Horse WhisperersWere horse whisperers part of a secret society with supernatural abilities? Or were they were just ordinary people who approached horses with an open mind and open heart? Individuals willing to communicate with horses in a way that horses understood? In 1998, Robert Redford directed and starred in the film adaption of Nicholas Evans book "The Horse Whisperer." The term and concept became part of mainstream America's vocabulary. Robert Redford played a fictional character, but there are authentic whisperers. Many of them are sharing their techniques through books and clinics. The days of a secret society of whisperers no longer exist. Now all horsemen and horses can benefit from this shared knowledge of communication *****************************************************************
Xenophon lived ca. 431 - 355 BC; soldier, mercenary and writer. His short treatise "On Horsemanship" earned him the citation as being the original "horse whisperer." "On Horsemanship" written c. 350 BC is one of the earliest extant treatises on horsemanship in the Western world (the oldest is the one written by Kikkuli of the Indo-Aryan Mitanni Kingdom). In it, Xenophon details the selection, care, and training of horses for the use both in the military and for general use. One of the most important qualities in a horse, Xenophon writes, is that it have a fleshy (or "double") back. This presumably is due to the fact that he wrote this treatise before the invention of the saddle. "On Horsemanship" is one of the oldest surviving Western works detailing the principles of classical dressage, including training the horse in a manner that is non-abusive. In "On Horsemanship," Xenopohon himself pays tribute to better established works by apparently more celebrated contemporary horsemen -- in particular, a trainer and writer referred to only as "Simon" -- but no known copies of these other texts have survived into the modern era.
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