Horses are exquisite machines. As prey animals, their greatest survival tools are designed for flight, and every sense is finely geared toward safety. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses who don’t venture beyond their pasture will take turns staying awake while others sleep. They can see nearly 360 degrees and can focus on two objects at once, one from each eye. They evolved to mosey along, grazing for up to 16 hours a day, using whiskers on their muzzle to discern, in part, tender grass from rocks. Their hide is so sensitive to touch that they can feel a single fly land on their body and wriggle the skin underneath to send it aloft. Their sense of smell is almost as keen as a dog’s.
Horses form friendships, and friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own. Where our brains are outfitted with a prefrontal cortex that allows for planning, organizing, setting goals and decision making, a horse has virtually none. They experience thoughts and emotions without the benefit of evaluation, and although they can remember a great deal, they don’t think about what they want to do tomorrow, which makes them geniuses at living in the present. Since they fear they may die without the collective protection of the group, they are experts at coexisting. They just want to get along.
In the roughly 5,500 years since their domestication, horses have continuously been in our service, whether it’s to charge into battle; race chariots; hunt buffalo; bust sod; carry the mail; run, leap and pull at our bidding; or, more recently and mundanely, tote kids around a ring in a county 4-H show. Despite this long and intimate association, interspecies communication can be tricky, and things between horses and people don’t always go so well. Horses can shy or bolt. They can buck, bite or plant their feet and refuse to go forward. Frustration, for both horse and owner, can begin to build, and with it grows the possibility for getting hurt.
That’s where trainers like Warwick Schiller come in, bridging the knowledge gap between people and their mounts. His methods for improving steering or loading a reluctant horse into a trailer weren’t too different from those of the rest of the horse world. Lots of folks can teach an anxious horse to achieve a more relaxed state of mind by circling to a stop, or to keep a steady pace within a gait. And horses, they’re the same everywhere, generally willing to try to do what a person demands, even if the request is clumsy. “Horses in the wild show almost no infirmity,” Schiller explains. “They’re good at pretending they’re OK. They’ll take a lot of heavy-handed training, and a lot of people with horses are fine with that. The horses still work for them.”
Lately, though, Schiller has strayed from solving horse-and-rider issues through straight technique or drills. Instead, he has delved into a place where the horse-human relationship is more about cooperation than obedience, more process than product, and where horsemanship is less about a perfectly executed stop or achieving a snappy flying lead change than it is about creating mutual trust and understanding.
That message resonates well beyond the trainer himself. On a late spring morning last year, Schiller, wearing a shirt that read “professional horse petter,” sat with a clutch of 12 people under oak trees at the Paso Robles, Calif., ranch he owns with his wife, Robyn. The group was there for a three-day clinic, and among them were a retired firefighter with a filly who didn’t steer well, an entrepreneur with Ph.D. in leadership who worried about ruining her new horse and a lawyer with a steed that found grass more motivational than her owner. There was also Chelsey Warriner, who bought a horse after selling her family’s restaurant in 2021. Two bolting incidents resulted in two trips to the emergency room for her. “I ended up humbled and hurt,” she told the group through tears. Despite her terrifying accidents, she bought a steadier mount that was disinclined to hold a trot and opted not to travel in straight lines. “We’ve struggled with connecting,” she said. “We’re still working on it.”
The clinic attendees were already fans of Schiller’s. Each was a member of his monthly subscription service, which offers hundreds of instructional videos and occasional Zoom sessions with him. More than 145,000 people follow his YouTube channel, where his training videos top 30 million views. In clips like “Arabian horses are crazy … or are they?” or “Helping an anxious-off-the-track thoroughbred find relaxation,” Schiller never seems rushed or worried, even if there’s a horse pitching around the pen or at the end of its lead. His voice doesn’t rise. He’s affectionate with the horses he encounters, offering a “Hallo there!” when they reach out a nose to investigate his hand. He never seems annoyed by either horse or rider, even when the human fumbles in the effort to do what Schiller asks.
He is, largely, a problem solver, not unlike the many other trainers with an online presence, those who have become television personalities on RFD TV or who have their own popular YouTube channels filled with advice on how to fix behaviors or improve performance. Your horse bucks under saddle? Here’s how to change that. What sets Schiller apart is a vulnerability that has been minted in real time, in front of his followers and his audiences, as he experiments with incorporating the horse’s emotional intelligence into more traditional training methods. And along the way, somewhat unexpectedly, communing with horses in this fashion has led Schiller to arrive at a new understanding of both horses and himself. “I think horses lead us to consciousness,” he says. “I think that’s what they’re here for.”
