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Another principle of natural horsemanship that has become accepted is the practice of de-spooking. Back when I first talked about de-spooking a horse, it was an unknown concept. Now it is a common term and simply means we are taking the spook out of the horse. All horses have the flight instinct and de-spooking is getting a horse to accept pressure. What I see now is that people are trying to make their horses safer by desensitizing or de-spooking them. They often end with dull horses because they are not willing to increase the pressure until the horse gives.

Thirty years ago, when I was doing round pen training, few people knew what a round pen was. If you were working in a round pen, you looked like an idiot that didn’t know what you were doing other than running a horse around in circles. Fifteen years ago, more people were aware of natural horsemanship and it started to have an influence in the horse world. Ten years ago, it really started taking hold and now you see natural horsemanship techniques, in some form or another, used widely everywhere in training programs. I remember at Horse Expos I attended ten years ago, I was the only guy out there with a blue tarp and people were wondering what in the world I was going to do with it.