With a Soft Breath: How My Daughter Rides Horses

"I've begun to teach my 3.5 year old daughter to ride horses on her own. ... I grew up with horses, and learned to ride alone at a similar age, and when I was a teenager, I began teaching others to ride around the time I was training horses and working with traumatized and "problem horses". Having grown up in the USA, I grew up surrounded by a lot of ways of being with horses that were fundamentally dominance-based ... and built upon the need for "power-over" because that was the only safe way to work with such a large and powerful animal. Even in the natural horsemanship space, which I studied for decades, many of the approaches still utilize power-over tactics to get the horse to do what the human wants. It doesn't actually have to be this way though. Living the way I've lived with our herd these last 8 years, I've basically unlearned nearly everything I was taught ... because the horses have just taught me it was all wrong, force and power-over was never necessary..."