Women and Horses! Anything Special?
Women and horses! Nothing special about that right? Wrong! Women bring something very special to their relationship with horses, and it should be no surprise. It's the same thing that men love them for, the same thing that they bring to their intimate relationships with fellow humans, namely their femininity. But we're all the same, right? So, what's femininity? Women are equal to men. We all have the same nature! Again - - -wrong. Where is our horse sense, our practical common sense?? Women are obviously not the same as men: they are women!!! In addition to their (praise be to god) physical differences, their femininity consists of a warmer, more sensitive, more nurturing, and more sympathetic nature than that of their male counterparts. They identify more readily with the feelings of other creatures, with the subjects to whom they are relating. They are more subjective. Men are more objective. They are less empathetic, which is to say they identify less with the feelings of a given creature and concern themselves more with the objective aspect of creatures' situations. These are of course generalizations: there are varying degrees of exceptions among the sexes. However, these general differences among men and women account for our calling a man 'feminine' or 'soft' if he seems to be unusually sensitive, or expresses an unusual degree of feelings; and for our calling a woman 'masculine' or 'tough' if she doesn't express much sensitivity or feelings, but treats her fellow creatures rather objectively. ______________________________________________________________ 
Is it obvious then what this means for horsemanship and training? Sure it is. On some level we all understand what this amounts to in the world of working with horses. In terms of 'horse sense', which was the focus of the previous topic, a woman is much more prone to tune-in to the subjective, the feelings and senses, of a horse, and a man is much more prone to appraise the objective and practical circumstances of a horse in a training and care situation.The ideas of natural horse training and horse whispering will strike an immediate resonant chord with female trainers, where training methods involving physical manipulation and discipline will appear as reasonable to the masculine training personality.The ideal training personality is most probably the perfect combination of the two. I try to keep this in mind in my book "No Feet No Horse": Check It Out! (You can download for free one chapter of my book bi-monthy. For information just click on the "Corrective Behavior" button on the top left of this page.) Few of us are totally devoid of either the subjective(feminine) and the objective (masculine) elements in our personalities -. To my way of thinking, it is to your advantage as a horse trainer, and probably as an individual human being, to strike a healthy balance in your development of both of these characteristics so that you will be able to use the appropriate degree of each of them that a particular situation my call for. Well, so much for my dissertation on "Women and Horses'. For a web-site which places special focus on Women and Horsemanship I would recommend checking Patricia's web page from ruffsranch.com named Clever Horse Women And for a great manual on horse training in general it is well worth checking out Professor Jesse Beery's methods. Just click here: Horse Trainer Jesse Beery For the next article on 'Women and Horse Shoeing', click on this link: Women Handling Horses' Feet |
