Regrettably we stopped listening to Xenophon. Be firm but not harsh, Xenophon urged, and never lose your temper while dealing with a horse. “A fit of passion,” he wrote, “is a thing that has no foresight in it, and so we often have to rue the day when we gave way to it. Consequently, when your horse shies at an object and is unwilling to go up to it, he should be shown that there is nothing fearful in it, least of all to a courageous horse like him; but if this fails, touch the object yourself that seems so dreadful to him, and lead him up to it with gentleness.”
4.2 Rodeo girl and horse, 1912: horse-human history is full of lessons learned, then forgotten. (photo credit 4.2)
The irony is comic. Xenophon trained horses for war, that most violent of mass enterprises, but he cautioned riders that aggression (at least with horses) does not pay: “Reward him with kindness when he has done what you wish and admonish him when he disobeys.” On the other hand, “riders who force their horses by the use of the whip only increase their fear, for they then associate the pain with the thing that frightens them.”
If Xenophon’s horsemanship marked an island of enlightenment, the dark ages that preceded and followed him were indeed dark and perilously long for the horse. Greek chariot drivers of the sixth century B.C. deployed bits with spiked cheek pieces that offered the driver control, all right, but at the expense of the soft tissue around the horse’s mouth. The habit of not castrating stallions and the absence of sophisticated training methods may have made such bits necessary.
The ancient Egyptians, meanwhile, would control spirited horses by using an extremely low noseband. Unlike today’s drop noseband (which sits three inches above the nostrils), the severe ancient version was often attached directly to reins on either side. This arrangement not only put terrific pressure on sensitive tissue right at the horse’s nostrils but also interfered with breathing (the horse cannot breathe through his mouth). The rather savage solution was to slit the horse’s nostrils. Bas-reliefs from 1450 B.C. testify to the practice, which resurfaced in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when similarly low nosebands were also used.
The decline of the Greek civilization and ascendancy of the Roman would also spell hard times for horses. Roman trainers, bronc-busters in togas, would force the horse to the ground, sit on his head and tie his legs together. Xenophon’s book seems not to have made it to the imperial capital.
Perhaps the notion of gentling war horses struck the Romans as unseemly, even unmanly. The same harsh discipline imposed on legionnaires and conquered tribes was inflicted on horses. For centuries, no one challenged that philosophy.
In tenth-century Iceland, sagas describe how stallions were made to fight each other, as pit bulls and cocks are today. Even thirteenth-century Mongols under Genghis Khan, who professed their love of horses and felt real affection for them, nevertheless broke them harshly — that is to say, traditionally — and rode some of them to death on cross-continental raids.
No one gave much thought to setting down a system for training horses until along came Federico Grisone, the sixteenth-century horsemaster from Naples. His book, Gli Ordini di Cavalcare, inspired riding schools all over Europe. An old woodcut shows him in feathered hat and spurs, holding a sharp pointed stick against a horse’s chest.
Gentle, Grisone was not. “In breaking young horses,” he wrote, “put them into a circular pit; be very severe with those that are sensitive and of high courage: beat them between the ears with a stick.”
The horse afraid of crossing streams, Grisone advised, should have his head forced underwater. The bits he devised were brutal. Grisone took seriously his role as subjugator of the horse and his words attest to a cold confidence in that approach: “The ‘breaking down’ or ‘taming’ is not without the most desperate trial on the part of the horse, which rears and plunges in every possible way to effect its escape, until its power is exhausted and it becomes covered with foam; and at last it yields to the power of man and becomes his willing slave for the rest of his life.”
This makes for distressing reading, and yet I take solace in the knowledge that sometimes young trainers do not listen to their elders; they listen, instead, to the horse. Monty Roberts’s father, for example, responded viciously when his son renounced the old way (in essence, the Grisone way). The father beat the son so severely with a stall chain that Monty had to be treated in hospital. Monty, though, persisted in gentling horses as a young teenager in the 1940s.
