Horse Whisperers
Interview discovery with Dr. Deborah Goodwin, Lecturer in Applied Animal Behaviour, University of Southampton New College - GB
Natural Horse Planet : Do you know some horse whisperers or self called masters of communications ?
Dr. Deborah Goodwin : In general they are not called whisperers they are more often called natural horsemanship trainers. I am aware of many people that use natural horsemanship techniques, and I think, compared with the origin in America where people used to train horses in a very brutal fashion, their natural horsemanship approach is much better than that.
I became concerned about it because what they claim today, by scientific knowledge, really is not that. They just say that they have made observations in the field.
We know when we have observed horses in a free range situation in Europe and also in America, that very often what they are telling people what horses do is not necessarily what has been observed and recorded objectively by scientists ! These people do set themselves up as gurus and then they attract followers, and they are very charismatic people.
They also start to become very set in their way of thinking and they end up in believing their way is the only way of doing anything. I think, as a scientist, there is always more than one way of doing anything and I do not like the way that people set themselves up as gurus. We are all fallible and there is always a limit to our knowledge and they also maintain a mistake that what they do is different in the way that they can do it.
And if there is a person interested in horse training from a scientific and learning theory approach, I think that it is quite a worrying position to adopt and it actually limit people on applying and acquiring new knowledge. I prefer not to go down the guru road which is very commonly adopted by trainers as well because I really think it is a limitation.
