Natural Horsemanship EPQ

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ellenhol

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Hi there, I am doing an EPQ (extended project) for college and was struggling with a title/idea. Basically, I wanted to incorporate Natural Horsemanship and the behaviour of horses/why they act in certain aggressive ways. Also, what are your thoughts on Natural Horsemanship as a method of dealing with 'problem' horses? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks :)
 
The first thing you should ask yourself is, "Do the opinions of random, anonymous people on the internet constitute valid data for a college research project?" The next question is, of course, "Where might I find valid and reliable material?"

I would start with books of well-respected trainers who are considered by some to be in the vague category of "natural horsemanship," although they themselves might not categorize themselves that way. Mark Rashid, Buck Brannaman, Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, to begin anyway.
 
I attended a training day with Ben Hart last weekend and he has a lovely approach to horses. He comes from the angle of identifying how the horse learns so that your approach is then modified to suit the horse. Worth looking up I think. He's got his own website. Also don't know about whether he'd use the term Natural Horsemanship for what he does.
 
Thanks, I wont be using the opinions of anonymous people in my project, but obviously they are valuable into researching further into the subject in question. The links to trainers are very helpful and I've chosen my title to be ‘What are the benefits of natural horsemanship when compared to traditional horsemanship?’
 
You could do a whole project on the minefield that one encounters when simply trying to define "natural" versus "traditional" horsemanship.
 
or look up actual behaviourists rather than NH trainers. Most NH trainers have very little knowledge of behaviour-or at least, they interpret it completely incorrectly. Most have no understanding of learning theory either (Ben Hart being one of the exceptions).
 
For starters, it is worth defining the term Natural Horsemanship. What it doesn't mean is a la nature - in nature horse don't get treatment for ailments, or the best diet, or good hoof care, and they certainly do die young.
What it means to me is working with the horse's nature - seeing things from the horse's point of view. That is horses in a world of humans - in their own world and their own behaviours it is called ethology, but now that there are very few truly wild horses could you ever really work out their ethology - maybe using feral horses such as native herds in the UK. I don't know what approach you are looking for, but comparing the two might be a starting point?
And looking at whether the methods of various well known "horse whisperers" truly do use the horses' nature as their starting point?
 
Sorry, I was making a kind of backhanded point that "natural" versus "traditional" is a bit of a false dichotomy and you will run into problems as soon as you have to define those terms. Every good trainer will use horses' nature as a starting point, whether they train horses to work cattle or do Grand Prix dressage. At the same time, nothing we do with horses is "natural," unless you were to turn your horse out with a band of mustangs in Nevada and leave him to it.

The interesting questions, for me, lie in how trainers (and lay people) interpret behaviour. Are you speaking "horse language" when you do certain things? Are simply applying operant conditioning? There is a lot of contested ground over how people understand and apply concepts like "dominance" and "respect" to horses. When you start paying attention, you realize that there are layers and layers of interpretation, assumption, anthropomorphisation and indeed, just making stuff up, between the actual behaviour and the handler's perception and understanding thereof. Perhaps that is a direction you could go in.
 
I'm pretty sure Ben would never categorise himself as a NH trainer. I would agree, though to look at behavourists, or even behavourists as a comparison to NH. I agree with MotherofChickens about NH trainers. A couple of high profile ones can't even define basic terms correctly and even make up their own science to suit their method. Real facepalming stuff!!
 
Fransurrey said:
I'm pretty sure Ben would never categorise himself as a NH trainer.
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no, you're right-I just sort of put him in with 'non-traditional' trainers-not that I think there's anything wrong with good traditional trainers.

What really winds me up about NH trainers is that so many of them don't take pain into consideration-way too much emphasis on 'dominance' which again, they've made up definitions for wrt horses.
 
MotherOfChickens said:
no, you're right-I just sort of put him in with 'non-traditional' trainers-not that I think there's anything wrong with good traditional trainers.

What really winds me up about NH trainers is that so many of them don't take pain into consideration-way too much emphasis on 'dominance' which again, they've made up definitions for wrt horses.
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Hello,

what sort of a project is this - just an assignment or a dissertation? What strikes me is that your question is MASSSSSIVE!!! As you can see from the responses so far just saying 'what do you mean by NH' - even defining it is a problem, so comparing it will be a ngihtmare! So with no specific question it's pretty hard to get a definitive answer. Could you maybe choose one scenario and be a bit more specific with it? For example, you could look at horses with rearing problems, loading problems, who are 'confirmed biters' - something like that. Then you could also specify the types of trainers - e.g. BHS trained in comparison to e.g. Parelli. This would make your types of trainers much more standardised - otherwise you ahve to lump together e.g. Ben Hart and Parelli - that's just a recipe for disaster, you'll never be able to stop writing ;-).

