Tapestry's Horse-Human Relationship Program
Rides Again!
Tapestry is delighted to announce that our Horse-Human Relationship Program is moving in new and very exciting directions after a long year and a half of hiatus. You may remember that a wildfire at our Sowbelly Canyon, Pine Ridge area Nebraska ranch in late summer '06 made many of our programs impossible and, a year later, forced us off the land we loved so deeply. Most of our first year in New Mexico was spent trying to get our feet back under us and figure out how to retool our programs so we could offer them without the significant Land partner Sowbelly Canyon had been to us. And we've finally done it! The Horse-Human Relationship Program is back in action and growing!

New Riding Program Component

Because of our proximity to Santa Fe -- 35 miles on Interstate 25 -- we are now offering a Riding Program that allows people to connect with horses in a unique way. As with everything we do, the program is informed by Indigenous Earth-based worldview and uses different ways of learning and knowing -- focusing, of course, on Experiential (learning from physical experiences with and on the horse). In practical terms, the Riding Program helps people learn how to balance, center, and connect. Riding Program enrollment is growing rapidly as word spreads about the special ways our approach helps new, returning, and experienced riders understand and relate to their horses in powerful ways that don't just improve the riding they're already doing, but change it.

Jo Belasco, Director of the Horse-Human Relationship Program, teaches the Riding Program, where her newest student is Carol Mills (pictured at right and on the front page). Carol's wanted to learn how to ride horses all her life, and now -- at 66 -- she's doing it! In her only previous riding experience, she explains, wranglers at Glacier National Park "gave me a placid quarter horse and just said 'follow me'," then led off on a nose-to-tail riding experience. The result was pain that made her leery of what would happen if she took up lessons. "But," says Carol, "there's no pain whatsoever when you're taught correctly. I love every minute of my lessons with Jo."



Above, Carol Mills, 66, of Santa Fe finally gets to learn to ride a horse! Jo Belasco, head of Tapestry's Horse-Human Relationship Program and riding instructor in the program, prepares to lunge horse and rider in an exercise. You can see just how happy Carol is to be horseback in the picture below, but you can even see that beautiful smile in the image above! Carol is riding an Arabian mare, Alaya, owned by Patricia Vincent of Santa Fe, another Riding Program participant. In fact, Patricia is a Program enthusiast of sorts, providing help and support we really appreciate. (Thank you, Patricia!) Both pictures were taken by Carol's husband Bill Aneshensel, and are used with permission. Bill says Carol's having such a good time that he just might put down his camera, get on a horse, and learn to ride, too!



A Focus on Partnership

The most salient feature of Tapestry's Horse-Human Relationship Program is that, Instead of seeing horses and humans as adversaries or assuming that humans are “superior” to horses, we teach people how to relate to horses as partners. Yes, humans need to be leaders at times, but at other times, we need to let the horse lead us. When we relate in this way, extraordinary things happen. As stated on our Program's introductory webpage,"Horses are our partners, our teachers, our friends, our kin. It sounds revolutionary in a horseworld that has been told repeatedly and erroneously that humans are predators and horses are prey; a world that has been led to believe that horses must be submissive to humans at all times; a world that has taken horses, once partners to humans, and turned them into tools for the benefit of humankind without regard for the horses' well-being. But such an idea of relationship, one based on partnership, is how great horse cultures and great horse individuals have experienced the horse-human relationship since it began. Now is the time to realize that humans and horses are more alike than we have been led to believe in modern times, and, at the same time, to come to appreciate our unique differences. This exploration, this understanding, is at the heart of the Horse-Human Relationship Program."

EQUUS Magazine Publication

One of the first things the new Horse-Human Relationship Program produced was an article that scientifically critiques the "Predator/Prey Model" of horse-human relationship. Co-authored by Jo Belasco and Dawn Adrian, the article will appear in late spring or early summer as a "Perspectives" piece in the well-known magazine EQUUS. This article summarizes our investigation of the model's anatomical, neurochemical, genetic, and evolutionary premises, which turn out to be seriously, even fatally, flawed.

Online Program Elements

A new Horse-Human Relationship Program Blog is being launched as this newsletter goes to press. Its first entries include an article that details the scientific evidence against the idea that humans and horses primarily relate as predators and their prey, and an essay about alternative views of relationship that focus on what horses and humans share in common. Future blog entries will continue to explore the relationship between horses and humans within Indigenous, Earth-based worldview. We are also developing a distance education component that can reach people who are not located in the northern New Mexico area. Through the use of articles, videos, and more, people will be able to learn how to connect with their horses in ways they have thought about but not known how to actualize.

Horse-Human Relationship Consortium

Finally, invitations are going out to select horse professionals and others who relate to horses in the spirit of kinship, to come together as founding members of a new Horse-Human Relationship Consortium. This Consortium will pursue our understanding of the horse-human relationship in focused ways, finding out how to better help horses and humans have the kind of relationship we all want and deserve.

This is a good place to acknowledge those who helped develop the progenitor of Tapestry's Horse-Human Relationship program back in 2001, our original "Trailmaster" Program, and those whose support since has kept the program alive. They include clinician and author Mark Rashid, actor and artist Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely Shaye Smith, Chickasaw author and Tapestry Board Member Linda Hogan, clinicians Ray and Carolyn Hunt, and (more recently) Northern Cheyenne trainer and clinician Phillip Whiteman, Jr. We were tremendously saddened to learn of Ray Hunt's passing last week, at the age of 79, and will miss him desperately in our Program. More than ever, we must all work to keep alive the vision of horse-human relationship that Ray, and Tom and Bill Dorrance before him, articulated and taught so well. As they would have said, "We need to do it for the horses."