01/26/2026
This is truth.
How we think about horse training is important. My first paid horse training job was on a ranch in California back in 1968. This was when Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt began teaching a new kind of horsemanship. My boss was interested in these new training concepts.
It was a time of transition between the old and the new. The cowboys on the ranch were old school and not as open to new ideas as our boss. He didn't press them too hard to change. I think he hired me, a 22 year old from the east, because I was young and not so set in my ways and I could ride.
This was long before social correctness. Then the word "domination" wasn't evil or cruel then. I still use that word because that is what I see in herd behavior. Domination is part of establishing the herd's necessary pecking order. For all the socially correct culture cops, I have gone to the thesaurus to give you alternative words to help you get comfortable with this post. The alternative words are sovereignty, control, command, authority, dominion, supremacy, ascendancy, or subjugation.
The training meter below contains my understanding of the possible range of steps in the horse training process. Where a trainer starts training a prospect on the meter varies widely. In my experience most training begins in the yellow Leadership range. However, there are some very low confidence horses with intense needs for leadership that quickly move into Partnership because they want to be directed and to please.
Likewise, on the other extreme, there are some horses, due either to their genetic impulse to dominate as herd leader or as a result of defending themselves from human abuse, that a trainer must deal with. They have to confront a prospect's dominance with their own ability to dominate. All the treats and kissy face in the world won't train these types of horses. With these horses, the trainer must begin in the red Domination range on the meter.
The ultimate goal is always Partnership. How we move a horse from Domination to Leadership, or from Leadership to Partnership depends on the individual horse. They determine the training process. The most exciting transition for me is from Leadership to Partnership. This happens when a prospect accepts your Leadership and then they begin to anticipate your expectations of them as a partner. For example, when you put them on an approach to a jump they know the task and what you expect, but in the approach something unexpected happens and they fix it and make a proper jump as their contribution to Partnership.
The transition from Domination to Leadership is another positive transition. Domination need not be cruel, violent or painful. At its best Domination is using communication techniques that trigger a useful response that most often is instinctive from their brain stem, not from their brain when fear resides. For example, a lion attacks a Zebra's belly. This triggers a flight response just like if you touch a hot stove you immediately withdraw your hand without thinking. If a horse is trying to dominate me on the ground, I will raise my knee into their belly and "be the lion". They stop trying to dominate.
Another form of training using domination comes from the Ray Hunt saying. "Make the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy". This is being smarter than the horse by understanding their biomechanics. When a horse bucks, I just use one rein to turn their head out to the side while raising their nose. This makes it really hard physically for the horse to buck and thus distracts and dominates their impulse to buck.
There are more positive examples of skilled Domination, but you really cannot learn how to move horses along the range of the meter from the internet. You need to apprentice with a pro. I spent many years training polo horses alongside fellow polo horse trainers from Argentina. They train horses faster and less delicately than Americans, who I think train too slowly. The Argentines use a lot of strong voice in training. Because horses have 35% better hearing than we do, the right voice puts the equivalent of a taze of energy throughout their body that disrupts a horse's Domination impulse.
I see too many good horses getting sorted out of a training process because many of today's horse trainers either lack the needed skills to train all types of horse, or because they reject effective training methods, they feel are cruel by human social correctness standards that they misguidedly apply to horses. These trainers are more focused on how the training process impacts their emotions than how the horse needs to be trained.
