Reddit reviews John Lyons' Bringing Up Baby: 20 Progressive Ground-Work Lessons to Develop Your Young Horse into a Reliable, Accepting Partner
We found 1 Reddit comments about John Lyons' Bringing Up Baby: 20 Progressive Ground-Work Lessons to Develop Your Young Horse into a Reliable, Accepting Partner. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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It's a tough thing to learn from a book and most of my reading is dressage based but I have flipped through Bill Dorrance's book (I think it was this one) and what I remember of it, I liked: http://www.amazon.com/True-Horsemanship-Through-Feel-Second/dp/1599210568/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421433622&sr=8-2&keywords=ray+hunt
You could try this Mark Rashid book too: http://www.amazon.com/Considering-Horse-Problems-Lessons-Learned/dp/1616081562/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1421434415&sr=8-7&keywords=mark+rashid
Maybe this John Lyons book? http://www.amazon.com/John-Lyons-Bringing-Baby-Progressive/dp/1929164122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421434443&sr=8-1&keywords=john+lyons
There are a LOT of snake oil salesmen out there selling natural horsemanship. That's because it's really easy to screw up a horse and so there's a big market of people who love the horses they screwed up but want to make them better. Anyone can hang a shingle out there, publish a 10 part CD training series and charge $100 for it. Nothing substitutes for a real life mentorship with someone who is producing well adjusted, happy, useful horses. The proof is in the pudding.
The natural horsemanship stuff popped up initially as a humane response to a rough around the edges cowboy approach. There are some cruel methods out there but at this point, a lot of the wordless joining-the-spirits-as-one training approaches is just as harmful and consists more of hopeful marketing than anything else. Pat Parelli is the worst offender of this in my opinion and he's made himself an assload of money creating an industry out of it.
Go for no nonsense types if you have to. I like Ray Hunt, Bill and Tom Dorrance, Buck Brannaman and John Lyons. I don't know much about Clinton Anderson but I hear mixed things. Really, cut out the marketing middleman and just look for someone who is consistently producing purpose-bred and trained horses. It's not rocket science if you've grown up in it but it's not necessarily intuitive either. Dressage (or at least the kind I do--the classical folks are their own breed) doesn't buy into most of this stuff, they just back the horse and ride.