Schiller grew up in Young, a small community in New South Wales, Australia. His father was a ranch hand at a 1,200-acre sheep-and-wheat farm and rode bulls, twice earning a spot at Australia’s national rodeo finals, winning it once. His mother worked at the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul charity shop. As a child, Schiller showed horses and pored over the family’s Western Horseman magazines, riveted by American cowboys and their horses. He landed a job at age 23 riding colts for a California horseman who told him he had promise.
For much of his career, Schiller specialized in reining competitions, where horse and rider run patterns of circles, stops and slides that require precise control of speed and responsiveness. He performed at the discipline’s highest levels, posting wins at major shows. Twice, along with Robyn, he represented Australia at the World Equestrian Games. He coached clients to achieve reining titles of their own and demonstrated his training techniques in a series on Farm and Ranch TV.
Over time, his knack for communicating well with horses and people garnered notice. “I started getting a lot of phone calls, would you do clinics, and I started doing them, flying all over the place. When I was doing clinics, I realized there are some common misunderstandings about horses, so I thought, I’ll make videos and put them on YouTube to help people out.” By 2015, he focused on creating video content while also traveling nationally and internationally, helping clinic participants with their balky pony, their horse that didn’t want to back up, the one that spooked on trail rides. His schedule was packed. Things were great. Couldn’t be better.
It might have gone on like that indefinitely, but surprising things can happen with horses. Sometimes, it turns out, the teachers themselves need teaching. In 2016, a little red horse called Sherlock stood in the Schillers’ barn. He was Robyn’s new reining mount, a talented athlete who was nonetheless a puzzle. He was obedient, but without curiosity or spark, so emotionally distant that he never ambled over to say hello to his people. His anxiety showed up in his body, where an imperfect stride or two in an otherwise solid reining performance consistently kept him out of the blue ribbons. Schiller turned to his arsenal of training techniques to soften and refine the horse, and yet Sherlock’s tension and flat affect remained unchanged. The glum little horse stayed glum. “He had a few issues that I thought I could fix quite easily,” Schiller says, “because it seemed pretty normal. But this horse had a level of shutdown I’d not ever encountered before. Nothing that I knew could get him out of it.”
So he experimented. He spent time just watching the horse in his pen. When Schiller moved a step or two toward Sherlock, Schiller stopped at the flick of the horse’s ear or shift of his gaze. If Schiller moved back, the horse might sigh or slightly lower his head. If Sherlock turned to look at cackling chickens in the barnyard, Schiller looked, too. If Sherlock moved off to graze, the trainer kept pace on a parallel path. He realized that the horse’s indications of stress were significantly more subtle and meaningful than he previously understood. “That was the start of communicating awareness,” he says. “I had no idea what I was doing.”
He was on the right track. Researchers are discovering that horses may have far greater sensitivity than we ever knew. The heart rate of horses in a 2016 University of Sussex study went up or down accordingly when shown photographs of angry or friendly human faces, demonstrating that not only can they discriminate between positive and negative expressions, but they can do so in a species not their own. Another study in 2020 confirmed that they can recognize their keeper in photographs, even after a six-month separation.
In the 1970s and beyond, a few revered American trainers in a genre that’s loosely called “natural horsemanship” brought the horse’s inherent acuity to the attention of clinic crowds or in books they wrote. They spoke in semi-cyphers about the horse and handler’s following each other’s “feel” and needing to reward the horse’s slightest effort. One of these well-known mantras is attributed to the renowned trainer Ray Hunt, who died in 2009: “A horse knows when you know and knows when you don’t know.”
As he worked at unraveling Sherlock’s mysteries, Schiller began considering the Hunt quote in a different light. “I always thought that meant that they know if you know what you’re doing, or if you don’t,” he says. Maybe, he thought, it had more to do with a horse’s knowing that you’re truly present with them. “Horses do a lot of stuff to determine their level of safety around us. I started noticing things and letting Sherlock know I noticed things.”
