I tried to watch the video on this page but couldn’t finish it once CA started jabbering. I love the way that they edit it to make him out like he’s a WWF hero with rock music and scenes of “crazy” horses. The man is an egomaniac - not even close to being a good personality to work with horses.
[QUOTE=Lady Eboshi;6923426]
Idle observation: Usually a trainer has you sign a release of liability when you send them your horse; what did this one say? If he had care, custody & control insurance they might have paid for the necropsy and then made a settlement.
If the owner of this horse was an ammie, I’d cut them a lot more slack all the way around, but if they’re claiming to be any kind of professional operation (breeding, selling, training etc.) they should have known enough to cover themselves.
The other part that’s a head-scratcher is, at the time the horse (unsuccessfully-backed 7-year old who had hurt people) was sent to CA, his monetary value was essentially “nil.” Whatever one might think of CA’s training methods, he DID offer them a horse of around $25,000.00 + value to make it right, which is sure going above and beyond the call in my book. Now any “pro” worth their 1040’s should have JUMPED at the chance to make sweet lemonade out of a very sour situation indeed. It could have been plain bad luck, and I can’t fault the trainer.[/QUOTE]
My thoughts re: necropsy, was that the owner said no. What she would have said had he offered to pay for it, we’ll never know. However, since she said no necropsy, he could have gotten in a boatload of trouble had it been done anyway on his…or the insurance company’s dime.
And you bet she should have taken the horse he offered and been glad to have it, even if she resold it. That would have been the smart move to make…she could have resold it and bought a fully trained, black majikal Fresian with the proceeds. I agree that the horse she sent him had no real-world value in the condition it was in when she sent it to CA. Its value was in being a majikal hairy black horse…unlike the fully-trained-yet-ordinary horse she was offered that actually had value, even if only for resale. He bent over backwards to accommodate. And she was nuts for refusing.
Yeah, that would’ve been a huge deal-breaker for me, too.
Although, my trainer says that she’s run into problems with owners coming to watch. So often, the problem the owner thinks s/he has is the symptom of a bigger underlying hole in the basics. (Kind of like when I taught school, and I was supposed to prepare the little darlings for their standardized algebra tests when they couldn’t do arithmetic yet.) So when the owner, who leaves a horse who has trouble performing something more advanced, sees my trainer working on something very basic s/he sometimes complains, “But he already knows that!” Still, she’s always encouraged me to come watch and learn. 
That is one long thread. I’m on page 37 with no end in sight. Anybody know how it ends?
[QUOTE=4cornersfarm;6925230]
That is one long thread. I’m on page 37 with no end in sight. Anybody know how it ends?[/QUOTE]
Sonesta posted an update on the last page 
[QUOTE=katarine;6924961]
He used every pool noodle, chain saw, boat buoy, Mounted Shooter pistol, leaf blower, and splint boot in the county. His splint boots had little pieces of pool noodle flapping from them, for cripes sake. He had spoken many times over the course of Friday and Saturday about the little horse- saying how KIND and EASY this little horse was, such a NICE horse, will make a nice ladies or child’s horse.
Until that sweet, kind,trying little horse had enough.[/QUOTE]
IME, it takes a lot to make the average horse come after you. The unbroke ones may be a little quicker as they haven’t had years of learning to take crap from people. But if the horse seemed out-of-the-box kind and it decided to come after CA at the end of 3 days, I’d be willing to bet that there was some pilot error.
I really don’t know where to go with all this…nowhere I guess.
I have to say that this has been one of the most entertaining threads I’ve read lately.
I’m new here, I’m a CA follower, but not blind to him being an @ss… He is an @ss. That’s why some people like him. I like him b/c I’m not a horse trainer, I’ve ridden my whole life. I really enjoy the ground work, and there are lots of things I have gotten great results from. That doens’t mean that I agree 100% with everything, but 90% of it has been something I could do myself.
This is just a bad situation all the way around, but how entertaining you’ve all made it…
I would like to see the video of that little horse that went after CA. I wonder what happened to him? I hope he found someone to soothe his brain and bring him back around.
He really wasn’t doing anything outrageous to the horse that rears and flips over. I don’t really see him doing anything outrageous to any of the horses on that video.
