By Alisdair MacKenzie, Kintail Equine
"Natural horsemanship" has become a popular philosophy in modern horse training. The term suggests we're working with a horse's nature, honouring what comes naturally, partnering rather than dominating. It sounds appealing. It sells well. It fundamentally misrepresents what we're actually doing.
There is nothing natural about any of this.
The Predator and the Prey
Horses are the quintessential prey animal. Humans are apex predators. Every survival instinct a horse possesses — honed over tens of thousands of years of evolution — tells it to flee from us, to push into pressure rather than yield, to escape enclosed spaces rather than enter them willingly.
When a wolf's jaws clamp onto a horse's flank, pulling away means evisceration. Going into the bite forces the predator to release. When a mountain lion lands on a horse's back, dropping to the ground means death. Rising up and bucking might dislodge those claws — and from there, the horse's greatest defense activates: speed. Four feet carry salvation.
This is the wiring we inherit when we bring a horse into our world. Push into pressure. Fight or flee. Never trust a predator.
Which part of what we do is "natural"? Asking a horse to stand calmly while a predator climbs onto its back? Loading willingly into a dark, enclosed trailer? Yielding away from pressure instead of bracing against it? Moving its feet because we asked, rather than because it chose to flee?
None of it. Not one single thing.
What We're Actually Doing
Think of the horse's mind as an ancient structure built for one purpose: survival in the wild. The original architecture — flee from predators, push into pressure, avoid enclosed spaces — has worked for millennia. What we're doing is carefully dismantling that structure and rebuilding it with a completely different blueprint. One where a predator on your back means safety, not death. Where pressure means guidance, not threat. Where four walls mean security, not a trap.
This isn't partnership on the horse's terms. It's systematic reprogramming. It's education — not unlike how we shape a child's mind to function in human society, overriding immediate impulses in favor of learned responses that serve a greater purpose.
We are fundamentally reversing the horse's relationship with pressure, with humans, with the world itself.
Why the Label Matters
"But," you might ask, "if some ‘natural horsemanship’ techniques work well, why does the name matter?"
The name shapes how people think. How you think about what's happening in your horse's mind determines everything.
When people believe they're working "naturally" with their horse, they often fail to recognize what actually needs to change. They become gentle when they need to be clear. They avoid pressure when pressure is precisely what the horse needs to learn from. They wait for the horse to "choose" to yield, rather than systematically teaching it that yielding is the only correct response.
Worse, they sometimes reverse the dynamic entirely. They become the prey animal — afraid of their horse's fear, bending to the horse's mind rather than requiring the horse to bend to theirs. They form a partnership, yes, but entirely on the horse's terms. That partnership is unproductive and dangerous.
The techniques themselves — round pen work, groundwork patterns, pressure and release — many of these are excellent. The problem isn't the methods. It's that the "natural" label directs thinking toward the wrong ideas about how horses actually work. Understanding why horses act the way they act is the key to changing it. Changing it is the key to safety and success.
Horsemanship is education. It's reprogramming the mind through systematic, thorough teaching. It's the meticulous replacement of instinct with learned response. It's not natural. It's effective.
The Pattern I See Repeatedly
The most common issue I encounter with problem horses isn't a lack of technique. It's that the horse is still operating with its original wiring intact: into-pressure syndrome.
Push on the horse's side? It leans into you. Try to move it laterally with a rope? It braces and pushes through. Under saddle, this becomes a horse that ignores leg aids, leans on the bit, walks over the top of people, or — in extreme cases — bucks, bolts, or bulldozes through boundaries.
These horses are significantly more dangerous and less trainable than horses that have been correctly educated. They're more likely to misunderstand, more likely to revert to instinct under stress, more likely to hurt someone.
Not because they are bad, but because they are horses, doing what horses do. They are simply confused as to what we want, due to an education that wasn't thorough enough.
The Essential Shift: From Fight-or-Flee to Search-and-Yield
What we need is categorical: the horse must learn to yield to all pressure, rather than categorically fight and flee from it.
If I push a horse with my finger, it should yield immediately. It should find the release itself. If I push again, it should search for the release and yield further than last time. Done correctly, this principle applies not just to the body, but to the mind. If I don't want the horse thinking about something, I should be able to redirect its attention. The horse should yield to that mental pressure just as readily as it yields to physical pressure.
This is the essential shift. This is the education. This is what makes a horse safe, responsive, and rideable.
There is nothing "natural" about it.
Here's the irony: the "natural horsemanship" misnomer has successfully brainwashed a large portion of the equine world into believing a comfortable myth. What they've done to the minds of horse owners is precisely what we need to do to the minds of horses.
We need horses en masse to accept a myth: that we aren't predators, that we aren't going to kill them, that yielding to us leads to safety rather than death. This is manipulation. This is systematic mental reprogramming.
This is the great brainwash.
If we're going to do it correctly — if we're going to produce horses that are genuinely safe, willing, and able to function in our world — we need to stop pretending it's something else.
The Way Forward
Every horse is afraid. Your job isn't to eliminate that fear — it's to be the one certainty in a world of unknowns, and to systematically change how the horse relates to that world.
The goal isn't to find a fashionable technique or follow someone else's drill. The goal is to understand what's actually happening in the horse's mind, and to systematically, clearly, and thoroughly change it.
Strip away the marketing. Drop the romantic language. Acknowledge what you're actually doing: removing tens of thousands of years of primordial wiring and replacing it with something that suits your needs.
That's not natural. That's horsemanship.
Once you think about it correctly, everything else becomes clearer.
© 2026 Alisdair MacKenzie, Kintail Equine. All Rights Reserved.