The best horse trainers I have observed could train a wild colt to be ridden within two hours. One of them, Ray Hunt, was hopeless at explaining what he did. The best he could manage was, “Get in tune with the horse.” He simply worked intuitively and empathically. The same is true of many animal handlers. They forge a direct emotional connection between the animal’s body and their own, based on nonverbal communication. They unconsciously draw on sensory recall and visual thinking to observe the horse’s behavior. These skills are very difficult to teach.
