"I used to be really hard. But they taught me how to be soft"

….Sometimes, when Deborah Cooper looks a troubled horse in the eye, she knows exactly how it feels. She knows what it's like to be expected to do something that goes against your nature, to be considered something of a rebel. Which may be why some believe her to be one of the top horse trainers in the county, a real-life horse whisperer whose livelihood depends on her talent for turning a bucking, bolting, biting animal into something that's close to a friend.…What she does, she says, is finds out what an animal's talents are, listens to what it is saying by how it behaves, and then sets out to get it to trust a human, so its owners can trust it again. "It's: How can we create the ambiance where a horse wants to play with me or ride with me," Cooper says as she heads into the ranch's cool, dark tack room, her spurs leaving small punctuation marks in the dust.…She's got 70 horses — 15 of them, her own — and people bring their animals from all over California so she can "fix" them.

…A horse isn't exactly glad to see a human, she says as she heads into the bright winter sun where her stallion waits in a round corral. "A horse is a prey animal, and we're predators. Our eyes are in front to focus on our prey. A horse's are on the side of their heads to see what's going on." Which, she says, makes them frightened of people, movement and changes in things around them — one example, she says, of how a horse views the world differently than a human and why they act in ways that a rider might not appreciate.

The trick, she says, is to figure out what an animal is experiencing or trying to say, and then learning ways to communicate with them. It's not making a horse more like us, she says, but making us more like a horse.

These are the things she learned when she studied with Pat Parelli, one of the masters of what has become known as Natural Horsemanship — popularized in the 1995 novel by Nicholas Evans, "The Horse Whisperer"

The idea behind his, and other "whisperers' " training, is to understand and use a horse's natural instincts and communication, in order to teach it.

…"They've taught me to be soft," she says. They've taught her to observe and listen and to be courageous. Some of them come in so fried and so scared," she says, her voice breaking. I used to be really hard," she says. "But they taught me how to be soft"…

…from:
Deborah Cooper may just be a horse's best friend
By PEGGY TOWNSEND, 28 January 2007, Santa Cruz Sentinel