As I watched him chase her I was reminded of those silent movies where everyone is moving comically fast with music in background. As I chuckled to myself I heard him ask aloud, “Why does she keep running from me?”

That was a good question. Lots of people have that trouble. There are lots of reasons horses run from their owners. One reason is fear. Horses are epitome of fear. If they sense their life is in danger they’ll run.

If a horse is comfortable with their herd, even if its one or two other horses, it can be uncomfortable for him. His entire DNA speaks loud and clear to him that herd is safest place to be. Therefore, if he leaves herd it could mean his life is threatened – at least…that’s his thinking.

One of biggest mistakes I see are new horse owners that make their horse work almost every time they go to see them. Picture it. You’re a horse standing there with your buddies. It’s ninety-four degrees out side, flies won’t leave you alone, and you were doing fine just standing there doing nothing – thank you very much. And because you are enormously alert due to your innate fear, you quickly spot your owner coming to you holding that weird looking, not-so-good-fitting rope thing that goes on your head.

The last 400 gazillion times your owner walked toward you with it in his hand, he accidentally jabbed your cheek while clumsily jerking it on your head. Then he made you leave your friends and go run in circles for thirty minutes. Boring!

Rather, horse owner should alternate working and pleasure for his horse. In other words, one day walk to your horse with halter in your hand and pet him. Talk to him. Tell him how beautiful he is. Take your halter and rub it on his body as if it were a brush. Get him thinking that halter will give him pleasure so when he sees it he’ll feel good about it.

The next day, with halter in hand, go see your horse and pet him. Talk nice. Then put his halter on. Pet him again. Keep talking nice. After a few minutes, take halter off and rub his body with it. Then walk away.

Since they don't have reasoning abilities, horse training becomes a challenge because you now have to understand how their intelligence works. You have to know what works and why to really be effective.

The biggest secret that makes it so we can train a horse is fear of pain and/or punishment that our creator instilled in their mind. We can use that built-in fear to our advantage and teach horse what we want him to do.

The trick is to not push horse too far with his built-in fear. We must never abuse this knowledge because it will backfire. Once it backfires then we will have problems with horse we're training.

How does it backfire? Let's take a novice horse owner who fulfills his dream to have horses and train them. Unless he's studied a horse's nature he will probably get into big trouble with his horse because of delicate balance of horse's built-in fear.

For instance, very first lesson you must teach your horse is to have confidence in you. If your horse doesn't have confidence in you, he will neither trust you. Both are enormously important to horse training.

Think of confidence in this way. If you're a child who's just seen a scary movie on TV you probably want to sleep with Mom and Dad for night. They'll protect you. You'll be safe with them. Hopefully, you know these things to be true because you have experienced it with your own parents.

But if you didn't feel like they'd keep you safe you wouldn't have confidence in them, would you?

A horse's thinking is similar to that. He must have confidence in you when you're working with him.

A horse can be taught confidence in different ways. I prefer to Jesse Beery confidence lesson.

Jesse Beery, a famous horse trainer from 1800's, uses his confidence lesson as beginning place of training his horses. He said, "This is most important lesson of all."

Interestingly, it's also easiest.

How nice it is that most important lesson is easiest to do.

Essentially, confidence lesson takes advantage of (but never abused) horse's built-in fear. In a way, fear is harnessed and carefully used to get horse's confidence in you. It's akin to getting a child to watch a scary movie and being there to protect him or her when they get scared.

When horse experiences fear, you're there to save day. You make it so he depends on you to be his superhero.

When horse gets fearful, you have to be there to tell him everything is okay. You do that through petting him. Talking to him in a soothing manner. Using a pleasant tone of voice.

I have a friend, Gene, who loves his horses but when they don't do certain things he think they should do, he punishes them. (By punishing, I don't mean he hits or whips. A horse can feel punished just by a threatening tone of voice for example)