Similarly, Grisone’s teachings in the sixteenth century were foisted on, and rejected by, Antoine de Pluvinel, who became Master of Horse to the king of France, Louis XIII. Like Xenophon, he urged that the trainer calmly inspire confidence in the horse and that each horse be treated as an individual.
Contemporary Englishmen thought otherwise. Thomas Blundeville recommended that riders be equipped to deal with recalcitrant horses: an iron bar set with prickles would be suspended from the horse’s tail and passed between the horse’s legs by a cord. The rider could thus draw the cord up and mete out punishment whenever he saw fit. If this failed, Blundeville advised, “let a footman stand behind you with a shrewd cat tied at one end of a long pole with her belly upwards, so as she may have mouth and claws at liberty. And when your horse may stay or go backwards, let him thrust the cat between his legs so as she may scratch and bite him, sometimes by the thighs, sometimes by the rump and often times by the stones.”
The Renaissance (the revival of art and literature between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries), meanwhile, had at least elevated riding into an art form. An educated person was expected to know something of music, art, literature — and equestrian matters. Methods used to instruct in haute école horsemanship may not always have been gentle, but there were glimmers of light.
By the eighteenth century, the duke of Newcastle was setting up riding academies in Paris and Brussels and his methods were a far cry from Grisone’s and Blundeville’s. “A boy,” he wrote, “is a long time before he knows his alphabet, longer before he has learned to spell, and perhaps several years before he can read distinctly; and yet there are some people who, as soon as they get on a young horse, entirely undressed and untaught, fancy that by beating and spurring they will make him a dressed horse in one morning only. I would fain ask such stupid people whether by beating a boy they would teach him to read without first showing him the alphabet? Sure, they would beat him to death, before they would make him read.”
Meanwhile, over in the New World, footloose horses — who had escaped the Spanish or the indigenous peoples who stole them — thrived on the rich buffalo grass of the prairie. Wild horses spread north and west and those who captured them became lords of the plains in relatively short order.
Plains Indians tended to be firm as horse breakers but also slow and easy (unlike cowboys, who seemed to be in a terrible hurry.) Even the moment of capture — in winter and early spring, when mustangs were weak, or at watering holes after they had gorged themselves — showed patience and forethought. Another tactic was to exploit the herding instinct of horses: their tendency to move in a wide circle when flushed. The tamer’s task was to keep them moving in that circle until they were exhausted.
Like modern horse whisperers, the Indian horse breaker believed touch was important. He would walk toward the roped horse, talking all the while and eventually touching the horse’s nose and head.
He would also breathe into the horse’s nostrils, an ancient practice rooted in the knowledge that wild creatures smell first, trust second. (Mustangers and horse trainers soon learned not to change their clothes, even their underwear, while working with horses over the course of days — to avoid starting over. The horse’s keen sense of smell, which can find water in the desert, would catalog and tolerate the familiar while rejecting the new.)
A leather halter was then applied in such a way that even a slight pull back by the horse exerted terrific pressure on nerves at the neck and nose. The horse soon got the message and then the warrior c
ould begin schooling.
Uttering deep grunts (hoh-hoh-hoh) or calming sighs (shuh-shuh-shuh), he ran his hands over every inch of the horse’s body. If the horse balked at being touched around the flanks, a tug on the halter would serve as a reminder to stand still. The aim was to convince the horse that no harm would be forthcoming.
Following all this, actual riding posed no real difficulty. It strikes me that while the training of a horse can reach immensely complicated dimensions, in the beginning, at least, it is a question of simple manners. The Indian trainer made a point of introducing himself to the horse he would ride.
Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, a Blackfoot, had a brilliant phrase to capture the importance of marking equine courtesies: in Long Lance, published in 1928, he advised that wild horses “must first be treated gruffly — but not harshly — and then when he is on a touching acquaintance [the italics mine] with man, kindness is the quickest way to win his affections.”
Mounting was done slowly and by degrees. The rider approached the near side of the horse and pressed down on the horse’s back, first lightly, then harder. With elbows laid across the horse’s back, the rider lifted himself off the ground a few inches until the horse bore the rider’s weight. Finally, the rider slipped his leg over the horse’s back. Astonishingly, few horses bucked.
