Horses Never Lie: The Heart of Passive Leadership

Introduction: What is a Passive Leader?

Back in the spring of 1996, I was asked to give a lecture for the Pacific Northwest Endurance Riders’ Convention that was to be held in Oregon. The subject matter for the lecture was left up to me, but the organizer mentioned that she felt a lot of the folks who were going to attend might be interested in hearing about how I work with troubled horses.

I gave the idea a great deal of thought before finally sitting down at the computer and trying to jot down some notes. For some reason, I was having a very difficult time getting my thoughts together for the speech, and it took me nearly six months to get an outline down on paper. Even at that, I still wasn’t overly excited about what I had written. I had given so many talks on troubled horses over the years that I couldn’t help but feel like I would be repeating myself by giving this talk. Even so, it was what they wanted to hear, so I figured I would go on ahead and give the talk as I had outlined it.

I was to give the speech around mid-February of 1997 and had only finished my notes on it a few weeks before. It had been like pulling teeth getting them done, and I was happy to have that part of it over.

Now, I never was much good with computers and certainly didn’t have a real good understanding of how they work. I had no idea that when you saved things on a computer, you were supposed to back up the file to a disk, so that if the computer ever crashed, the information that you had been working on for months wouldn’t be lost. I just figured that once the information went into the computer, you would always be able to get it back out, no matter what. After all, the information was going into a box, and logic says that if you put something into a box, you should be able to get it back out. Unfortunately, I was soon to find out that my idea of how computers work is not in any way, shape, or form the same idea that the computer has.

One afternoon we had a pretty bad windstorm that knocked out the power on the ranch. When the power came back on, the computer didn’t. Not only did it not come back on, but everything that had been inside it when the power went off was lost to the ages. The notes that I had agonized over all those months had disappeared somewhere inside those tiny little circuits, never to be seen again.

With the date of my speech rapidly approaching, I sat down and tried to recreate my notes. It was no use. The harder I tried to write, the more my mind wandered, until I finally gave up on the idea of talking about troubled horses and began thinking about something else entirely.

The thing that my mind kept coming back to was an idea that I had been playing with for more than twelve years. This idea has to do with what I feel is at the heart of successfully working with horses. It has to do with some of the things we’d done over the years at the ranch where I worked, which enabled us to build a sort of unconditional trust with our herd of around seventy head. I felt that folks might find this subject interesting because, in our search to find ways to gain our herd’s trust, we also found that they seemed to look to us as leaders that they willingly sought out and wanted to follow. As a result, we not only ended up with horses that were extremely easy to train, but they were also responsive and dependable, no matter who rode them.

I believe there was one primary reason for the success we had in helping our herd develop that kind of relationship with us—we worked very hard at mimicking the behavior of a certain lead horse in the herd. This horse that we chose to mimic was not the alpha, or dominant horse in the herd, as many folks might suspect. The horse we tried to be most like was a horse with a completely different temperament and role within the herd—a horse that leads by example, not force. A horse that is extremely dependable and confident, one that the vast majority of horses will not only willingly choose to follow, but that they actually seek out.

The biggest obstacle in trying to explain what we did with our herd to the folks at the convention was the fact that, as far as I knew, the type of horse we had tried to mimic didn’t have a title. In fact, I had never heard anyone even refer to the horse before. I felt I needed to come up with a term or title for the horse that would best explain its role within the herd. If I could do that, I felt it would make it easier for me to explain why we found it so important to mimic that horse during the work we’d done with our herd.

It took several days, but I finally came up with a title that I thought would best suit this idea, one that I could use when I gave my talk. The title I came up with was passive leader. Okay, it wasn’t very scientific, but it was the best I could do. After all, I was running out of time.

At any rate, I chose that title because the horse in question wasn’t one that would force its way into the leadership role. Instead, the horse was chosen by members of the herd as the one they wanted to follow. The leadership role was bestowed on the horse in a passive way. In other words, it wasn’t necessarily looking to be a leader but didn’t turn the role down once it had been chosen. The title actually refers to the way the horse is chosen for the role, not to what it does once it’s appointed.

After the convention, I found out that I should have made the idea behind the title a little more clear. As word of my talk spread throughout the horse community, people automatically assumed that in order for our horses to see us as passive leaders, we must treat them in a passive way during training.

This simple misunderstanding caused quite a bit of confusion for a number of folks. Many people couldn’t understand how they could possibly get anything done with their horses if they were constantly treating them in a passive manner. After all, the word passive, by definition, means not acting. How could we possibly train or work with our horses by not acting? Well, the answer to that question is that we can’t. Again, the term passive leader wasn’t designed to illustrate what this particular horse does after he is chosen as leader, but rather how he is chosen in the first place.

