Product Description

Get your relationship right with your horse and he'll try to get it right with you, too. It's not about following steps to success or special equipment. It's about very subtle signs that show him you are on his side, and when you're with him he can let you take responsibility for his safety. This is the heart of great horsemanship. Be With Your Horse is a clear and accessible guide to finding the best relationship with your horse. Tom Widdicombe invites the reader to embark on a search for the perfect partnership, learning how to make your horse a willing friend, and find the balance between leadership and respect. The book is full of practical advice applicable to all horse owners and horse lovers, and peppered with accounts of Tom's own experiences with horses and how they shaped his ideas about training horses and humans to achieve a greater understanding of one another

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343708 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Tom Widdicombe is a Recommended Associate of the Intelligent Horsemanship organisation, the movement that represents Monty Roberts' training methods in the UK. There are only about 30 such certified trainers in this country. Tom has written features for Your Horse magazine, and recently appeared on BBC2's Make Me Honest, where his training approach was used to help a young offender understand better methods of communication. Tom has been working with troubled horses and 'starting' young ones for many years, as well as breeding sought after gypsy-type piebald cobs on his farm near Haytor, Devon.

Customer Reviews

Be With Your Horse
Anyone who wants to get on better with their horse will love this book. It is easy to read and can be read again and again - you'll learn something new each time you do. It isn't full of exercises to persuade your horse to do what you want, but through anecdotes and information about the way horses are, the author helps you find a way to get your horse to do what you ask of him, just because he wants to do it for you. It's also a great book to read just to learn more about yourself and the way the world works.

Be with Your Horse - Opening the door
Toms' book explains how less is more, and opens the door to a better understanding of our horse. It helped me to slow down, take a step back, and expect less, and therefore build a much stronger and more trusting relationship with my horse. From this everything else follows. It is a book that you will want to read more than once, as each time you will understand something that little bit better, and you will remember points raised that you ought not to have forgotten. It is not a manual of do's and don'ts, it is more a lesson in thinking and feeling, things that we as humans often forget to do, and for which our horses receive the blame. I found this book very enlightening, and thought provoking, and would recommend it highly to anyone who believes that there can be a better way to be with your horse.

Simple, thoughtful, inspiring
In this book Tom Widdicombe mixes brief stories from his working life with horses and explanations of how and why people and horses can work together successfully. He is not pushing a particular system or style of training- there are no sets of exercises here and time and again he observes that completely different approaches can yield equally successful results- but in his clear, easy-going way his writing gets as close to the essence of horsemanship as anything I have ever read. The anecdotes that illustrate his ideas or raise questions for the reader have a parable-like quality that leaves you thinking about them long after you have put the book down. His honest, down-to-earth explanations of how he has learned to work with horses and how he has helped other people to work with them will show you things you had never noticed about how you relate to them in your life.

Time and again, from many different directions, he returns to the point that horses are simple animals and that it is us who make them complicated. He never wanders off into incomprehensible spiritual meanderings, he just describes the things he has seen and felt and learned through experience and through observation. Rather than offering any kind of fixed system or rules he suggests that you make your own decisions and take responsibility for your own choices.

Reading this will make you want to go out and just spend time with your horse. It is a brilliant book- profoundly simple yet simply profound.