And a good thing, too. The rider had neither saddle nor stirrup to help keep his seat. The saddle was no more than a pelt cinched under the belly. The bridle was a leather thong looped around the horse’s lower jaw. The rider’s primary aid was the knees.
Even young Indian boys, the Sioux most notably, broke mustangs, though they wisely cushioned their falls by riding into a lake or river. Using water to soften the wildness is a clever idea, one perhaps passed on. During the First World War a reclamation camp was established in England to handle “untamable” army horses otherwise destined for the slaughterhouse. The demon horses were entrusted to the daughters of wealthy country gentlemen, horse-wise young women who had lived around horses from childhood. The ladies did as Sioux boys had done: they rode into deep water. Without fail, the unruly horses soon turned quiet and tame.
But while Indians broke horses their way, and cowboys theirs, John Solomon Rarey developed his own unique approach to horses. Much as Monty Roberts would take the horse world by storm more than a century later, Rarey made a name for himself in the 1850s. He was a gentler of sorts, neither bronc-buster nor whisperer but something in between. Rarey wrote of “conquering” the horse through the odd crack of the whip, but he also stressed the importance of a kind voice and touch and insisted, like Xenophon, that fear and anger had no place in the training of horses.
Rarey grew up on a farm in Ohio, where he broke horses the old way — and almost every bone in his body. “His pluck,” one observer noted, “was greater than his science.” But maybe not, for he had the good sense to seek alternatives by asking around — of cowboys, other horsemen, circus trainers — and to read widely. Eventually, he devised a system of training horses that relied ultimately on gentleness, fearlessness and simple devices (such as soft leather hobbles).
A British cavalryman who witnessed a Rarey demonstration was so impressed he wrote letters of introduction to prominent families in Britain. A plan took shape: Rarey would teach his techniques but only after five hundred clients had anted up more than ten pounds each — a fair sum in 1858.
While waiting for his British equestrian class to top up, Rarey crossed the Channel to tackle a French horse, called Stafford, who had refused to let anyone groom him for a year. Trainers in Paris had tried blindfolding him, muzzling him and hobbling him, but he still attacked anyone who came close. His despairing owners were about to have him destroyed and had nothing to lose by letting Rarey have a go.
A large crowd of horse fanciers gathered to witness the inevitable — Rarey’s humiliation. But that is not what the Paris Illustrated Journal would report: “After being alone with Stafford for an hour and a half, Mr. Rarey rode on him into the Riding School, guiding him with a common snaffle-bridle. The appearance of the horse was completely altered: he was calm and docile. His docility did not seem to be produced by fear or constraint, but the result of perfect confidence. The astonishment of the spectators was increased when Mr. Rarey unbridled him, and guided the late savage animal with a mere motion of his hands or indication with his leg, as easily as a trained circus-horse. Then, dashing into a gallop, he stopped him short with a single word.”
The challenge awaiting Rarey in England was a stallion called Cruiser, a steeplechaser handled by a groom with a bludgeon and reputed to be the most vicious horse in the country. The horse had not been ridden in three years and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle. His owner conceded it was “as much as a man’s life was worth to attend to him.” But attend to him Rarey did, with infinite patience, perseverance and savvy.
First he rode the horse, though tacking and mounting took three hours. Then he put the horse behind a cart and walked him forty miles to tire him. Cruiser was fitted with a gag bit, straps and hobbles that would render him helpless but would not cut him. Then Rarey gentled the horse, talking softly to him and touching him all over. As one observer put it, he sought to tame him “limb by limb, and inch by inch.”
If Cruiser displayed any sign of hostility, Rarey would lift the horse’s still-helpless head and shake it, as a father would scold a child by delicately taking hold of her chin. When the horse had again calmed, the gag bit was removed and the horse was rewarded with a drink and a handful of hay. Thus was Cruiser the crazy horse tamed.
