This is not to suggest that all horse trainers are clueless individuals that bumble along hoping to do something right, because most professional trainers will take time to understand a horse before ever thinking about saddling him and training him to ride. But all too often an impatient or inexperienced "trainer" will misread a horse's problem or intention and react incorrectly due to his lack of understanding. Too many of these incidents can prolong training process (thereby costing you money) and potentially mentally scar your horse for life.

Far too many head-shy horses can be attributed to inexperienced or abusive past trainers and/or owners who lacked an understanding of horse they were working with. Once a horse has developed this mistrust or fear of people it can take a good while to reassure horse that another cuff is not waiting around corner. And who can blame horse? If every past exposure with a dog resulted in dog biting you, chances are you would be very wary, if not outright panicked, by future exposures to canines.

To correct an improper action it is first important to understand motivation that lies behind it. For example, let's say that you are training a young filly to walk alongside you to your left. Suddenly without permission filly slams against your side, but being that she's still young it doesn't do much more than get your attention. What would you do?

1. Ignore behavior – no harm was done after all.

2. Jab your elbow into filly's shoulder and growl at her to remind her to respect your space.

3. Take a moment to detect reason why filly brushed against you.

The BARF feeding regimen actually consists of throwing a raw carcass (usually chicken) to your dog and letting him eat it bones and all. The thinking behind this concept is that dogs used to eat raw food like this for thousands of years in wild. Many are praising multitude of benefits that BARF diet provides.

The problem that I have with BARF diet is that dogs have also been domesticated for thousands of years. They have not had to feed themselves in packs such as wolves and coyotes do for a long time because of relationships that they have established with man. Man has traditionally fed their dogs leftover scraps from dinner that has been cooked long before commercialization of bagged dog food.