I'm confused!?

What really is natural horsemanship? I hear lots about it but I never asked what it was......

www.parelli.com

Yes, because it is natural to stick a rope across their gum and pull on it until they have a sore and wrap a rope around their leg and make them bounce around on three legs until you get them to do what you want......

Well, I can tell you that it's NOT Parelli.

NH is just the newfangled 'cool' name for what boils down to common sense horse training. Which has been around for centuries; it just didn't have a name, circus atmosphere, or expensive, useless gadgets associated with it.

Classical training is the exact same thing as 'natural horsemanship', but without all the flash, trash, or smoke and mirrors.

You can ignore the ridiculous parts of NH, especially the expensive gear and the 'horsenality profile' garbage.

My personal take - no gimmicks or gadgets. No one size fits all theory.

Horses are individuals and need to be treated and respected as such.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Do not bash mine because it is different than your own.

NH is knowing the how the horses think and to teach them thing completely without pain or force. Its understanding horse language, like body language.

No one is trying to bash anyone its just some people don't like Parelli, especially the videos that just cam out about both of them.

In my opinion, NH is having respect for the horse you are working with. Respect for their mind and body. You don't rush their mind, you don't rush their body. You take the time to understand them.
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Its a gimick. Nothing we do with horses is natural. Horsemanship is horsmanship, god and bad ans all shades in between.

NH as I see it is uses a "language" that is already hard-wired into the horse's brain to teach him, rather than plucking a raw mustang out of the pasture and expecting him to understand a human-devised "language" from the get go.

One caveat to that - teaching the horse to move away from pressure rather than resisting pressure. Referring especially to truly wild horses or horses used to being the leaders of their human herds, resistance is natural, voluntary giving is not. That's the start of schooling the lexicon of aids that communicate more subtle, advanced, perhaps discipline specific requests.

It's about becoming El Capitano of the horse's world the same way that another horse would.

Well said, Gluey. Once that horse even lives in a fenced pasture, the natural aspect of his life starts to vanish. As to differentiating good from bad horsemanship, the proof is in the pudding. Judge the individual method by the individual horses it produces. A faulty method (or faulty application of a perfectly sound method ;) )will produce faulty horses.

Spirithorse: With all respect to your views, opinions, and horse training preferences, it isn't that there is hostility toward Parelli because his techniques are "different", it's that many followers of the method berate every other way to interact with a horse, citing Mr. Parelli as the end-all-be-all of gentle and non-forceful "Horse-Man-Ship", while the recent video and response to it show that he has not qualm one about using methods that are forceful to say the least, and blatantly contradict what every scrap of his published method preaches. It's hard to stay credible when one contradicts himself.