Word of Rarey’s achievement spread and his quota of five hundred was quickly met. He was hired to teach cavalry officers and riding masters. London cabmen heard his lectures on how to treat horses humanely. Even the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, sought a word with Rarey, and Queen Victoria had Rarey tame one of her surliest mounts. A contributor to the Illustrated London News in 1858 predicted of Rarey that “His name will rank among the great social reformers of the nineteenth century.”
That, of course, never happened. His books, The Modern Art of Taming Wild Horses and The Farmer’s Friend: Containing Rarey’s Horse Secret, With Other Valuable Receipts and Information, were soon forgotten.
In the nineteenth century it was common practice, and still is today in some areas, to “fire,” or soundly whip, a horse to make him frisky before a sale. One observer remembers seeing “a poor brute, stone blind, exquisitely shaped, and showing all the marks of high blood, whom I saw unmercifully cut with a whip a quarter of an hour before the sale, to bring her to the use of her stiffened limbs, while the tears were trickling down her cheeks.” The italics were part of the original text and suggest a stretching of the truth: a horse may shed tears from dirt in the eye but, unlike humans, does not weep. Countless horses, though, have had cause to.
In West Africa earlier this century, riders of one tribe rode bareback. To create a safe seat, an historian noted, the horse’s own blood was made to act as a glue: “They cut a strip from the centre of the beast’s back, about eight inches long by a couple of inches wide, and on this raw and bleeding surface the horseman takes his seat … The sore is freshened up with a knife whenever the owner means to start off for a ride.” In another tribe, the cruel practice was at least shared by horse and rider: both were cut.
In the Philippines, gaming continues to pit stallion against stallion. Two sex-starved horses are brought into a large outdoor ring where a mare awaits them; the two gladiators may fight viciously over her for an hour, when, typically, the loser flees the ring. The winner then mounts the mare. These contests draw hundreds of onlookers, who bet considerable sums on the outcome.
In 1992, I spent a week at Spruce Meadows, that sprawling show-jumping venue outside Calgary where the world’s best riders compete. And I remember in particular a British-born rider with the Swiss team, Lesley McNaught-Mandli. Her horse, Panok Pirol B, failed to negotiate a certain fence — failed, that is, not by knocking the rail do
wn but by putting on the brakes at the very moment that liftoff should have occurred. When a horse balks this way, a little tension grips the crowd, for we know that the rider will almost certainly try the fence again. Cannot let the horse get away with that, the rider thinks, must end on a positive note.
Back to the troublesome fence went McNaught-Mandli. Same result. She managed to stay in the saddle, but the horse did not go gently into that good in-gate. Panok performed a choppy trot that took him up and down, up and down, but hardly forward. The horse issued defiance; his rider, only calm. She had no crop, just her own hard-earned horse sense and her sense of this one horse. Resolutely, she waited — we all waited — for the tantrum to subside, and when it did she patted her mount on the neck and sought the barn. All this took three, four minutes. A small victory had been won, and the applause that rained down on the rider signified our respect.
Why did that moment stay with me? Because what the rider did was not the norm. Most riders carry crops and use them on recalcitrant horses. I know the sound — short, sharp cracks — and hear it often in show rings.
Trainers, called “butchers” in backstretch parlance, still run injured and unfit horses. Jockeys, called “stick riders” or “machine riders,” still use the crop freely, or even illegal electric buzzers. Cowboys still wear nasty-looking spurs and sack out young horses. The palio, the traditional no-holds-barred horse race through the cobbled streets of Florence and Siena in Italy, still takes a terrible toll in riders’ and horses’ lives.
A rider struggling to contain an explosive horse still catches the eye in a way that a fine and subtle dressage display does not. One, it seems, is about fire; the other, about water. All those statues of generals on horses pawing the air, of coursers on charging grays, have left their mark. The horse, especially the spirited horse, makes the rider feel tall. “Many of us,” wrote Vladimir Littauer, a prolific author and eminent riding instructor, “still derive sincere pleasure out of a brutal mastery of the horse.”
Wild About Horses Page 9