The *Real* Clinton Anderson (profanity)

I don’t disagree with his assessment but yikes on the delivery.

I thought he retired from training horses?

Bucking horse in pain - probably but by now it’s in pain and taught that bucking is ok.

Pain should have been solved when he started bucking so shame on those other trainers.

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I remember years ago hearing that his original large facility was for sale. I was kind of shocked as it is hard to find a property that large and lovely any more, where he was located west of Fort Worth.

Otherwise either his promotional activity has scaled back, or else I just don’t keep up.

Just from a business perspective, as a remote observer who was in the area, at the time (early 2010’s) his huge and rapidly growing portfolio of related enterprises is the kind of thing that frequently becomes a train wreck in business. It is as if every good idea is instantly turned into a new arm of the business. But the problem is that it is hard to maintain management and consistency when there hasn’t been time to grow the staff needed, from within. Hard to find the outside people with the unique qualifications required, that fast. People won’t be on the same page. Decision-making becomes fractured, or even paralyzed. And financially it is easy to become over-stretched. I don’t know if that happened with CA, but that also wouldn’t be a surprise.

Fwiw from the outside of his orignal facility from which he filmed and promoted, there was a solid high fence and big castle-like gates. There was no seeing inside or getting inside from the road, if you weren’t already scheduled to be in.

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The stuff he would do in clinics and while being filmed made me cringe - I can’t imagine the hell that happened when the cameras were off.

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He says the woman should have EQ while behaving like a petulant, overtired toddler. The first domain of EQ is self awareness. He had the right to decline to engage with her at all, or at any point to stop. What he lacked was the ability to manage himself.

This is not new.

He harassed a colt into trying to attack him at RTTH. I saw that with my own eyes.

Years ago a local friend did a 2-week clinic with him and came home with a very, very angry, rather large horse with holes in both sides from spurring. She finally stopped having anything to do with him after this ‘dream realized’ of going to that ranch. She leased said angry guy to a friend who just wanted to trail ride, and he was perfectly happy to do that safely and all day long. Just don’t train on him, or he’s going UP and maybe OVER.

He is marinating in self-loathing and narcissism and alcohol and everything else.

He’s a person who has a limited vocabulary and leans on fuck this and fuck that in the place of better, more accurate words. Listen, I’m all for all the fuck this and fuck that in the world- but when it’s the ONLY adjective in your little book of words, your little book is too fucking little :wink:

Anyone of any gender who still thinks he has anything to offer horses and humans more than a rough day and a load of rough talk, is willfully blind.

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He has stated he almost lost everything as a result of that over expansion and trusting the wrong people with a whole lot of money.

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As I was reading this it occurred to me that affordable drones may have changed this model. Perhaps leading to the construction of indoors where the climate would not appear to make them necessary…

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So it was everyone else’s fault. :smirk:

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Perhaps he needs to think about the original meaning of the word. It is an abbreviation for Fornication Under the Consent of the King…its a marriage license. Hilarious.

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Really? I don’t know, but read somewhere that f was originally Danish. That it’s one of the oldest active words in the English language. But I’m not a language historian so I don’t know.

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Oh of course! Then again I’m not confident he can count past 10…

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I haven’t read all of the replies, but as a human - I completely understand him.

Fortunately or unfortunately for him, he hit a wall of contempt in the same lifetime as hitting the point he no longer gives any fucks about who likes him or not. There’s something marvelous in it; he’s honest about who he is and he isn’t playing for the cameras.

I’ve dealt with the general public and over the last few decades, they’ve come to need more and more coddling. In this interaction in particular, is he wrong? Absolutely not. Could he have phrased his response in a kinder way or offered additional solutions? Sure. Is he required to do so? Not in the slightest.

The challenge from my tiny corner of the world is that the divide between horsemen and naivety is growing daily. The naive folks tend to also be the loudest in the room. I have several personal acquaintances who have exited full time careers in the horse world solely because the people were so ignorant (but entitled at the same time, somehow?).

When someone known for being a foul mouthed, misogynist like CA pops off on one every few years? :woman_shrugging:

But then again, I’m a “cut the shit” type of person and I’d rather you get to the point - even if it’s delivered in a very direct manner, than to have to wade through rainbows and unicorns to figure out if I’ve read between the lines correctly. I’ve dealt with my fair share of egotistical men as a woman in STEM and this type of language rolls off like water.

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My hearsay is it was military shorthand, used to discipline a soldier who’d gotten a STD (thus taking him out of action).
Stood for Found Under Carnal Knowledge.

@OverandOnward
" Why are people so surprised to find out that a ‘celebrity’ - any celebrity - is not the pleasant uplifting personality that is portrayed to the public?"
I know a Script Supervisor who’s worked on both film & TV.
To quote her:
Celebrities are mostly people who can stand where they’re told & memorize lines :smirk:

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The etymologies that propose the origin as an acronym are myths.

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Wow his hostility towards women really oozes out with every other word. Makes my skin crawl

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I’m a 100% honest, tell it like it is person but you know what I’m not- a whole bag of d!cks like CA. One can tell the truth and be kind. The language is not the problem - the problems are treating another human being like she is lesser than and property just for asking him a question and that he clearly sees the horse as a thing and not a living being.

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I get being sick of the dog and pony show. I get being sick of the overhorsed ammy clientele that don’t want to change anything about their handling skills and just want a miracle.

But he absolutely takes this anger out on the horses. That’s where I’ve got the problem with him. His contempt gets transferred right into the horse’s mouth and sides.

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Years ago I watched his training videos and they were good at explaining how to train… something Parelli wasn’t good at (or maybe if you spent lots of money Parelli might give you some training advice).

But his attitude was something else even back then. And the one horse I looked at for sale using clinton anderson training had put his leg through the round pen fence because someone pushed him too hard and the horse had some sort of permanent injury at only 4 yrs old.

At a certain point it would be better to retire.

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Which is, interestingly enough, a rare enough quality that they are paid well to do it! And producers can be desperate to find the people who can and will! :smile:

In my opinion from long ago when CA was at his public height, he was essentially the lead actor / star of a produced show. His loud smartass personality and willingness to do anything for attention was a big part of the sell. Other than that, he wasn’t introducing anything new to the space.

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A great many of his training videos have the same loud misogynist sentiments, just phrased slightly more palatably. In a round pen, with woman and horse being verbally chased back and forth relentlessly.

Guess that’s why some people don’t get the newness of the shock at these first-post remarks. They aren’t new, for maybe two decades, at least.

It seemed to me that many of his female clients in the videos were so used to this treatment that they kind of accepted it as attention. I also wondered if maybe we weren’t seeing some of them change their minds during the video, and be rather less impressed with him at the end – but still polite. But I only saw a few videos, so maybe not.

I think he probably comes from a culture where women and horses are both possessions, who should not have too many opinions of their own. He seems to thoroughly own that culture himself. I wonder if he would gain the same traction today that he did then. Has the culture changed enough to not accept his bs. Not sure about that.

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No. It’s very possible that poor horse has had a health problem that’s never been addressed. A real horseman would have asked her if the horse had been vetted. And spent a few minutes trying to parse out what was going on.

He’s not a horseman.

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