Six Popular Questions… and the Answers

A few short years ago I could never imagine a time when we would be receiving so many questions about our experiences with horses. How they should be living. And eating. How the barefoot thing was working out. How we achieved such terrific relationships. How our horses transitioned from dry rocky California to wet green middle Tennessee. Questions about pastures, Join-Up, ground work, lifestyle, leadership.

It’s all very humbling because we’ve been at this for such a very short time. But very obsessively as Kathleen says. And we so very much appreciate all of you who have written, telling us your stories, and asking all those questions. Invariably reading the stories and constructing the answers back to you has been another teaching device for us, adding to our learning curve.

Cash, Pocket and Mariah are in their sixth year with us. Skeeter his fifth. Mouse her fourth, Noelle coming up on three. The first three have been living like horses, out 24/7, barefoot, with free-choice grass hay (or real grass now in Tennessee) around the clock for five years. The rest of them from the moment they arrived. They are all happy, healthy, unstressed, living the wild horse lifestyle. We have established wonderful relationships with each of them. We are members of the herd, by their choice, not ours. They all know their names and come when called, and they know what having fun is all about. We have play times at liberty when feeding every day. We ride bitless, often bareback if we’re staying on the property, learning the use of legs for cues instead of reins. To accomplish all this has required an enormous amount of research to gain the knowledge to know (not guess) that we were doing the right things for our horses. For that always came first, not what we wanted, but what they needed. And that, we learned very quickly, also caused our horses to be more willing, more desirous to do whatever it is that we might want them to do. It’s truly amazing how that works.

I personally answer each of your emails about all this, most always getting involved with the issues and gobbling up more time than I actually have. But getting it right for the horse (and the folks who care for them) is what it’s all about. It’s why we began all this in the first place.

And I suppose it’s why some people who have a lot of knowledge are afraid to share it, for they know its impossible to do in a few short minutes or a few short sentences. Once in the soup they’re there for a while. I’ve never forgotten how a famous Hollywood producer, way behind in his workload, stopped one afternoon to spend three hours sharing with three would-be hopeful screenwriters. His name was Paul Henning. If you’re really old you’ll remember The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, all three in the top ten viewed television shows for several years back in the 1960s. Paul Henning produced Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction and executive-produced Green Acres. He wrote every Beverly Hillbillies script that was ever written and a goodly share of Petticoat Junction scripts (side note: years later the original Benji turned out to be the dog that was on Petticoat Junction).  He might well have been the most sought after, influential television producer/writer in Hollywood during that time. And yet because of a request from a good friend he took three hours out of his schedule to mentor and tutor three writing hopefuls wanting to break into the business (the entire story is told in Who Needs Hollywood). He did this on a day when his next Hillbillies script was due that evening. A script he had barely started.

I’ve never forgotten that. And I’ve tried to live by his model.

But I’ve also realized how incredibly fortunate we were to be in the minority among folks who would cut off an arm to spend that much time with Paul Henning. He couldn’t do it very often. Just couldn’t. Because he knew he couldn’t stop with just a few short pieces of advice. Once committed, he would go the distance. But if he did that very often he would never get any work done and the very reason folks wanted to learn from him would soon disappear.

As more and more people continue to read The Soul of a Horse and The Soul of a Horse Blogged I feel very blessed, but I’m also beginning to understand the above concept. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I try to cut the length of some of the responses to your emails down in size a bit. It was Kathleen’s idea actually. We have taken the subject areas of the six most asked questions we receive and put everything we have learned about each of those subjects into what we are calling eBook Nuggets from The Soul of a Horse. Each an entertaining and enlightening (we hope) shorter-than-most-books eBook version of our journey involving that particular subject. Again the most important object of this exercise is to get the information – what we’ve learned to be true – out to as many folks as possible… so each eBook Nugget will cost only 99¢. Not even breakeven for us. But hopefully will save us some time that can be spent on the larger volume of emails these days. Or get us back out to the horses more often :). And still get the information out to you.

Not that we would stop answering emails. We’ll never do that. Because our time is no more valuable than yours. And because we love each and every one of you. After all, you have enabled us to do something that we love, and to help accomplish the positive changes you’ve told us about in horses’ lives all across the planet. We thank you so much for that. It’s the fuel that keeps us moving forward.

With free Kindle or NOOKbook apps, you can download these books to your computer, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad, Kindle, Nook (probably even your electric toothbrush)… or all of the above for one teeny little price of 99 cents! The stories you love and the information you need will always be with you. We hope you’ll check them out. The first three are available now, the next three very soon.

eBook Nuggets from The Soul of a Horse