The water’s always Clearest Closest to the Source

The textbook: Horses, A guide to Selection, Care and Enjoyment, by J. Warren Evans is probably the single definitive source about horses. The third edition is 835 pages of small print and great illustrations and covers in detail much about the horse. I strongly recommend this book to any horse owner. It is a great source for the everyday understanding of the conditions one will encounter with horse ownership.

So, with that source in mind, I am thinking what could I possibly include in this blog that is not covered in Horses, or other sources such as the Complete Book of Bitts and Bitting, or other textbooks about specific issues?  I think the answer is my increasing experiences and knowledge obtained from being a new horse owner, wrangler at a trail riding and boarding facility, years of riding lessons, cowboying, horse trainer, and most recently being a Guest Ranch Owner and operator and western reinsman riding instructor.   I am not an “expert”, but I have learned that the horse and rider go through a related training process. (More about that later.)  Also, during my journey of increasing competence, I find it interesting that horseback riding is very “fadidsh” and that there are so many different philosophies and opinions that exist about horses and their enjoyment.  Man has been riding horses about 5,500 years since horses were first domesticated on the plains of northern Kazakhstan by people who rode them and drank their milk.  It seems we would have horses and horseback riding figured out by now.  Well, we have amassed a heck of a lot of information.  So much information that it is going to take a simple solution to sort it all out.

Muddying the Water

Although not always intentional, people love to socialize, and our memories are selective. By that, I mean that people want to be part of the herd and we have a tendency to remember the good things or interpret things, shaped by our bias, to fit our understanding of how things are (or should be). We also know that some people will remove snippets of information out of context in order to support their position (establishing herd dominance) and hence muddying the water for their friends wanting to drink from this fountain of information.  This information gets copied or restated until it becomes fact and is not necessarily what was originally stated.  I have encountered fantastic information, and some not great misinformation, that someone else might be interested in sharing.  Well, it appears that a lot of people either don’t have or don’t read a lot of the origional sources. Most (not all) just want to ride and enjoy the recreation provided by the horse. (I guess that is why they call it recreational riding.)