I thought that this was a nice article about Warwick Schiller:, published today in the NYT. I’ll share the first part of the article below, but the whole thing is worth a read!
Horses are exquisite machines. As prey animals, their greatest survival tools are designed for flight, and every sense is finely geared toward safety. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses who don’t venture beyond their pasture will take turns staying awake while others sleep. They can see nearly 360 degrees and can focus on two objects at once, one from each eye. They evolved to mosey along, grazing for up to 16 hours a day, using whiskers on their muzzle to discern, in part, tender grass from rocks. Their hide is so sensitive to touch that they can feel a single fly land on their body and wriggle the skin underneath to send it aloft. Their sense of smell is almost as keen as a dog’s.
Horses form friendships, and friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own. Where our brains are outfitted with a prefrontal cortex that allows for planning, organizing, setting goals and decision making, a horse has virtually none. They experience thoughts and emotions without the benefit of evaluation, and although they can remember a great deal, they don’t think about what they want to do tomorrow, which makes them geniuses at living in the present. Since they fear they may die without the collective protection of the group, they are experts at coexisting. They just want to get along.
In the roughly 5,500 years since their domestication, horses have continuously been in our service, whether it’s to charge into battle; race chariots; hunt buffalo; bust sod; carry the mail; run, leap and pull at our bidding; or, more recently and mundanely, tote kids around a ring in a county 4-H show. Despite this long and intimate association, interspecies communication can be tricky, and things between horses and people don’t always go so well. Horses can shy or bolt. They can buck, bite or plant their feet and refuse to go forward. Frustration, for both horse and owner, can begin to build, and with it grows the possibility for getting hurt.
That’s where trainers like Warwick Schiller come in, bridging the knowledge gap between people and their mounts. His methods for improving steering or loading a reluctant horse into a trailer weren’t too different from those of the rest of the horse world. Lots of folks can teach an anxious horse to achieve a more relaxed state of mind by circling to a stop, or to keep a steady pace within a gait. And horses, they’re the same everywhere, generally willing to try to do what a person demands, even if the request is clumsy. “Horses in the wild show almost no infirmity,” Schiller explains. “They’re good at pretending they’re OK. They’ll take a lot of heavy-handed training, and a lot of people with horses are fine with that. The horses still work for them.”
Lately, though, Schiller has strayed from solving horse-and-rider issues through straight technique or drills. Instead, he has delved into a place where the horse-human relationship is more about cooperation than obedience, more process than product, and where horsemanship is less about a perfectly executed stop or achieving a snappy flying lead change than it is about creating mutual trust and understanding.
That message resonates well beyond the trainer himself. On a late spring morning last year, Schiller, wearing a shirt that read “professional horse petter,” sat with a clutch of 12 people under oak trees at the Paso Robles, Calif., ranch he owns with his wife, Robyn. The group was there for a three-day clinic, and among them were a retired firefighter with a filly who didn’t steer well, an entrepreneur with Ph.D. in leadership who worried about ruining her new horse and a lawyer with a steed that found grass more motivational than her owner. There was also Chelsey Warriner, who bought a horse after selling her family’s restaurant in 2021. Two bolting incidents resulted in two trips to the emergency room for her. “I ended up humbled and hurt,” she told the group through tears. Despite her terrifying accidents, she bought a steadier mount that was disinclined to hold a trot and opted not to travel in straight lines. “We’ve struggled with connecting,” she said. “We’re still working on it.”
The clinic attendees were already fans of Schiller’s. Each was a member of his monthly subscription service, which offers hundreds of instructional videos and occasional Zoom sessions with him. More than 145,000 people follow his YouTube channel, where his training videos top 30 million views. In clips like “Arabian horses are crazy … or are they?” or “Helping an anxious-off-the-track thoroughbred find relaxation,” Schiller never seems rushed or worried, even if there’s a horse pitching around the pen or at the end of its lead. His voice doesn’t rise. He’s affectionate with the horses he encounters, offering a “Hallo there!” when they reach out a nose to investigate his hand. He never seems annoyed by either horse or rider, even when the human fumbles in the effort to do what Schiller asks.
He is, largely, a problem solver, not unlike the many other trainers with an online presence, those who have become television personalities on RFD TV or who have their own popular YouTube channels filled with advice on how to fix behaviors or improve performance. Your horse bucks under saddle? Here’s how to change that. What sets Schiller apart is a vulnerability that has been minted in real time, in front of his followers and his audiences, as he experiments with incorporating the horse’s emotional intelligence into more traditional training methods. And along the way, somewhat unexpectedly, communing with horses in this fashion has led Schiller to arrive at a new understanding of both horses and himself. “I think horses lead us to consciousness,” he says. “I think that’s what they’re here for.”
