Are you a purist?

This is about horse training so get your mind out of the gutter and into the manure pile.

So over the years I've followed quite a few horse trainers. In the beginning I worshiped  (and recently though to a lessor degree)  insert horse training guru here. I can successfully say that I have unsuccessfully  been pure to half a dozen or so trainers. That is, I followed the try, try again if you don't first succeed kind of thinking with varying results.

There are a variety of reasons for that. For one thing, horse trainers don't always make good people trainers.  Another is that every trainer, I mean every trainer, keeps something back. Sometimes it is intentional and other times, the trainer is unaware of something small but important they do and or consider things they do as understood. So there's that. Then there is your ability not only to understand what they are talking about, but the skill to execute it. For some unempirical  evidence, I present  to you my experience using the training stick. I use a training stick well. I use a lunge whip expertly. And just returning to a tool I've had twenty years practice with upped my training game.

The variables continue: riding ability (or as in my case, lack there of) breed of horse (yes, it does and doesn't matter simultaneously),  and I can't think of anything else coherently right now, but there are a lot.  One less coherent problem that popped into my head and by coherent, I mean hard to understand unless you live in South Kore are open ditches. So alongside most countryside roads are this 4ft uncovered, concrete drainage ditches. If you want to go trail riding, you pretty much have to deal with these and this silver, sun reflecting, apple ripening plastic. It glittersas far as the eye can seen from late July until Novemberish,  Though to be fair (to the farmers) from September on, there are also the flying silver sheets of plastic that got away from the apple orchards, didn't manage to snag on a tree, bush, or fall in the ditch.

Everyone but Thunder is really good about. And Thunder being a mare has opinion changes by day and sometimes minute to minute.  Well, to be accurate, circle to circle in the round pen.

This brings me to things like side reins and what not. The purist natural horseman will tell you your horse just needs to relax more or something. But with a horse like Thunder, relaxed is relative to now.  Having said that, an equine chef baking that special trained horsey cake, probably would have less trouble because after the first few thousand horses its pretty much the same right?

Okay, now that this is nice and long, here's my point. Draw reins are not bad. Lots of very good trainers use them. Probably because the people they learned from use them and so on down the line, Just as not using them isn't bad. It just is.