Your opinion on Parelli

Very nice last post!

Awesome post from Padrona, I wholeheartedly agree!

The post also reminded me of something I forgot to mention:
Most valuable thing I've learned from Parelli is the idea of individual's responsibility in a partnership -- be it horse or human. Love it.

Well done Padrona. I wish I had had the nerve to write a post like that. I wholeheartedly agree with every word said. I was helping a couple out yesterday and they were keen to learn the NH ideas and Parelli in particular. They asked why they heard so much negative comment about Parelli at their yard from traditional riders. To be honest I struggled to answer the question.
I totally agree that there are many who say they are in the program, but have a very very poor understanding of it, apply it incorrectly and get into trouble. The naysayers then concentrate their criticism on those horses and point to them as examples as to how all Parelli is at fault.

Pat says that he can provide inspiration but the student has to provide the perspiration. This is both physical perspiration and mental perspiration. When I ask many self professed Parelli students how they much study it is normally a negligible amount. I reckon to study at least 5 hours a week on top of playing with horses.

Is it maybe because Parelli is such a big brand that a huge number of folks know about it and get started in it, many with no intention of putting the perspiration in that is required. They like to watch his show tours on TV but don't want to spend the time and effort it takes to watch his proper instructional DVDs or his Internet accessed DVDs. They then try to emulate what Pat has done on those shows with their horses, saying they are doing Parelli, and it goes wrong.

I would like to ask those on this forum who are anti Parelli, have you spent at least 20 hours viewing his Levels Packs, Horse behaviour pack, Colt Starting pack or are you basing your opinions on the afore mentioned badly trained horses, TV presentations and internet gossip.

Those TV presentations are good, but they should NOT be regarded as instructional material. They are edutainment and Pat describes them as such. They are there to give a flavour of the program, not its' details and are not aimed at folks who already know that NH is the way forward.

They are to get the sort of folks who will wire the mouth of a horse shut to get more points in the show ring thinking that there might be a better way. Or those that put caustic soda on horses feet to make them step higher to think a different way. OK those are extreme examples and there is probably no helping them, but the same sort of abuse, in a milder way, happens on yards up and down the world everyday. If these edutainment shows makes just one person who is unknowingly being abusive to their horse stop and think then I am all for it.

What I actually like about Pat is that he does not say "follow my step by step program and all will be well". He actually says that you have to study hard and have a lot of mental and physical perspiration to succeed with horses, but his job is to provide us with the information he has gathered from all his mentors in a convenient form to learn it.

Note I say from his mentors, not from him. He is trying to pass on the wisdom of generations and explicitly says so all the time. He does NOT claim to have invented any of it and I have never heard him claim to have done so. Even the Horsenality idea is just his way of trying to make a subject that is difficult to explain accessible to more folks. The Parellis invented the presentation of the material, but not the content.

I consider this a fault of most DVD trainers.

If a large number or percentage of people are not understanding your message, then maybe YOU are part of the problem. If Parelli thinks people are misapplying his teaching, maybe he ought to examine how he teaches.

Most DVD teaching I've seen make it look too easy, and doesn't emphasize how much subtlety goes in to training a horse. If you can't read a horse's body language, your training is going to suck. And the majority of DVD training I've seen doesn't make that point.

If you hire a trainer to work with you, they can show you what they are looking for in the horse's response. And if you spend hours teaching a horse a small thing, you begin to realize that a DVD is highly compressed and usually involves one or two types of horses, at best - but each horse is truly an individual.

I've recently watched a couple of DVDs from Larry Trocha. I think he makes it pretty clear that these are training suggestions, but they don't work on every horse and they don't work in 60 minutes. I haven't watched anything he has on training a colt, because that isn't my need.

Which brings me to another pet peeve: If you are watching a DVD on training a colt, you might want to reconsider training a colt. It is fine to watch one for ideas, but anyone who thinks they can learn how to break a colt from watching a set of DVDs needs to buy a horse with some good training first.

If lots of folks are misapplying your methods, you need to rethink how you communicate and market your method. You are either marketing to the wrong people, or not communicating clearly.

The Parelli program does of course have a large number of certified instructors to help folks through the system.
They are required to have passed Level 4 and then go to Colorado to do a course. They are then graded as to what they are allowed to teach and only the experienced ones who have been assessed to be good enough are allowed to teach more advanced topics. 1 star instructors are not allowed to teach riding at all for example, only ground skills.
When the Parellis visit the UK instructors are strongly encouraged to go on courses with them which I believe are free for instructors to attend. I have never heard of a Clinton Anderson certified instructor in the UK, nor a Buck Branaman one. Monty Roberts does have such a system in place.
Parelli is not a DVD only program, it is a program supplemented by DVDs with a strong instructional bias.
As for the Colt Starting DVDs I have watched them. To my mind they actually contained a huge amount of advice that I use daily for working with our two horses one of which was backed recently for me by James Roberts (one of Pats' proteges) and the other is an 11 year old experienced horse. In some ways it is their best product in my opinion.
I cannot think of a stricter system to ensure good quality instruction is the norm. Of course there will always be the odd instructor who slips through the net, but in a large organisation there will always be weaker individuals.

Of course if folks do not / cannot take advantage of the instructors who are out there and just study by DVD then they will probably not progress as well as those who a) have an instructor nearby and b) can afford one

Next objection please !

Again: If your marketing results in significant numbers of people thinking the DVDs suffice, then there is a marketing problem. Based on the Parelli website, Arizona has 2 Parelli instructors - a 4 star in Phoenix, and a 1-star in Tucson. That, in turn, suggests the majority of Parelli trained horses in Arizona are Parelli DVD trained. And that might explain why Parelli trained horses in Arizona have a less than sterling reputation...

BSMS : there is no way you can do a very detailled programm. Advice people they had to watch the whole thing to keep the whole stuff.
And bind people to do it all right.

You can't force people to be smart enought to follow the advice you gave them.

So there is two solutions left :
- whether you just do nothing.
-Wether you do something, knowing you can't be sure every body that buy your stuff will be smart enough to use it the correct way. But you will help the people who really want to do their best.

Too much schtick - not enough substance.

schtick can you please use words that existe in the dictionnary?

BMS I agree with Dame Nuit.
You seem to think that Parelli should be responsible for the people who don't follow his program properly. There is such a thing as personal responsibility.
I mentioned in a different thread that you should research what instructors are available in your area and what programs they teach. Then pick one which you feel you can successfully follow. If there are no instructors of a particular program in your area, pick a different program.
Some people will have the experience to follow Parelli just from the DVDs but not many.

Themacpak. I can honestly say that there is so much substance available in the Parelli program I have trouble learning it all, or even being aware of it all. Given that the subject mater is primarily just for foundation training and not for training a particular discipline (which Pat says you should find from a specialist afterwards) the concentration of information available for that stage of a horses and persons training is huge.
How long did you study the Parelli program before coming to your conclusion ? Did you watch levels 1 to 4, the horse behaviour series, the monthly DVD series (which has suddenly taken a huge leap in quality by the way). Did you read Pats book, or the thousands of documents on the Parelli website (which you can join free for a month) ? Or did you just watch the TV shows he does ?