Where the Words Natural Horsemanship Came From
The men credited with starting natural horsemanship did not call it that. The name arrived later, and it has been argued over ever since.
Natural horsemanship is one of those names everybody uses and almost nobody is happy with. It is worth knowing where it came from, because the history explains the argument.
The work came before the name
Western Horseman has written that Tom Dorrance, Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt can be credited with triggering the phenomenon that came to be called natural horsemanship. The wording is careful: came to be called. When Hunt met Tom Dorrance around 1960, and for years afterward, there was no label. There were a few people handling horses in a way that depended on feel and timing and on the horse working things out, and a growing number of riders who wanted to learn it.
Nor were they the first to argue for gentleness. John Rarey filled theaters with that argument in the 1850s, and writers were making it in ancient Greece. What was new in the twentieth century was a line of teaching that could be followed from person to person.
The label
The phrase reached the wider public in the early 1990s. Pat Parelli, who has named Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Ronnie Willis as his mentors and who hosted several of Hunt's clinics, published a book titled Natural Horse-Man-Ship with Western Horseman in 1993 and built a teaching program around the name.
By 2005 the veterinarian Robert Miller and the broadcaster Rick Lamb could write a history of the whole movement under the title The Revolution in Horsemanship. Encyclopedias now describe the Dorrance brothers as among the founders of the modern natural horsemanship movement.
What natural was supposed to mean
Bill Dorrance addressed the word directly in True Horsemanship Through Feel. When he and the people around him spoke of what was natural, he explained, they meant what is natural for the horse to do within its own limits. The point was the horse's nature: its need for self-preservation, the way it reads pressure and release, the way horses communicate with each other through feel.
It did not mean that riding a horse is natural, or that equipment is unnatural, or that one program has a claim on the idea.
Why the argument continues
Once a way of working has a name, the name can be sold, and can be attached to things its originators would not recognize. Some trainers in the Dorrance and Hunt line avoid the phrase for that reason and simply say horsemanship. Others use it gladly. Critics point out that plenty of harsh handling has been done under gentle-sounding labels, and that good horsemen in older traditions were doing much of this long before anyone named it.
The Two Rein uses the phrase where a source does and otherwise prefers to say who a person learned from. A name tells you what something is called. A line of teachers tells you where it came from.
