Category Archives for "Horse Whisperer"

My first experience with wild horses came more than 20 years ago in Arizona when I worked with a horse whisperer who caught wild horses off the Hopi reservation. Steve Harris also trained BLM mustangs, both fresh and spoiled, and difficult domestic horses. Cowboy Steve Steve was a working cowboy for 25 years on ranches […]

Horse whisperers learn to recognize and reward “try.” What is “Try” “Try” is the smallest, sometimes almost imperceptible, effort the horse makes to do what you ask. It may be as big as a change of direction or as small as a sigh, a twitch of an ear, a change of the eye, or a […]

What’s in a Name? I’ve mentioned in my post Horse Whisperer, What Does it Mean? the label horse whisperer was glamorized by the 1998 movie based on a book by Nicholas Sparks. But my research showed that Sparks’ depiction of horse whisperer had flaws. There are a lot of labels that dance around this type […]

In the 2007 movie “Wild Hogs” four middle aged suburban men take a motorcycle road trip to California on a search to find themselves. Along the way the four biker wannabes get into a mess of trouble when they run into the Del Fuego motorcycle gang whom they believe are the ‘real deal.’ The wannabes […]

Has desperation ever driven you to try something new? When you’re well educated in your field and you’ve been at your craft for a long time it’s easy to become skeptical of new methods. That’s the way I was about horse whisperers twenty-five plus years ago until a situation put me at a point of […]

Being labeled a horse whisperer has not always been good for the person or the horse. In the 17th century there was a possibility that a person caught speaking to animals would be accused of witch craft, something that did not usually end well. The Following is an excerpt from J.S. Rarey’s Art of Taming […]