“And I whispered to the horse; ‘Trust no man in whose eye you do not see yourself reflected as an equal.’” —Poet Don Vincenzo Giobbe
When horse power drove the world, there was plenty of work for anyone who could tame a wild mustang or rehabilitate a horse who turned hostile. Most trainers followed traditional, and sometimes painful, methods that used force to “break” a horse and make it submit. But there were always legends about people who understood horses so well that they could gain the animals’ trust and cooperation through mutual respect. These legends went back hundreds of years, and often such horsemen were thought to have magical powers.
In 350 BC, Greek philosopher Xenophon wrote On Horsemanship. His wasn’t the first text on working with horses—that honor goes to a Mesopotamian horse trainer named Kikkuli, who wrote a book around 1400 BC. But Xenophon’s work was the most comprehensive, and it emphasized training through kindness and reward rather than force. In modern times, a 19th-century Irishman named Daniel Sullivan rehabilitated dangerous horses using his own “secret” method: Sullivan stayed alone in a barn for a few hours with a vicious or terrified horse, and when he led the animal out, it would be calm and well mannered. No one knows Sullivan’s secret for sure, but some people noticed that when he worked with a horse, he faced the animal as if preparing to speak to it. So he earned the nickname “the horse whisperer.”
Sullivan died in 1810, but a few horsemen carried on his work. The most famous was John Solomon Rarey of Grovesport, Ohio. Rarey started taming horses on his father’s farm when he was 12 and worked out his own method without spurs, whips, or force. He became so successful that he gained a reputation as a man who could break the most difficult animals—he even tamed a team of elk. When word of Rarey’s “horse whispering” reached England’s Queen Victoria in 1858, she summoned him to Windsor Castle and asked him to tame her husband’s dangerous charger. Rarey spent some time with the charger in his stall. All was eerily quiet, so after a few minutes, the worried queen and her entourage peeked inside and saw the horse lying side-by-side with Rarey, who was using the animal’s hind legs as a pillow.
With Queen Victoria as a reference, Rarey traveled the world taming horses (and even a zebra). His most famous triumph was the rehabilitation of Cruiser, a stud stallion who had killed two grooms. Cruiser wore an iron muzzle and had to be fed through a funnel so as not to injure the stable boys. But it took Rarey only three hours to make Cruiser docile enough that (the New York Times later reported) he could be “fondled like a kitten.”
Rarey became a celebrity. His book, The Complete Horse Tamer, was a best seller and explained his secret: Rarey painlessly hobbled one of the horse’s legs with a special strap he’d invented himself. Standing on just three legs quickly tired the horse so that Rarey could make it lie down. Then he gently overwhelmed and calmed the animal with strokes and petting and by speaking in low, soothing tones. The result was a horse who trusted and obeyed him.
More than a century after Rarey’s death, British author Nicholas Evans wrote The Horse Whisperer, a best-selling novel about a horse named Pilgrim who was horribly injured in an accident. In 1998, the book became a movie starring Robert Redford as Tom Booker, the horse whisperer who rehabilitates Pilgrim.
According to Evans, Tom Booker’s skill with horses was inspired by the accomplishments of real people. One was Rarey—in the movie, Booker uses the Rarey strap technique to gentle Pilgrim. But the primary inspiration for the book was a modern horse whisperer from Wyoming named Dan “Buck” Brannaman.
Like John Rarey, Brannaman started training horses at 12, and his methods don’t include punishment or pain. After watching Buck Brannaman help traumatized horses, Evans had these admiring words: “His skill, understanding, and his gentle, loving heart have parted the clouds for countless troubled creatures. Buck is the Zen master of the horse world.”
According to Brannaman, part of his knowledge comes from hard-won horse sense. After being bitten, bucked, and run over, he decided he’d do better if he could understand what made horses tick . . . as well as kick. So Brannaman studied “natural horsemanship,” a tradition that takes its cues from a horse’s instincts and innate methods of communication.
Natural horsemanship encourages trainers to “listen to horses” by understanding the animals’ herd instincts and body language and then use that information to communicate in a way the horses understand. A “natural horseman,” for example, will use the horse’s herd instincts to maintain leadership. With the trainer acting as the head of the herd, he gains the animal’s trust and cooperation. Brannaman, who himself was abused as a child, especially likes to work with mistreated animals. He’s sensitive to their psychology and uses “patience, leadership, compassion, and firmness” to help them overcome their traumatic pasts.
Buck Brannaman has also become a motivational speaker teaching others to use horse-whispering techniques to help troubled children and adults. Teaching horse whispering as a philosophy, Brannaman says, “For me, these principles are really about life, about living your life so that you’re not making war with the horse, or with other people.”
Horses first appeared in cave art about 30,000 years ago. The animals weren’t domesticated then, but they were clearly a part of life for early humans. Even though there’s a lot of disagreement about when horses were domesticated (and very little solid evidence), most archaeologists believe that horses began living with people in Eurasia around 6,000 years ago.