Something weird was happening to Schiller too. While lecturing at a big horse expo in Madison, Wis., Schiller found himself deviating from his standard talk, divulging keenly personal issues, like old childhood hurts. He returned to his expo booth rattled, and the woman in the neighboring booth asked how it had gone. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” he told her. “I don’t know what it was. I admitted to some things that I’d probably never admitted to myself to a roomful of strangers.” Oh, the woman said: Like Brené Brown says, vulnerability is the ultimate bad-ass. Schiller went home and devoured Brown’s books. One passage stood out among all the others: “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
Schiller remained perplexed by Sherlock’s interior demeanor — detached yet obedient. While thinking about him one day, the Brown quote surfaced in his mind. As a child, his family hewed to the principles that boys don’t cry, show fear or allow themselves to grieve. “We’d go to a funeral, and it would be: ‘Oh, well, he’s dead. No use worrying about that.’” He understood that from early on, his emotions had been tamped down, discouraged to surface, and that he had remained that way. “That’s when I realized — that’s Sherlock,” he says. “Sherlock is me.”
Working with the horse awakened Schiller to other aspects of his own character. Old habits, like an inclination to talk at people instead of to people, started to fall away. “It’s from horses where I learned to listen,” he says. “Listening instead of telling.” What followed was a period of self-discovery that continues even now. Tons of reading. Ice baths. A men’s emotional retreat. Therapy, traditional and otherwise. Schiller guilelessly covered his evolution in his “Journey On” podcast, whose rapid popularity led to an annual meeting where podcast guests and fans commingle and plumb the horse-human realm. In one episode featuring the horse trainer Nahshon Cook, the conversation wheeled from comparative religion to James Baldwin to Schiller’s challenges with Sherlock. “I stepped back from trying to make him any different and trying to change him,” Schiller said of the horse. “I really started exploring other stuff, and some of that other stuff led me to explore my own stuff, led me to going and seeing therapists and learning a lot about trauma and the autonomic nervous system and different states of arousal. And yeah, it was a horse that led me down that garden path.”
“It’s a horse that shows up as the master you need so that you can continue to stay alive while you’re living,” Cook replied.
Weekend clinics filled Schiller’s schedule, a perfect testing ground for his new ideas about attunement. In time, Sherlock’s attitude brightened, and his optimism and curiosity bloomed. A few months into this exploration, Schiller encountered Cody, a mustang in Texas with a bolting problem. In that clinic, Cody repeatedly turned his head in such a way that he blocked Schiller and his owner from seeing his right eye — so distrustful that he could not face them. Schiller spent time approaching Cody by taking a step or two and retreating a step or two according to the mustang’s subtle signals of concern. After a while, Schiller told the owner to simply stand and hold the lead rope. Within minutes, the horse, finally sensing he was protected, dropped to the ground and slept, and then slept again through the next day’s activities.
The mustang showed Schiller that if he could unravel the reasons behind the bolting, instead of simply fixing the bolting itself, the problem might not reoccur. “Cody was the eye-opening moment where I realized the importance of our awareness and how it allows horses to feel safe around us,” he wrote in his book, “The Principles of Training.” “I had let him know I was very present. This approach was unlike any other way I would normally suggest solving a bolting issue” — like having the rider calmly reach wide with one rein and bend the bolting horse into a circle until he slowed — “but ever since then I have taken much more care with working through the slightest level of tension in a horse.” The mustang’s owner later reported the horse no longer bolted; he understood that his rider could focus on what mattered. “What you find is the more that you communicate that you’re listening,” Schiller says, “a lot of times the behaviors go away.”
To swing a leg over and sit astride a horse is to encounter its magical aliveness. A rider feels the horse’s rib cage expand as it sighs, feels its sides quiver, feels through the reins the push of its tongue as it adjusts the bit in its mouth. There is life in the heat and dusty scent they generate and in the great thrust of power and roll of its body as it pushes off into a walk. The rider can feel anxiety coil and buzz inside the horse and feels it unfurl as the horse calms. A thoughtful rider is aware, moment by moment, of what the horse’s ears are doing; where its gaze falls; the cadence, speed and movement of its feet; the rhythm of its breathing; and where its mood or thoughts lie. When horse and rider drop into the same current, minds and bodies converge, and alertness and athleticism flow in equal measure. Getting there, though, isn’t easy.
