By the time you’ve had a relationship with a horse for a while, there are characteristics in the way the horse behaves with you and around you and responds to you that are directly (related) to some of your traits as a human being…whether it’s insecurity or aggression or fear or hate.

Like Tom Dorrance said, ‘It boiled down to one thing: observe, remember, and compare.’ Do something, observe what you did, remember what you did, compare it to what you were doing before, and adjust.

With a horse, if you make it easy for him to do the right thing, that's what he will logically do, but it's not necessarily true with the human. You will see humans that will beat their heads against the wall rather than open the door and walk through it.

Not all horses are going to be show jumpers, not all horses are going to be dressage horses. So you have to sort of find where the horse physically fits into what might suit him, but all horses can be comfortable and all horses can have good, solid fundamentals.

Horses don’t think the same as humans. Something that’s most unique about the horse, that I love, is not what he possesses but what he doesn’t possess. And that is greed, spite, hate, jealousy, envy, prejudice. The horse doesn’t possess any of those things. If you think about people, the least desirable people to be around usually possess some or all of those things. And the way God made the horse, he left that out.

Every time you interact with a horse, you are teaching the horse.

You can accomplish amazing things with this if you have a passion and you work hard - I just think it’s a cop out to say 'I wasn’t born with this, so it’s OK if I fail'. You can make up the difference with hard work and devotion.