Grass: Talk to your horse via body language

BLACK MESA and NARROW CANYON, Ariz.

Leland Grass is helping people create better relationships with their horses. He says it’s fascinating to see how horses help their owners become not just better riders, but better individuals. And he has a young apprentice learning the art.

“Horses really help people,” said Grass, practitioner of natural horsemanship, known as gentling. “With the healing horses we have, one will look at the land differently. One will become a gentle person with their words and with everything one does.” Horses evolved to communicate with each other primarily through body language. So forget talking palomino Mister Ed of sitcom fame when it comes to horse communication. Grass says the horse’s extraordinary ability to read equine body language translates to humans as well.

“Trainers must be 100 percent healthy (when gentling),” Grass explained. “You don’t want to be aching or in pain because the horse is going to know that.”

Grass says that trainers must not be angry, impatient, grieving, stressed, or worried because the horse will know, seeing, feeling, and responding to a trainer’s emotional state.

But the horse’s capacity for interpreting human body language, Grass says, may go much farther than simple communication, such as the horse’s ability to demonstrate qualities like compassion, which helps people heal from alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, and other things.

“Horses have a lot of qualities that we humans lack,” Grass explained. “It’s really something – heartwarming.”

But one quality not all horses have is respect, which Grass says the horse loses when it separates from its mother.

“The horse is going to act like a child, like youngsters who attend parties,” Grass said. “As for respect, it outgrows that. Now we trainers will have to teach them how to respect (humanity) from the other side of the environment.”

Grass says many horses, though, have suffered abuse from people or have been traumatized through an accident. And that’s when he’s called to help with gentling. But Grass doesn’t “break” horses, a quite brutal method of coercion.

“I don’t use a post in the middle of the pen, I don’t use that method,” he explained. “I use my body as a post, and my body language and my words to heal, to gentle.”

At another seminar in Narrow Canyon over the weekend, Grass and his young apprentice, Sharon Billy, gentled a couple of domestic horses.

Grass says Billy, who admits she’s not quite a “horse whisperer,” is becoming skilled in the practice of natural horsemanship and becoming an inspiration to others who might want to learn the art of gentling.

Grass’s next seminar will take place May 28 (turnoff at milepost 432.3) and 29 (7th Annual Jerrold Todacheenie Memorial Music Fest) in Standing Rock, Ariz.

Information: Leland Grass, 928-429-1504, sacred4s@hotmail.com

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