| John Hovde Trainer gets into horses' heads. by Ted Stone, Features Editor, Crookston Daily Times |
| North Dakota rancher and horseman, John Hovde, is a horse trainer who is apt to turn you down if you try to hire him to train your horse. " We found that we take these horses and get them started nice and then people take them home and that's when the trouble starts." Hovde says he just decided it wasn't the horse that needs the work, it was the human. He say's he doesn't put on clinics to train horses, he puts them on to help people to learn to listen to their horse and work with it as a member of a team. "I'm here to help these horses have a little better way of life", he says. " People come to me and say, " I have a problem with my horse, but there's never a problem with the horse, He says. " The problem is with the human being." Hovde says it seems crazy to say we're training a horse to lope , or how to jump, or how to stand. " A horse knows how to do those things from the day he's born," " We're not teaching a horse anything.... We're learning to communicate." Hovde says that horse's aren't like humans, but that doesn't mean they don't think, or they don't feel, or even that they don't reason. "HOrses are experts at body language," he says. " That's how we have to learn to communicate with them. Body language is their language." Hovde demonstrates his methods with some of the horses brought in by clinic participants. Some of the horses had never been ridden, while others already had several weeks or months of training. " A lot of people come to these clinics looking for secrets, or some gimmick that will put them on the road to success," Hovde says, " but it doesn't work that way...I stress basic horsemanship. Advanced horsemanship is just a perfection of the basics." " With John, this isn't just about training horses," she says. " This is psychology. It's how a horse thinks." Hovde says his father was a horseman and he grew up using many of the training techniques he uses now. But one day more than twenty years ago he got a call from a friend from Hardin, Mt who said he sould come out to see a man named Ray Hunt who was putting on a horse training clinic there. It was Hunt, Hovde says, who encouraged him to think more closely about the way he deals with horses. " My father had got me on the same track," Hovde days. "He had a good way with horses, but I didn't really think about it. We just did things because they seemed to work. Then I talked to Ray Hunt and he told me why some of the things we did worked and some didn't. He got me thinking about it." Hovde says to work with horses you have to learn to understand and listen to them, but he doesn't want to make it sound like the Robert Redford movie, The HOrse Whisperer. " That's just a way of sensationalizing horsemanship." Hovde says. " This isn't anything new. Xenophon [a horse trainer in ancient Greece ] wrote about some of these same things. I think Ray Hunt put it best when he said that horsemanship isn't teaching a horse, it's learning how to ask a horse to do something in a way it can understand. Hovde says the horsemanship is a natural partnership. " They prefer to be led," he says, " but they want to be partners. They don't want to be dominated like a slave." Hovde is also leery of books and videos that claim to explain how to train a horse. " That's one reason why there are so many horses in trouble in the world. " Somebody writes a book, step one, step two, step three, and then people just look at the procedure. This is what to do. When it works, they think they're a great trainer and when it doesn't work they think it's the horse's fault. What's more important than books or videos, Hovde says, is the hands-on things you can learn by working with and listening to your horse. " We're talking about feel, about timing, about balance. You have to put that all together with the horse., " Hovde says. " You can't do that from a book or a video... The horse is the best teacher you'll be able to find." Hovde says horsemanship is a way of thinking, a way of life. " It's a lot easier and more fun if you can get these horses to understand what you're asking them instead of trying to force them to do it.", Hovde says. " And it's a whole lot easier to sleep at night doing it this way. I want to be able to look in the mirror and be able to say I'm proud of what I've done with my horses." |
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| John Hovde.....AQHA Professional Horseman Contact John 701 859 4621 Email John |
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