A horse can always spot the bad guy
THINK LIKE A HORSE by Grant Golliher (Yellow Kite £16.99, 272 pp)
‘PUT a wild horse in the middle of a group of people,’ says one of Grant Golliher’s friends, ‘and it will pick out the most dangerous guy, every time.’
The friend worked at a farm which teaches horse skills to prisoners who are about to be released. Every new group was asked to stand around the edge of a pen, and ‘pretty soon [the horse] would throw its head up and snort at a particular fellow … the horse could also pick out the least threatening guy … and would be drawn to him’.
Grant Golliher’s own ranch is near that farm in the U.S. state of Wyoming, and he, too, gives lessons in the bond between horses and humans. Business people visit the ranch to develop their leadership skills. At least one client asks Golliher to give her group minimal instruction in handling the animals: ‘Failure can lead to learning, and we want people to be “learn-it-alls” instead of “know-it-alls”. ’
As the old saying goes, ‘If you haven’t fallen off a horse, then you haven’t been riding long enough.’
Golliher is a gentle soul, and the book emphasises the value of calm, gradual learning. But he’s no soft touch. ‘A client [an individual whose horse he’s looking after, rather than a corporate group] will roll up at the ranch with her kid … He keeps kicking the gravel at her leg … “Johnny, if you do that again you’ll have to go sit in the car.”
‘But Johnny does it again and his mom doesn’t follow through on her warning … That’s how it works with horses, too. If the horse tries to snatch a mouthful of grass while you’re out riding and you pull his head up, but then you let him do it the next time, you’re telling him that it’s OK to keep trying.’ As he tells his groups: ‘Discipline without love is abuse, but love without discipline is also abuse.’
I didn’t know that most horses have a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ side, often influenced by something that happened to them in the past, ‘something painful or scary that they have a hard time forgetting’.
If a wild or unbroken horse crosses the line into another U.S. state, they have to get a blood test, which means having a needle inserted into their jugular vein. ‘He won’t forget that. He might get real used to being touched on his left side, but still refuse to let you go near the right.
‘That’s why sometimes a horse can be quite comfortable with you waving a flag on his right side, but then jump out of his skin when you shift it to the other hand and suddenly he sees it in his other eye. It’s like a brand new experience.’
Golliher is careful to give his horses the best environment in which to learn. For instance, he uses a round pen, which ‘has no corners where a horse can get trapped’.
There are some moving stories, too, like the father who realises that, just as Golliher has shown patience with an unruly horse, he himself needs to show patience with his tantrum-prone son.