The Four Models
Written by Hiddenhorse on 29/08/2009 – 2:44 pm -If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In this post I will introduce the basics, the things that, to me, are absolutely fundamental to my philosophy of horsemanship. I call them the Four Models of Horsemanship, they are the result of a lifetime of working with animals and human beings and observing how the two species interact, to me they explain everything, all the problems, all the behaviours and all the success of our history together over the years. So let’s get started, first of all I better explain what I mean by a model.
A model is…
A representation of reality, so, for example, an architect’s model is a model of a finished building, it allows us to think about the whole building, to see what it will look like, to see where the windows and doors are, to see what colour it will be and so on. But here is the crucial thing, we can imagine all this without having to worry about the tiny trivial things of life such as where we are going to get the door hinges or who is going to do the plumbing.
A model of horsemanship is a mental model, it is a way of thinking of all the things we do with the horse, things like:
- How we house it
- How we train it
- How we feed it
- How we breed it
- Our attitude to it when it is ill
- and, most importantly what we consider the horse is for.
Of course there are literally millions of variations on this and this is why a model helps us to understand our relationship with the horse. This will become clearer when we look at the first model. I call it the UTILITY model.
