Tom Dorrance and His String Trick

This is one of my favorite videos of Tom Dorrance teaching horsemanship. It’s always been interesting to me how profound his observations are, but they’re usually stated implicitly or delayed. This is one of those moments, he starts by teaching someone a simple trick with a string, and as she picks it up and gets faster and faster at doing it by herself Tom shares this insight into how the horse learns.

“It takes them a while to get a little idea of what it’s about, and then, when it gets to working the reflexes get programmed. And then, it’s like reading, you don’t have to think.”