BLM, wild horse specialists?
How does the BLM call themselves wild horse specialists?
What might they be basing this definition on, on the fact that they have been chasing wild horses for a long time? Does doing something the wrong way for a long time make one an automatic specialist?
Natural horsemanship people everywhere who’ve ever witnessed BLM staffers at work with wild horses, know beyond a shadow of a doubt, how ridiculously un-knowledgeable the BLM “horsemen” truly are. Even bystanders at BLM adoptions, not fully trained in the principals of natural horse man ship wonder why the men flail their flags so furiously and send the horses into scattered frenzies. They constantly look like they are trying to break some kind of time record, and they refuse to take 5 or 10 more minutes longer to make the situation half way bearable for the horses. The BLM staffers know frightfully little about horses, about horse behavior and about how to communicate with them.
It is actually rather easy for a natural horsemanship trained person to maneuver a wild horse, because they are not spoiled by human signals yet. The horse can be motivated to move in any direction by the way the trainer looks at the horse, the way he/she moves towards or away from that horse and the way their shoulders are angled in relation to where the horses body is positioned. Horses are masters of perception and they respond accordingly and very predicatively. Without any prior training of the horse, a completely wild horse can be gentled in a round pen in approximately one to two hours, it fails only in 1 out of 500 horses. Through simple principals of reward by release, the completely wild horse is easily persuaded to trust the trainer upon which time fear miraculously dissipates.
Contrarily, the BLM guys, they treat the wild horses as if they were cows. They mis- communicate with the frightened horses, by waiving their flags around, unknowingly positioning their bodies in completely opposite ways of where they want the horse to go. The horses of course end up going in the direction that they understand the humans body language is telling them, which is a direction unbeknownst to the BLM staffer. The BLM staffer is therefore confused as to why that horse is going into the fence instead of where he wants it to go, and feels like he has to waive his whipstick more furiously in order to make the horses understand.
A true horse specialist, would know without a doubt when a horse is about to loose its cool. The tell tale signs are easy to recognize. But because the BLM staffers do not recognize these signs or do not want to, they push the horses far passed the limits of what their minds can take and this is why there are many situations of which the outcome is, horses trampling other horses, jumping fences, climbing out of chutes, hurting themselves etc.
To be perfectly fair to the BLM, if you have not studied horse behavior, and have not become a specialist on horse body language, it is a difficult thing to do, and people just do not know this instinctively.
Knowing fully well that this will fall on incredibly deaf ears just the same as the requests to cease and desist all wild horse gathers, I still feel compelled to share my humble, natural horse man ship opinion with you, that either the BLM should be required to hire natural horse man ship people only, or every BLM staffer needs to spend 5 weeks on Monty Roberts Ranch mandatorily, before they ever get to flail a walmart bag whipstick at a wild horse.
Simone Netherlands
www.respect4horses.com