At the ranch in Paso Robles, Schiller coached the clinic participants, cracked jokes and relayed a multitude of stories that illustrated aspects of his training philosophies. Mostly, though, he noticed. At Schiller’s instruction, Chelsey Warriner, the former restaurateur whose horse wrecks sent her to the E.R., rode her horse, Partner, without steering with her reins or her legs, allowing him to choose his own path and speed. Partner, who historically didn’t trot or travel straight for Warriner, cantered in circle after circle. Fear made Warriner stiff and tense in the saddle. Partner made big circles and small circles, searching to understand what she wanted him to do. He sped up several ticks. Her jaw clenched; one hand clutched the saddle horn. Whenever he made a couple of strides in a straight line between circles, Schiller had them stop and rest before beginning again. Gradually these straight lines lasted longer, became more frequent. Partner offered periods of a trot instead of a constant canter. Warriner’s bearing in the saddle eased. What she had wanted to happen was starting to happen.
“We’re going to solve this by letting him figure it out on his own,” Schiller called out to her as she trotted past. “You have to give up control, which is quite possibly a trait you have in other places. Restaurants are busy, always something to do. This is the total opposite of that. You have to do nothing. And if doing nothing for you is hard, then this is the lesson our horse has presented us with. The part of us that doesn’t work — they zero in on it. That’s what we need to work on.”
Warriner’s cheeks were still flushed two hours later as she gathered her belongings. Schiller, she said, was right about her controlling tendencies. “I shoveled my anxiety into my restaurant,” she said. “For 13 years, I never stopped, me and my husband. I was working 80-hour weeks to survive.” Instead of dwelling on her own fears and fixating on things her horse did wrong, Schiller had guided her to target the moments that went right. The more that she relaxed, he relaxed. Tension left the mind, and the body followed, for rider and horse. “I want to be a good enough human for my horse,” she said. “I can’t grow if I don’t face my fear and breathe through it.”
Macey McCallion’s gelding, Leo, galloped headlong around the Schiller arena when she untied his halter and let him loose. She bought him as a lesson horse for her riding students in San Dimas, where she teaches horsemanship, but he was prone to distraction, apt to spook and proving unsuitable for his job. “I can’t figure him out,” she told Schiller. “His focus is awful.” In the arena Leo called frantically to other horses, slid to a stop, and took off full speed in another direction, then did it all over again. This went on, uninterrupted, for some time.
At Schiller’s direction, McCallion walked a looping, indirect path in the arena, holding a wand with a small flag of cloth on the end. While Leo whinnied and ran and snorted, Schiller guided McCallion to waggle the flag until he turned an ear in her direction. She abruptly ceased what she was doing, signaling that she’d noticed his attention. The duo continued in this way, with Leo lurching around and McCallion flapping the flag, only to stop at the barest ear flick or glance. From his spot under the oaks, Schiller called out instructions on her timing.
Increasingly, Leo began to stop and look at her directly before winging off again. His gallop slowed to a canter and then to a trot. His passes drew nearer and nearer to her until he came to stand before her, dropped his head and heaved a sigh. As she turned to leave, Leo followed behind her for the length of the arena, docile as an old Labrador. He stood meekly to be haltered and taken back to his pen. About 20 minutes had passed.
“All that there was giving,” Schiller said. “Trading is expecting something in return. Giving is just giving with no expectation of anything in return. If the person can do the right thing every time, the horse will come around. It’s getting your communication right — letting him know, ‘I saw that.’”
McCallion returned to the hillside and sat under the oaks. “Horses have been super transformative to me,” she said. “I was a very awkward kid. I felt that horses saw me and responded to me. They’ve been my biggest teachers. I’ve evolved as a person in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
It’s quite possible that despite this deepened insight into the horse’s vast emotional fathoms, humans still get the better end of the deal from the partnership. McCallion recognizes that Leo’s nervous distractibility may reflect changes that need to take place in herself. She’s OK with that. “Most people are attracted to horses because they need to figure out a lot of stuff for themselves. They’re going to show us what’s going on, whether we want to see that or not.” She paused for a moment. “Horses are so genuine,” she said. “They call us to our greatness.”
The act of noticing will improve horsemanship, but the heightened awareness also leads to becoming a better person — better at communicating, better at listening, better at being still and calm and in the moment. “People are quite passionate about their horses,” Schiller says. “If they stay passionate for long enough, and they keep asking the right questions, they tend to make changes in themselves that they wouldn’t make for their boss or their co-worker or their husband or their kids. But they make it for their horses. Then it carries over into the rest of life. That’s the amazing thing about what horses do for us.”
The post He Thought He Knew Horses. Then He Learned to Really Listen. appeared first on New York Times.