The question then is, how do we get our horses to want to choose us as a leader? It has been my observation that before a horse (or person) can even be considered as a passive leader, it must first exhibit the qualities that make it desirable for it to be chosen. Those qualities are quiet confidence, dependability, consistency, and a willingness not to use force.

What I have tried to do in this book is explain some of the things we found over the years that have helped us attain these qualities in our horse’s eyes. By making an effort to establish the qualities that I just mentioned, we quickly found that our horses could put their trust in us. Once we had their trust, it seemed easier for them to look to us as someone they would willingly follow, and even seek out, for leadership and security.

I’m afraid you won’t find much information in this book about new or different techniques or what tack or training tools you should use if you try to establish yourself as a passive leader. I have found that tools and techniques don’t matter all that much unless they are applied with the right attitude. And, I guess when it comes right down to it, that is what this book is really all about—attitude.

A good friend once told me that she felt that working with horses is like being on a long trip. It’s a journey with no destination—an unending process—and everything that is important is as you go, not when you get there.

For all of you out there who see horsemanship in that same light, I hope the information that I have tried to share here might help you take one more step in that long journey.

Horses Never Lie

The Question

When I was a kid, I always looked forward to Sunday. Not the entire day, mind you. Mostly just the afternoon, when my parents would load all of us kids in the car and head out for our weekly drive through the country.

Heading out into the country didn’t mean that much, since we were pretty close to being in the country in the first place. We lived on the outskirts of town on the last paved road before the land opened up into the great expanses of the unknown. At least that was how I looked at it. At eight years old, I considered anything past the corner of Weis and Stow completely uncharted territory. I could stand on that corner and look out across what seemed like thousands of miles of open fields and farmers’ pastures. And I could only imagine what kind of scary beasts might lurk out there.

If I looked hard enough, a mile or so away I could see the remains of a barn that had long ago burned down. Or perhaps it had simply fallen down—it was hard to tell. At any rate, the old, deserted house that stood next to the fallen barn was most certainly haunted, and that was reason enough not to venture too far from the safety of the corner.

Except on Sunday. On Sunday we would all climb in the car and drive down the dirt road that went right past that old house. I’ll be darned if it didn’t look all that bad on Sundays. Particularly when peering at it from the safety of the back seat of a ’58 Oldsmobile. Nothing is all that scary when you’re surrounded by four tons of glistening steel.

Once past the haunted house, we would take a left onto another dirt road that led us out to the highway. This dirt road was about two miles long, and about halfway down on the right was another deserted ranch. The driveway to the ranch was about a quarter-mile long, and it led up to a couple of run-down barns. There were overgrown pastures on either side of the driveway, all the fences were falling down, and things were in general disrepair. It was a place I never gave much thought to, but one Sunday afternoon that all changed.

On that Sunday we had driven past the haunted house, made our left-hand turn, and were approaching the old ranch when I noticed something out of the ordinary. Horses. There were horses in the ranch’s pastures. Not just one or two horses, mind you, but a lot. Perhaps as many as twenty! Maybe even thirty!

As we neared the driveway, I saw that things were definitely different. The ranch didn’t look so bad anymore. The fences were fixed, the doors were hung, and the windows had glass in them. In fact, the place actually looked pretty good. Somebody had moved in and cleaned it all up. What’s more . . . they brought horses with them!

All my short life I had loved horses. I’m not even sure why. After all, I had never actually been around real horses. In fact, the closest I’d ever gotten to a horse was watching Roy Rogers on Trigger, Marshal Dillon on his buckskin, and Joe Cartwright on his paint. So, I have no good explanation as to why I was smitten by them. But like so many other boys and girls my age, I just was.

Having horses that close to my house was way more than I could stand. Even though I had never ventured out that direction on my own before, the draw of real horses within bike-riding distance was worth the risk of being snatched up by the ghosts from the haunted house I’d have to ride past. The very next day I jumped on my bicycle and headed out.

Riding a bike out to that old ranch took a whole lot more time than riding in the Oldsmobile, that’s for sure. Seemed like it took forever, except for the little stretch there by the haunted house. That stretch didn’t take any time at all. I made sure of that.

At any rate, after what seemed like hours, there I was, standing with my bicycle right in front of the ranch with all those horses grazing quietly in the pastures. Funny, but it wasn’t until then that something important dawned on me: What was I going to do now? I mean, sure enough, there I was. But why had I gone in the first place? Now that I was there, what was I going to do, turn around and go home? Or stand in the road like an idiot all day long?

It was sad, but true. I had no plan. I guess I had been so worried about just getting there that it never occurred me to wonder why I was going or what I was going to do once I got there.