There are some really interesting studies which have taken 'wild' ponies or rescue ponies and then split them into two groups, training them either with 'natural' methods or 'traditional' methods (and one or two studies did the same with clickers i think). These are quite intersting, though it's practically impossible to get studies which aren't skewed one way or another. and the measurable outcomes are difficult to gauge (e.g. I seem to remember the clicker ponies were more 'willing' but the BHS ponies had learnt more stuff or something - but a nightmare to measure). But you could have a whole research piece on doing a lit review of those sorts of studies and comparing them, that would be great (in healthcare science there's a group called cochrane that do this - becuase most studies are skewed one way or another, they take all the studies that have ever been done on a subject, work out which ones are the rubbish ones and chuck them, then compare all the good studies to get a definitive answer. It's called a meta-analysis - very useful for you maybe?).

Sorry, I did quite a lot of wittering there - my basic point is, work out one or two specific things you can measure.
 
ellenhol said:
Thanks, I wont be using the opinions of anonymous people in my project, but obviously they are valuable into researching further into the subject in question. The links to trainers are very helpful and I've chosen my title to be ‘What are the benefits of natural horsemanship when compared to traditional horsemanship?’
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I did my epq on exactly that title, and what I did was to break it down into different areas to assess, such as does it create an increased bond between horse and trainer, and success in competition. There's a lot of studies available online about stuff like that, especially on areas such as join up. It's easier to break it down into specific areas to assess, because otherwise, as others have pointed out, you get bogged down into the theories of training and the definitions behind them. Therefore it is also important to define exactly what you mean by natural and traditional horsemanship at the beginning of the project :)
 
Nature verses nurture also comes into it to a large extent. A horse can have in bred behavioural problems and contrary to popular belief are also thinking reasoning individuals. So different approaches are required for different animals. As to the natural part of natural horsemanship sadly natural has very little to do with it and can be that traditional is also very difficult to define as the traditional way I was bought up with horses was largely speaking what is now defined as natural. "softly softly catchee monkee " was always the way forward calm insistence on boundaries and almost rigid welfare rules
So I was brought up in the view that the horse had to have a routine and nothing should alter from that routine. I am far too hap hazard now to be bothered with it but it was the start of my horse learning
 
From the college projects talked about on this forum, I think too many of them end up going in the same direction, i.e. an internet questionnaire designed by a person with no training in questionnaire design and interpreted by a person with no training in statistics, or an experiment built on extremely woolly concepts with no understanding of experimental protocol. Please, PLEASE try to avoid these all-too-common traps! Caol Ila, can I applaud you please??? You deserve a giant like button for your posts! :)

Given the enormous difficulty with definitions around NH, and the interesting questions raised around "layers and layers of interpretation, assumption, anthropomorphisation and indeed, just making stuff up" (to quote Caol Ila), would it not be worthwhile to write an entire paper just on disentangling these layers, so that when time came to do a quantitative study (arguably far more appropriate at the postgraduate level), you could go in armed with a really really clear idea of how you want to define the terms you use, and why? I would be really interested in reading a historiographical study of the term, "Natural Horsemanship". Who uses it to describe whom? Who self-identifies with this term? Who is referred to by which others with this term, but might not use it to describe themselves? Who first used the term, what did they mean by it, and how has use of the term changed? Is the term used differently in different communities? That would be a much, much more interesting project than yet another survey on (insert random aspect of horse management here).
 
spookypony said:
From the college projects talked about on this forum, I think too many of them end up going in the same direction, i.e. an internet questionnaire designed by a person with no training in questionnaire design and interpreted by a person with no training in statistics, or an experiment built on extremely woolly concepts with no understanding of experimental protocol. Please, PLEASE try to avoid these all-too-common traps! Caol Ila, can I applaud you please??? You deserve a giant like button for your posts! :)

Given the enormous difficulty with definitions around NH, and the interesting questions raised around "layers and layers of interpretation, assumption, anthropomorphisation and indeed, just making stuff up" (to quote Caol Ila), would it not be worthwhile to write an entire paper just on disentangling these layers, so that when time came to do a quantitative study (arguably far more appropriate at the postgraduate level), you could go in armed with a really really clear idea of how you want to define the terms you use, and why? I would be really interested in reading a historiographical study of the term, "Natural Horsemanship". Who uses it to describe whom? Who self-identifies with this term? Who is referred to by which others with this term, but might not use it to describe themselves? Who first used the term, what did they mean by it, and how has use of the term changed? Is the term used differently in different communities? That would be a much, much more interesting project than yet another survey on (insert random aspect of horse management here).
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I really like this idea!
 
I like that idea spookypony it would be a very interesting read especially as most of the labelled "Natural horsemen" I know hate the term
 
Maybe I'll write that paper. Lord knows I need to get more publications out there and it would make a nice change from writing about lunatic asylums.
 
spookypony said:
Given the enormous difficulty with definitions around NH, and the interesting questions raised around "layers and layers of interpretation, assumption, anthropomorphisation and indeed, just making stuff up" (to quote Caol Ila), would it not be worthwhile to write an entire paper just on disentangling these layers, so that when time came to do a quantitative study (arguably far more appropriate at the postgraduate level), you could go in armed with a really really clear idea of how you want to define the terms you use, and why?
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I don't think this has ever been tackled at a length longer than your typical blog post or in a scholarly way - at least, nothing published. It would be a valuable addition to the literature.
 
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