HORSING AROUND BY TRIANA ELAN

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Natural Horsemanship

Part of Island Star Equestrian Center's mission is to expose our members and students to as many educational opportunities as possible.

Horsemanship is much, much more than riding, showing, driving and ranching. The core of horsemanship is relationship between horse and handler. There is now a trend favoring using the nature of the horse itself for training, rather than the iron will of the human. This method has been coined "Natural Horsemanship."

Like humans, horses have their own mentality, natural talents, ideas of how things should be, and unique individual personalities. Natural Horsemanship, in its essence, addresses the horse as an individual on many levels. Firstly, a horse is a horse, and it is the nature of the horse to flee from danger. A horse is a prey animal, with little natural defense other than speed. A horse must be ever vigilant of its surroundings. No matter how well trained a horse is, it is still a prey animal and it knows it.

This is why absolute trust must be established between horse and human. To force an animal into a situation when it's not ready or to bully an animal into doing what the human wants is about as good as trying to bully a person into submission. Eventually it works, but with dire consequences.

Police horses are a prime example of centuries of training methods used for military purposes. Think of the war horses. The war horse is the ancestor of the modern draft breeds (Belgians, Percherons, Clydesdales, Shires and Suffolks). The Belgian draft horse is the descendant of the Flemish war horse, for example. Over the years, when horses were decommissioned as battle transport, the war horses were bred to work in the fields instead.

With that little piece of history, Island Star sponsored a field trip to the Seattle Mounted Police training barn on June 9, 2002.

We were warmly greeted by Sergeant Ty Elster and his fellow officers. What was originally planned as a short demonstration of precision maneuvers on the police horses turned out to be an enthralling hour of witnessing outstanding horsemanship.

Police horses must be trained to not run away from danger under any circumstances. In Seattle, the mounted unit patrols some of the more unsavory areas of the city every day. At any point, anything can happen, such as a gunshot, someone throwing something or shouting, the squealing tires of a car, the airbrakes of a semi. Police horses remain calm in these situations, largely because of the amount of trust they have in their rider. This trust has been established over hours and days and months of hard work. If a horse spooks, it must be able to quickly be brought back under control. The horses must be able to be loaded into the trailer at a moment's notice; in the event of a riot or other public disturbance, the mounted unit is called in for crowd control. Believe it or not, the presence of a mounted police unit has a calming effect on humans.

The SMP officers showed us several of their precision maneuvers for crowd control and various aspects of how the horses are started out dealing with unfamiliar, things flapping in the wind, objects moving on the ground and other anticipated events that would normally send a horse running. In fact, at one point during an exercise, Island Star's Vice President Karin Becker and I had to giggle, acknowledging that by this time our personal horses would have torn the whole arena down!

An impressive display of proper seat was given by Officer Steve Matheson on "Apollo," a paint horse. It was thoroughly explained how the seat and legs are what commands the horse to walk forward, halt and back up. The reins were slack and Apollo was responding to what almost seemed like an invisible command.

Hearing Sgt. Elster calling out commands and watching the unit respond in smooth unison called up something ancient and awe-inspiring, and watching them playing was as thrilling as doing it ourselves. Play, it was stressed to us, is a critical part of training. The horses and officers both need fun time and playing strengthens the horse/rider bond.

Sgt. Ty even shared a fabulous piece of trivia with me: In Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, a police officer is called a Constable. This is a contraction from the ancient term "Count Of the Stable," who was the keeper and trainer of the King's horses. Now here comes the good part...the word "cop" is an old acronym meaning Constable On Patrol! So really, the word "cop," in its full description, is "Count Of the Stable On Patrol."

Since pictures speak louder than words, I'm including several photos in this article.

Watch this space for our next scheduled trip to the Seattle Mounted Police barn!

If you'd like to learn more about what is required of a police horse, check out the Police and Posse Horse Training WEB SITE.

Triana Elan lives on Orcas Island and is the founder of Island Star Equestrian Center

© 2002 Island Star