What I see, is a person ‘moving the horse’s hindquarters’ without regard to the horse’s own mental attitude towards what is going on. As the person moves toward the hindquarters, the horse is moving its SHOULDERS towards the person. In the horse’s view, the person is MOVING AWAY from the horse, giving the horse the clear idea that the HORSE is moving the PERSON’s feet. No wonder to me that the horse is completely surprised that it then gets his mouth jerked on.
This video shows how one should move the hindquarters over WITHOUT pulling the horse’s front end right over onto you. The horse in this clip has no doubt who is directing who’s feet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAmev1-3Btc
If you watch the ‘Buck’ movie closely, the part where the ruined yellow stallion comes after his handler Dan, you will see that the horse moves Dan’s feet several times before he bites Dan in the head. That’s not ‘out of the blue’, that’s how horses see things. If the horse can move your feet, even sometimes, his attitude will be that he is in charge. If the horse can’t move your feet (you’ll see the yellow stud try to move Buck around- he succeeds once, but never after that), he figures he’s not in charge.
Most horses haven’t been mistreated or whacked around enough to get aggressive toward a handler who allows the horse to move his feet. Usually, the handler just gets taken advantage of (horse grazes or otherwise pulls the handler around, or else the horse walks just about on top of the handler). But anyway, if Clinton Anderson doesn’t notice this about the horses he’s working, it’s no surprise to me that he’s getting ‘attacked out of the blue’.
What you are saying is intriguing, but I don’t see the trainer back away from the horse in that clip. Every time the horse turns in, the trainer stands his ground and the horse has to reverse direction.
Microbovine…Exactly! The clip of Ricky Quinn shows it done right for the horse to understand who is in charge…
The one of Clinton Anderson with the horse that flips over backwards shows the handler pulling the horse right over into his space, right before the handler stops moving and the horse ends up pretty much right on top of him. Then, the handler jerks on the reins, the horse rears and goes over backwards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NREoSIPWQ0E
You can see it briefly at 1:18 in the clip, and the part I’m giving my opinion about is at 1:49.
I would be so pissed off if somebody did that to my horse! Why can’t he just be still for a second and let the horse chill out and think?!
Uugghhh, seeing that clip of him waving the chainsaw around that horse was pretty disturbing, given the fact that so many horses in my area have been butchered alive/dismembered with chainsaws. :no: I really don’t want my horse desensitized to chainsaws, thanks–if someone comes at him with one, I would really LIKE for him to run away, kick the person in the head, etc.
I think some parts of CA’s method are okay, but there’s plenty that leave a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve seen a few episodes of his show, and it seems that he is VERY into running/round-penning the horse to exhaustion. At that point, the horse isn’t learning–it’s just exhausted and about to keel over.
Okay, I get it. If you are getting in a horse’s personal space to the point where they kick at you, something is not right.
Lookylou, CA isn’t a horse trainer either. I highly recommend that you to look around and watch many trainers, take what your gut says to you is good for your horse, and leave the rest. And don’t for a second think that one man has all of the answers. In my opinion, he doesn’t have one answer - I’ve never seen him do anything right. His timing is awful, he’s aggressive and he doesn’t actually understand horses.
[QUOTE=Frizzle;6926261]
I think some parts of CA’s method are okay, but there’s plenty that leave a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve seen a few episodes of his show, and it seems that he is VERY into running/round-penning the horse to exhaustion. At that point, the horse isn’t learning–it’s just exhausted and about to keel over.[/QUOTE]
That seems to be the signature move for many “natural horsemanship” trainers, you sure see it at those trainer challenges and colt starting clinics. The owner of the last horse I sold (we are friends and keep in touch) just hired a natural horsemanship trainer. She seemed decent enough from what I saw on her website but after their first session I find out that she spend 2 1/2 hours working on this horse and had him worked into a dripping sweat. First lesson! This horse has done NOTHING but sit in a pasture for 2-3 years and she wants to run him in circles until he’s dripping wet and push his brain for that long. headshake I tried to politely hint that maybe that wasnt a good idea and it could hurt his legs(he’s a big, lanky awkward OTTB). I can’t imagine that kind of repetitive, small circle drilling (the horses are almost always at a quick canter when they roundpen them) doesn’t do some damage to the legs.
