Is Raising a Young Horse Right for You?

Raising a foal or a young horse is not for most people. It is difficult to raise a young horse well. It helps if you have the foal from birth, it helps if you have had experience with horses before, and you need to be able to commit yourself to being strict with the foal. The worst thing you can do for a young horse is not to enforce boundaries and discipline.

The most important challenge in raising a foal is your ability to be strict, set boundaries and discipline your foal. It is with this area that most modern horse people struggle. Even a youngster that has been started properly can be messed up when acquired by a person without the necessary skills to keep it respectful. A horse is not naturally well-mannered. They are always seeking to establish their pecking order in the herd, and humans are part of their herd.

We see John Lyons, Clinton Anderson and Buck Brannaman getting amazing results with horses without beating or breaking anything. And what they do certainly looks gentle. That is what we want to do as well. But viewing these methods as gentle – and thus, trying to sculpt our own methods into the human concept of gentle – can cause some problems.

Look closer at John Lyons or Buck Brannaman, or any of the great modern horsemen. They are some of the strictest, strongest figures you will ever meet (at least when they are working with a horse). They are not so much gentle in their working with horses as firm. Their work looks like what humans call gentle for two reasons:

First, they are so good at what they do and so experienced, that they can get even the most unruly horse to react with a single look. It would take extensive physical energy and whole body effort for most of us to achieve anywhere near the same results. Controlling a horse by the slightest movement of your body or glance is very advanced horsemanship and most of us cannot do it yet.

Second, the level of skill which these have achieved allows them more time to be gentle, because they have the horse’s respect, devotion and obedience. They have spent many hours honing and perfecting their skills and studying horse behavior.

If we recognize that we are not yet capable of that level of control which allows us to gain respect and obedience from horses with minimal physical contact, but we want to take as much as we can from the methods taught by these modern horsemen, what do we do?

The modern horsemen, like the old cowboys, recognize the need for strength and control in a relationship with a horse. But their understanding of the reason for this need is different. The difference is that they are getting this control; projecting this strength, by learning the the horse’s natural language and communicating