>>> Altho I did take much of her advice and it helped the horse, I don't think that she got her ideas from communicating w/ him. I still call him Santana and he doesn't seem to mind it.
If some people can communicate with animals on that level, fine I suppose, but it's certainly an area that's a wide-open for scam artists, or plain old nuts to fill the void. I know of a few I could name, but I won't. I have heard a couple of stories that were darned hard to explain, as to how the communicator could have known certain things. But, I also know of cases where owners spent a ton of money, chasing something the "communicator" suggested with no visible improvement, while the owner ignored something obvious that a good trainer (or vet) might have helped them with. I don't feel like we can talk about this sort of thing without reminding people to keep their eyes open, and to retain a healthy skepticism....and to watch their checkbook balance. I also can't help but notice that a lot of the statements many so-called communicators make seem terribly "human-centric" - like the case that Robyn mentioned regarding Santana's name. Who really knows how horses think, but as prey animals, I'd be willing to bet that they have some pretty seriously different values than we do, and some of our values are completely off their radar screen. I seriously doubt a horse gives a flip what name we call them - unless POSSIBLY they associate their names with some abusive training in the past or something. I've heard of stories where the horse prefers certain colored tack, but I'm the first to admit that my tack color obsession is MY obsession, nothing that my horses care about. That would be my first litmus test for any so-called communicator - how human-centric is what they say... My thoughts are pretty clean-cut on this topic... if some people can communicate in this telepathic way, that's fine. BUT, there is no doubt in my mind that all of us can benefit from honing our own horse-human communication skills. There certainly are skills that each of us can work on improving, no doubt about it, and that's where most of us will benefit by concentrating our time and effort. We can spend hours just observing our own horses, just being with them, hanging out, or watching from the sidelines - with our own HUMAN preconceptions and preferences shoved out of the way as well as we can. We can read about the "prey animal" theories - although I think it's too-often over-stressed in the NH world, it is important to realize that horses have totally different motivations than humans. And we can talk to as many different horsemen from various backgrounds as we can to get different interpretations of why horses react in given ways. One of the first fallacies - or at least I'm fairly confident it's a fallacy - is that many Icelandic's are "goey" or "willing." Had I stayed within the traditional Icelandic community, I possibly would see that in many of the breed's horses. However, I started out taking lessons from more "mainstream" people, who early-on talked about horses "rushing" or "anticipating" and those were traits/habits to be improved, not fostered. Had I believed that Icelandic's are simply "goey", I think I'd have missed a lot of what a couple of my horses have plainly "told" me. It's amazing what having a few varied perspectives on any topic can make us aware of... Karen Thomas, NC
