Horse Brain, Human Brain: The Neuroscience of Horsemanship

Written by:
Janet L. Jones
Narrated by:
Helena Harris

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
2
Narrator
2
Release Date
January 17, 2023
Duration
8 hours 21 minutes
Summary
In this illuminating book, brain scientist and horsewoman Janet Jones describes human and equine brains working together. Using plain language, she explores the differences and similarities between equine and human ways of negotiating the world. Mental abilities—like seeing, learning, fearing, trusting, and focusing—are discussed from both human and horse perspectives. Throughout, true stories of horses and handlers attempting to understand each other—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—help to illustrate the principles.
Horsemanship of every kind depends on mutual interaction between equine and human brains. When we understand the function of both, we can learn to communicate with horses on their terms instead of ours. By meeting horses halfway, we achieve many goals.
• We improve performance.
• We save valuable training time.
• We develop much deeper bonds with our horses.
• We handle them with insight and kindness instead of force or command.
• We comprehend their misbehavior in ways that allow solutions.
• We reduce the human mistakes we often make while working with them.
Instead of working against the horse's brain, expecting him to function in unnatural and counterproductive ways, this book provides the information needed to ride with the horse's brain. Each principle is applied to real everyday issues in the arena or on the trail, often illustrated with true stories from the author's horse training experience. Horse Brain, Human Brain offers revolutionary ideas that should be considered by anyone who works with horses.
 
Reviews
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Karolina E.

A big warning for this book! The author is likely skilled in the knowledge of the brain - but in terms of horse knowledge and learning theory his book is a jumbled mess. Herd dynamics, the concepts of negative and positive reinforcement, punishment - find your education somewhere else, you won´t get it here. As an equine ethologist, I was disappointed in the incorrect statements, the lack of research that had gone into these parts of the book, and it made me distrustful of the rest. To write a book like this, basic knowledge of how horses interact with their herd (there is no such thing as dominant horses or an alpha mare - just for starters) is expected, and learning theory is just not correctly described. At all. I wish that the book had only covered the cognitive science and not mixed in the flawed statements about horse training. It would have made it such a better book.

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Rebecca C.

Wonderful book that helped me to understand my mustang so much better. It's important to note that she is a neuroscientist and a horsewoman and she's correlating the two. There are a million horse training books out there and this isn't what this book is. It is to help understand your horse better so you can adapt your own training methods to suit it your own horse. Every horse owner needs to read this book.

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Sarah W.

awesome book every horseman should read

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