainers. I think the name of the technique is probably more important than what other people called these trainers, but

A bit of progress

I found my copy of the book on "Monty Roberts, the man who listens to horses." I haven't had time to reread it. When I do I'll extract the factual information on his training steps. But I am already pretty sure that he doesn't mention John Rarey -- even though he seems to quote him frequently. He mentions Xenophon, lists a number of the same advocates of abusive practices given by Margaret Cabel Self in her 1950s book -- all of them before the 1800s I believe. He then skips over the 19th century. He does mention useful and non-abusive methods of American Indians, however.

Lil, do you have the book by Roberts's father?

P0M 02:31, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I have the book. It is a very nice little book. I will scan and OCR it so you may see it. It is very rare and hard to find these days.

Lil

Great! Thanks. P0M 20:24, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Checking In

Hi guys, haven't forgotten this project or my promises, just been very busy elsewhere. When the weather is decent, I'm outdoors and when it is not, I have other work to catch up on. But, looking forward to doing more work on this project.

Lil 15:27, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

It's good to have you back. I am enjoying the first unencumbered day since sometime in July when I realized I had to get cracking on preparations for the fall semester. P0M 21:12, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

---

Hi y'all, my to-do list keeps getting longer and longer!

Anyhow, wanted to let you know that the book Horse Whispers & Lies has been returned to the authors' website at Horse Whispers & Lies > By now, probably most of you have heard of the scandal about James Frey's Oprah Book Club bestseller, "A Million Little Pieces." As it turns out, the book, published as an autobiography, has been disclosed by thesmokinggun.com to be fiction.

Debra Ristau, coauthor of "Horse Whispers & Lies", the expose about her cousin, said that many people have contacted her with regard to the Frey issue's relevance to her book and Monty's own allegedly false autobiography.

She and her mother Joyce Renebome have now returned their book to their website. Read it now! Apparently, the authors also plan to copy their documentation for their book to the web, which will be a herculean task, due to the volume of material they collected.

See the book HORSE WHISPERS & LIES complete and online and free at http://www.horsewhispersandlies.com/index.html

From the home page: > Monty Roberts: "The Real Horse Whisperer?" His best-seller, "The Man Who Listens to Horses," was sold as NON- FICTION. (Random House 1996) Like James Frey's, "A Million Little Pieces," Monty's memoirs are not even close to the truth. Worse, Monty accuses his parents of heinous acts to make himself the hero.

JAMES FREY LIES CHANGED EVERYTHING. TRUTH MATTERS. THANK YOU OPRAH. Oprah gave us the courage to continue our stand for truth >