Well, this was going to take some thought. I walked my bike over to the shoulder of the road and slipped it into the deep grass growing wild in the ditch. I sat down next to it and stared out into the pasture at the horses while I tried to formulate a plan. After a bit, with me thinking just as hard as I could, one of the horses raised his head and looked right at me. He was a big, reddish-colored horse with a small white spot on his forehead. A handsome-looking fellow, as I recall. I remember his ears being very erect and his head very high as he stared at me. I sat perfectly still, not wanting to frighten him (and not really knowing what else to do). After a short time, his head began to slowly bob up and down—a peculiar-looking action that I had never seen Trigger do in any of the Roy Rogers movies. He continued the head bobbing for several minutes before he dropped his head and began to make his way slowly toward me.

Well, one thing was certain. I wasn’t expecting this. Of all the scenarios I hadn’t come up with regarding what would happen once I got to the ranch, this was certainly one of them. To say that I was a little nervous about that horse heading my way would be somewhat of an understatement. As the horse approached, I remember thinking, This is a really big horse! The closer he got, the faster my heart pounded. Before long, he was standing just on the other side of the fence, and I was in a nervous sweat. I found myself wishing that I had gone to the bathroom before I left the house.

The horse lowered his head to have a good look at me. There was no wind, and the late morning sun was beating down on the two of us. I remember hearing the buzz of flies and the rattle of grasshoppers as they flew here and there. And I remember hearing the horse’s breath. It sounded like a person in a deep sleep. Long, relaxed breaths, occasionally punctuated with a little quicker exhale. Each time the horse inhaled, his nostrils got a little bigger. I expect mine did, too.

I continued to sit quietly, being careful not to make any move that might make the horse want to bite, stomp, kick, or otherwise dismember or disembowel me. He responded in kind, staying at a safe distance with the fence between us. After a while, I guess curiosity got the better of both of us. He slowly made his way even closer to the fence. Still a little frightened but getting braver by the minute, I cautiously got to my feet and inched closer to the fence as well.

I had to pass through the deep part of the ditch to get up close to the horse, which I did just as calmly as I could. By the time I’d gotten through the ditch, the horse’s head was hanging over the fence, and he was putting his nose out where it was easy for me to touch. I couldn’t believe how soft the end of his nose was.

Within minutes, my fear had all but disappeared, and I was making fast friends with the big red horse. He let me pet him on his nose, cheeks, and forehead where that white spot was. In return, I picked some of the waist-high grass and offered it to him. He took it from my hand in polite, almost delicate bites, and while he chewed, I petted.

This went on for quite some time when suddenly I heard an awful racket up by the barn. The horse turned and lazily looked in the direction of the noise, and I had to move a little to my left in order to see what had caused such a disturbance. The sound was coming from an old truck sitting by the barn. Somebody had started the engine and blue smoke was belching from the tail pipe. That could only mean one thing—somebody had seen me and was coming to yell at me for messing with his horse!

I panicked. I turned on my heel and took one hurried stride toward my bike. However, the grass was so deep in the ditch that I couldn’t see where it ended and the ground began. As I stepped on what I thought was solid ground, I sunk into the overgrown grass and tripped and fell with a thud on the other side of the ditch. My falling caused the horse to spook and run off, which scared me even more. I scrambled up the other side of the ditch and pulled at my bike, but it had become tangled in the long grass. I pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t come loose. I looked up toward the barn. The truck had turned around and was heading down the driveway right toward me.

I continued to pull, and the truck kept coming my way. Suddenly, with help from a tremendous adrenaline rush, I yanked the bike free. I swung it up on the road and, in one swift and flawless movement, I was on it and pedaling for home. I never looked back, and the truck never caught up with me.

A few days passed before I got up enough nerve to go back out to the ranch. But when I finally did, I went back with a plan. First, I’d make sure that truck wasn’t there. If it was, I’d simply turn around and go on back home. If it wasn’t there, I’d hide my bike in the ditch and wait for a horse or two to come up to the fence. Once they were at the fence, I’d feed them grass and pet them if they’d let me. It was a good plan and, over the next several weeks, a successful one.

For the rest of the summer I made my way out to the ranch a couple of times a week. Sometimes I’d get to pet horses, sometimes I wouldn’t. But either way, I always found the trip worthwhile. If nothing else, I was no longer afraid to go past the haunted house.

The fall, winter, and spring passed without me making too many trips out to the ranch. Too cold to ride a bike that far and too much to do anyway, what with football season in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. But once summer break rolled around, there I was again, heading back out to the ranch. This time, however, I expanded on my plan. You see, sometimes when I went out to the ranch, the horses would be too far away or in a different pasture altogether. At those times, I wouldn’t get to pet any horses, and I considered the trip a waste of time. So, to better my chances of getting to pet the horses on those days, the new plan included trespassing.

From that time forward, if the truck wasn’t there and the horses were too far away, I’d crawl through the fence and go to them, instead of waiting for them to come to me. That