Twenty years ago I was just getting into training horses, and other than following the examples of my older sisters, I had one strong influence in natural horsemanship training. My teacher at Sunday School just happened to be the best horse trainer I have ever known or ever will know. His name was Kevin Wescott and he lived a few miles from our ranch in Nebraska, had grown up training horses, and was a personal friend of Tom Dorrance and a protege of Ray Hunt. His three daughters went to school with me, and we have kept in contact through the years, in spite of moving away and growing up. Kevin Wescott is the best horse trainer I know, and I have always been thankful for the advice he shared freely on training horses.
Kevin Wescott has never been one for promoting himself or his own training methods. He said that he learned from Ray Hunt that you don’t teach people a method or a technique; you teach people a philosophy of understanding the horse for the good of the horse. The world of natural horsemanship has gone the other way these days, with the focus being on how to swindle the most money out of your clients and students rather than being in it for the horses. If you’re charging $40 for your own personalized style of halter or training stick and demanding your followers to use it exclusively, it’s a clear indication that your motives aren’t centered on the horses.
In my teenage years when I was soaking up every ounce of horse knowledge I could find, Kevin helped me, and would spend entire days working on my horses with me, and never charged me a cent for it. He said it was the same when he was learning, he would call Tom Dorrance on the phone and ask him hundreds of questions and get his advice, which was offered freely and in the most helpful way possible. That’s what we’re missing today, in this fast-paced world of trainers who are self-promoting and fully marketed. They wouldn’t dream of taking an afternoon to help a teenager start out a colt, unless it had dollar signs attached to it.
I would love to see a revolution in the horse industry. We are faced with a couple huge problems, one being the closing of horse processing facilities in the United States, and the other being the greed and cold-blooded attitudes of most of the people involved with horses these days. Everyone loves to talk down the backyard breeder, the horse dealer, the kill buyer. But when it comes right down to it, are we horse trainers any better, when every move we make is to line our own pockets?
The old golden rule has been forgotten in this age, but if it started at the trainers and the “best” of the horse owners in this country, it could start a trickle-down effect that might just make it to the slaughter plants. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If we were all truly in it for the horses, what a difference we would see!