Wow, Fillabeana, that video left me feeling sick. All I saw was an egomaniac control freak using fear and violence to dominate. Why in God’s name would anyone want to make a horse stand still while they run a chain saw inches away from its body? That looked like nothing more than a cruel PR gimmick. Not impressed with that guy at all.
The more I read about CA, the less I’m liking him. I’ve never pulled a horse over backwards, even a mean one. A viscious one, I don’t need and he’ll go on down the road, so I don’t need to do that to that horse either.
As for the chainsaw, as someone else said, I want my horses to be a little touchy about certain things. I don’t want my horse to be so dead acting, they stand there while a leg is sawed off.
As for a horse chasing someone around a bale feeder, honestly, I’ve never had THAT one happen either!! Even the unhandled colts I bought from an auction or Joe Blow down the road. The only horse I’ve ever had a twinge about was, you guessed it, been ‘trained’ using the Pep’s cr*p. She never did unwind either.
I don’t think these NH gurus have a clue what real NH is!! The things I’m seeing now, thank you youtube, there isn’t any reason for this sh*te.
In the movie “Bull Durham,” Susan Sarandon’s baseball-groupie character, Annie Savoy, states that she “gave Jesus a chance,” after realizing that there are the exact same number of stitches on a baseball as there are beads on a rosary chain.
I have gone to live demonstrations, educated myself, and given NH a chance, so to speak. And as Annie Savoy couldn’t stick with it (“The Lord laid too much guilt on me,”), I just can’t buy the pig.
I think there are elements of so-called natural horsemanship that are valuable, and different elements might be more or less valuable for different horses at different times. In this respect, NH is just like any other training method.
I think the term “natural horsemanship,” however, is essentially a marketing catchphrase. Humans have been training horses for millennia, and until just this last century, these horses were trained not for entertainment, but because human life/communication/subsistence depended on them. Much higher stakes for the effectiveness of the training. Has the nature of horses changed much since Xenophon? I doubt it. Have a few folks come up with a totally revolutionary way to train horses in the last twenty-five years? I doubt it. Have they come up with a slick marketing scheme? Ding ding ding.
I have to take a deep breath and sigh at the handful of young female students who have left hunt seat lessons with me to pursue NH instruction.
“We SAT on the horse while it was lying down.” OK, just today in Virginia it was upper sixties, I had five schoolies basking in the sun, you could go out and sit on any one of them.
“We trained him to play with a giant ball.” Want to see a horse play with something? Put him in the ring, and place this $3000 Stubben saddle on that vertical. Walk away and watch the fun!
“We watched a video of a girl riding without tack.” OK, that is impressive for sure – whether it’s a NH-type quarter horse reiner, OR a << pretty damn sure not NH>> European showjumper nailing a puissance wall without tack.
“We got him to follow us around the arena.” Look, my chickens come running when I call them. It’s called Freeze-Dried Meal Worm treats. Carrots. Peppermints. This isn’t rocket science, people.
My favorite part, and it’s always a pattern, is when the parents who closely monitored my safety consciousness (which is high, thank you Camp Horsemanship Association), RAVE and show me pictures of their kids standing on horses without helmets on, but that’s OK because the new trainer is a “horse whisperer!”
{Yeah you can throw “sour grapes” at me, but actually a few kids have returned, after they were needlessly thrown/totally avoidably smashed into a fence/realized they wanted to enjoy a horse they could actually handle and ride.}
REPEAT: There are elements that may be valuable.
But I don’t want to sit helmetless on my horse while he lies on the ground kicking a ball around without a bridle while Leatherface does an interpretive dance with his chainsaw around us. I want to foxhunt.
And bitless, maybe, but with a thirty-foot drop into a river on the left, a green crazy horse behind me, an unsteady but beloved 85 year old rider in front of me, and a bull to my right trying to beat me through the gate – I am dang sure going to use a bridle. With reins!
rant over off to eat raw cookie dough
I have been training horses for 40 years…I can not even begin to count how many have been through my barn…
of horses to die in my care? 0
of horses galled wearing my tack? maybe 2 (1 was tacked up and ridden by the owner, but I should have checked things over)
Wonder how many horses go lame in his DUH program? all that tight circle spinning and out of control turning and brake slamming…ugh! Makes any seasoned horseman cringe…
