Let me start by making it abundantly clear that I have a great deal of respect for natural horsemanship–when used properly I have seen it do great things. This article attempts to look back on the last 10 days of the Pat Parelli and Catwalk controversy and explain why I made the video, why that video has 65,000 views, and my thoughts moving forward.
A short history of nearly everything: On Friday, July 9th, Pat Parelli gave a demonstration at the Festival of the Horse in England. During that demonstration he worked with Robert Whitaker’s show jumping stallion, Catwalk, who did not want to be bridled. The demonstration did not go as planned and by Saturday the forums were ablaze with first hand accounts of the incident, such as elsbells now infamous quote on the Horse and Hound forum:
“…The room went silent, all viewers went dumb as they watched him use a gum line as a twitch and a 22ft rope wrapped around the fetlock to the knee to haul Catwalks leg off the floor to render him unable to move while he tried to force the bridle onto a now very distressed and frightened horses face!!”
On Friday night the Parelli’s tried to quell the controversy with a post on the Parelli blog that acknowledged that Catwalk was challenging and that “a couple of folks were upset at what they think they saw,” but the post didn’t describe what happened. The story kept growing on the forums and it starting to gain some serious traction by Saturday.
On Sunday, the Parelli’s released a heavily edited Youtube video showing a few moments from the Friday demonstration and clips of the horse being bridled on Sunday morning. Despite obviously having the full video from Friday, the Parelli’s only included a few seconds of video from the incident and no twitch or leg rope as describe by witnesses on the forums. At this point, I was convinced that at least one person in the audience had cell phone video of the situation and it was just a waiting game to see when the truth about what happened would come out. I also published a post about the situation here on EN Monday afternoon.
Why I made the video: My opinion a week ago and my opinion today is that there are two possible explanations of what happened between Pat Parelli and Catwalk–
Either…
1) The methods Pat used on Catwalk including the twitch and rope around the leg are a legitimate part of the Parelli method.
Or…
2) Pat simply made a mistake and lost his patience with Catwalk
In the first instance, all Pat Parelli needed to do was explain publicly that, what he did to Catwalk is part of the Parelli method. If you really think that twitching a horse and putting a rope around its leg are part of the approved and marketed Parelli method, then fine, but personally, I think the second possibility is much more likely.
If Pat did lose his patience with Catwalk and got more aggressive than he wanted to, he should have acknowledged his mistake, apologized, and moved on. Ultimately, we all get impatient with our horses from time to time and our impatience leads to training mistakes. Heck, I got too impatient with my young horse about 3 times in the warmup at Maryland. Horses are the kindest, most forgiving, animals on the planet and the only way we can honorably work with them is to learn from our mistakes and try to do better the next time. In my opinion, Pat missed an important opportunity to show his vast group of followers that sometimes even the most experienced horsemen screw up and that the most important thing to do is to learn from your mistakes.
I think most people would have forgiven Pat and dropped the issue if he had just explained what happened and apologized. Instead, whether by greed or pride, the Parellis tried to cover the story up with deceptive blog posts and videos. So, it was my turn to get overly aggressive, and I waited for the cell phone footage of Pat fighting the horse to be posted on Youtube and then I combined the clips into one montage video and posted that video last Monday. My video quickly hit the forums, Facebook, and other sites, as of today, it has 65,000 views…
Wait, that’s not the right video, here it is…
I never expected the video to spread as quickly as it did, but I had a conversation last month with a friend of mine who makes viral videos and I used some of the techniques that he suggested. The simple fact is that lots of people wanted to know what really happened and the Parellis were not providing a sufficient explanation. There are nearly 700 comments on the video, with both logic and madness on either side of the issue.
On July 16th, Pat posted yet another Youtbe video, this time a copy of a letter he sent to the Festival of the Horse. Pat’s letter does not apologize or acknowledge any mistake/wrongdoing with respect to Pat’s treatment of Catwalk, but it does apologize for “allowing confusion to evolve” by not explaining what was happening to the audience during the demonstration. The letter goes on to say “we finally achieved success the following day after some more hours of passive persistence. To make sure there was no cause for concern, Catwalk was examined by an independent veterinarian.”
Frankly, the ‘we got the bridle on the horse eventually, so the techniques were successful‘ mentality concerns me. One of my favorite aspects of natural horsemanship is that it does not accept that the ends justify the means with respect to training a horse. True natural horsemanship, as I see it, is about finding a way to make the horse want to achieve success rather than just forcing the issue and saying ‘voila!‘
Ultimately, as I said in my original post, one two hour mistake should not define Pat Parelli as a horseman, and it certainly should not define natural horsemanship as a technique. DO NOT pass judgement on natural horsemanship because of a two minute long Youtube video. Of course, I didn’t mean anything personal against Pat or Linda when I posted the video. As they say in politics, ‘it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup’ and if someone intentionally tries to deceive our audience then I will do what I can to expose such deception, whether that is a post or a Youtube video that reaches 60,000 people. I still hope that Pat uses this chance to show his fans that acknowledging and learning from our mistakes is the most important part of living a successful life with horses, but I’m not holding my breath. Go eventing.
