Customer Reviews

Understanding Horse Behavior (Horse Health Care Library)

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This book is very short and so is this review. I would only say that this book is good if you are a novice when it comes to horses. Anyone with experience would find this repetetive and boring. The book only covers very basic points about horses. The book also does not give details about anything- it's more of an outline. I would close by saying that this book is probably one to steer away from.

I agree with the other reviewer here. This book barely scratches the surface on horse behavior. To me it raised more questions than it answered. Very brief and superficial discussion. I have been involved with horses for thirty years and just recently discovered the usefulness of understanding a horse's perspective in day-to-day handling and training. If you are looking for a good book on understanding why horses do what they do and what to do about it, read all three of Mark Rashid's books, available here at Amazon.

Unfortunately I found this book was not only vastly lacking in educational detail, but was appalled by one of the recommendations made by the author on catching difficult horses. I would have expected a novice lay person to come up with depriving the horse of food and water in an effort to make them "dependant" upon you for thier very life (and therefore grateful to be caught and fed), however finding it in a book obviously marketed to beginners and novice horsepersons felt this was largely irresponsible. The book is also filled with biases and general assumptions about the expected behavior of horse genders and breeds. There is also a comment that Thoroughbreds are Warmbloods... ? Just wondering when this happened? There are better books out there.

I bought a horse vet reference on an auction site and the seller threw this book in as a "bonus." Guess they wanted to get rid of it. I won't try to pass this on to anyone. Before committing this book to the trash I thought I'd recommend to everyone to select another purchase. There are plenty of good references out there on horses. This is *not* one of them.

I agree with the previous reviewer who pointed out the author's recommendation to withhold food to get the horse to start coming to you. This is simply cruel and wrong. There are many techniques that you can use for long-term success--this isn't one of them.