There is no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man named Bill Dorrance.
Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero — the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California — he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.
There is no codifying what Bill Dorrance knew. Some of it, like how to braid a rawhide lariat, is relatively easy to teach, and some of it, thanks to the individuality of horses and humans, cannot be taught at all, only learned. His legacy is exceedingly complex and, in a sense, self-annulling. It is an internal legacy. The more a horseman says he has learned from Dorrance the less likely he is to have learned anything at all.
That sounds oblique, but it reflects the fact that what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.
There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

Ne obstaja oseba, ki bi bila šepetalec konjem. Nikoli ni in nikoli ne bo. Ideja je žalitev za konja. Konju lahko šepetate in ga poslušate, kolikor želite, česa pa se boste naučili – če boste pozorno poslušali – je, da konji živijo v svojem okolju, ki presega jezik in ta jezik, ne glede na to, kako ga okarakterizirate, je slab izraz za to, kaj konji razumejo o sebi in ljudeh. Vaditi morate le tri stvari, potrpljenje, opazovanje in ponižnost; in vse tri so bile povzete v življenju Billa Dorranca.
Dorrance je doživel 93 let in še nekaj mesecev pred smrtjo je jahal in lovil z lasom s konja. Bil je eden izmed peščice konjarjev, vključno z njegovim bratom Tomom, ki so na različne načine pomagali na novo opredeliti odnose med konjem in človekom. Bill Dorrance je spoznal, da je subtilnost skoraj vedno bolj učinkovito orodje kot sila, vendar je tudi uvidel, da jo je težko izvajati, če verjamete, kot večina ljudi, da ste konju nadrejeni. V njegovem načinu jahanja in v tem, kar je učil, ni bilo dominance, samo partnerstvo. K vzvišenemu konjeništvu vaquera je prinesel vzvišeno človeštvo, katerega najvišji izraz je vera v voljnost konja.
Njegovega znanja ni moč spraviti v strokovni priročnik. Neke stvari, na primer kako spletati lariat iz surove kože, je sorazmerno enostavno poučevati, nekaterih pa zaradi individualnosti konj in ljudi sploh ni mogoče poučevati, ampak pridejo z izkušnjami. Njegova zapuščina je nadvse zapletena in v nekem smislu samonikla. To je duhovna zapuščina. Bolj ko konjar poudarja, da se je učil od Dorrancea, manj verjetno je, da je se je dejansko sploh česa naučil od njega.
To se sliši nepošteno, vendar odraža dejstvo, da ste se od Dorrancea lahko naučili načina učenja, katerega predmet je bil v osnovi konj, vendar se je presenetljivo razširilo tudi na pse, govedo in ljudi. Če bi se tega naučili, se ne bi tako domišljavo bahali naokoli.
V tem ni nobene mistike, nobene čarovnije, le prepoznavanje sorodnosti s konji. Veliko ljudi je naletelo na Billa Dorrancea in si sposodilo vpogled ali dva, nekateri pa so zaslužili veliko denarja s popularizacijo tistega, za kar so mislili, da on čuti in počne. Toda tisto, kar je vedel, nikoli ne bo priljubljeno, niti s tem ni nikoli veliko zaslužil. Ne morete prodati skromnosti ali neskončne radovednosti. Težko je postaviti ceno sprejemanju dejstva, da se lahko vse, kar mislite, da veste, spremeni že pri naslednjem konju.
V. Klinkenborg o Billu Dorranceu

Prevod in priredba: DoroTeja

Tekst je informativne narave in ne more nadomestiti strokovnega mnenja. Bralcem svetujemo, da poiščejo nasvet kvalificiranega veterinarja in/ali strokovnjaka preden začno s kakršno koli diagnozo, zdravljenjem, terapijo oziroma delom s konjem.