What is Natural Horsemanship?

Many people have never heard of Natural Horsemanship training, or even Parelli Natural Horse.Man.Ship. Pat has been involved with horses at a young age and with winning many awards and comments about his riding, he started studying horses with a different kind of an eye. It's Pat vision that one day the term "natural" will no longer have to precede the word "horsemanship." Horsemanship does not need to be mechanical. With enough savvy, horses and people can achieve fun, excellence, truth and results, harmony, and unity... naturally, through understanding, communication and psychology, rather than force fear and mechanics.
What Pat and his wife Linda has done is simple. They Written down the training secrets that all the other trainers didn’t want you to know about. Pat and Linda, who has done alot of the organizing have put everything in a simple and easy to understand format, provided written and audiovisual material that you can study as if you were learning a new language. It’s all found in a laid out step-by-step instruction guide, with multiple levels that you can progress through at your own pace. But the crucial part of the whole Parelli world is Pat and his wife Linda. Without a doubt they are preaching their own sermon and unlike the insincere all-for-money TV evangelists, they really do believe in what they are talking about.

In order to understand the horses world, we have to understand that horses are prey animals, and because of that they are genetically programmed to flee at the slightest sign of danger. That might be a mountain lion or a stationary rock. What Parelli does is teach you how not to be a predator in the horse’s eyes, but to become more like a horse than a human (a leader). Horses in the wild live in the safety of herds. They have a very dynamic and strong hierarchical social structure, so you have to work at becoming a horse that YOUR horse wants to be around! This is what Parelli makes so simple. However what ends up happening is that most people just want to get on and ride, and the first level of the Parelli training involves copeous amounts of work with you on the ground, so inevitably a lot of people give up before the results can be seen. For those that pursue through Level 1 and then the upper levels, the rewards are fantastic. Can you imagine riding a horse bareback with no halter/bridle/bit, yet still having control and feeling safe?