Trainer Teaches Horses in Their Own 'Language'
Source: The Roanoke Times
Christiansburg, VA
April 5, 2008

It was a near-perfect day at Canterbury Farm.

The sun was shining, a slight breeze was moving across the Danyis' 55 acres and a week-and-a-half-old filly was prancing in a nearby pen.

Gypsy, however, was not pleased.

Trotting around a round pen with Canterbury owner and trainer Paula Danyi, the 15-year-old mare was displaying her trademark obstinacy.

"She's going to do anything but look at me," Danyi shouted to Gypsy's owner Ernie Rash. "She's pretty headstrong."

Luckily for Rash, however, headstrong horses are a Canterbury Farm specialty.

Within the hour, Danyi had coaxed Gypsy to turn toward her, walk into the middle of the pen and "join up."

"What I want her to learn right now is that it's much easier to be with me than to be running around like a fool," Danyi said. "It's easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing."

And this, Danyi explained, is the key to natural horsemanship, a method of horse training that helps horse and rider develop a relationship using natural horse instincts.

"There's something to using their language to communicate with them," Danyi said. "I have a lot of people who just become afraid of their horses, and this technique is about using the horses' language to understand what they're doing and establish yourself as the leader of the herd."

"Once the horse respects you," she added, "you can get a horse to do about anything."

Even a stubborn horse like Gypsy.

"You can almost watch and see when a little light flicks on in their head like a switch where they go, 'OK, you're the boss,' " John Danyi said as he watched his wife lead Gypsy around the pen.

A lifelong lover of horses, Paula Danyi began a business teaching natural horsemanship in 2000. About five years later, she opened Canterbury Farm in Christiansburg, where she teaches up to four clients a day. The sessions, which vary in duration depending on what the horse and owner need, cost $40 each.

Many of the horses she's asked to work with are "problem horses," Danyi said -- horses so difficult to control that they terrify their owners and have become little more than "pasture ornaments."

The trick to teaching these animals, Danyi said, is not to punish them with physical pain but to put them to work.

The results, said 16-year-old Stephanie Guilman, can be significant.

Stephanie began bringing her horse Mustang to Canterbury Farm seven months ago.

"We wanted a trainer to work with him, particularly on his attitude," Stephanie said. "Before, every barn I went to thought he was something you couldn't really deal with."

In the months since Danyi began working with both horse and trainer however, Stephanie said she's learned that "the right movement or the right look can tell the horse what you want them to do and have them respect you."

Which bodes well for Rash and Gypsy.

I came "just to get the horse more manageable so I can use the horse just for pleasure riding or riding on my farm," said Rash, who has a farm near Claytor Lake in Dublin.

I want "to get her to do what I want to do, not what she wants to do," he added with a laugh.

And with that, Rash stepped into the round pen.