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New Age Cowboy Soothes the Savage Beast : Hardly the Jack Palance type, he’s a soft-spoken 52-year-old man who admits to having had a “macho-ectomy.”

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The brochure makes Steve Harris seem like just another businessman, a guy out to sell a product and a system, even if his field is a bit unusual.

Harris--no kin of mine--is a cowboy. He used to be the kind of cowboy who drove cattle and managed ranches. He used to, as they say, “break” horses, by using physical force and ropes to hobble the hind legs. Saddle ‘em up and show ‘em who’s boss.

But these days Steve Harris might be considered a New Age cowboy. Hardly the Jack Palance type, he’s a soft-spoken 52-year-old man who admits to having had a “macho-ectomy.” The Cottonwood, Ariz., resident travels the West marketing a newfangled training corral he invented and giving seminars on his “Touch of Love” horse-training method.

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Instead of breaking horses, he “gentles” them. “I start a relationship and develop a partnership,” he says.

And if you read the small print on his brochure, you’ll find that this cowboy has another mission as well.

Harris usually visits the Los Angeles area a couple of times each year. When I caught up with him Friday evening, he was standing inside his Porta-Flex Safety Round Pen at Jack Rader’s horse ranch inside Brown’s Canyon, in the rugged hills above Chatsworth.

“We’re two miles from town, but a hundred,” Larry Bowers said.

That was one of Bowers’ horses trotting nervously around Harris inside the pen that looks something like a spacious, roofless tent. A small group of horse lovers watched as Hawk, a powerful, 5-year-old Arabian, trotted clockwise until, abruptly, Harris tossed a lead rope in the horse’s path. Hawk could have simply stepped over it but, as Harris knew he would, Hawk halted, turned and trotted counterclockwise.

“See how high his head is and how high his tail is?” the cowboy said to the group. “There’s a lot of anxiety in this horse.”

They were engaged in a subtle dance, a game of give-and-take.

It wasn’t surprising that Hawk was so high-strung. Hawk, Bowers explained, “has done nothing for five years,” spending his days in a pasture with half a dozen horses, No. 2 in the pecking order. When Harris first led Hawk into the pen, “he was whipping his head like a sea serpent,” a horsewoman named Kerry said.

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The cowboy was a calm, confident presence, practicing a method he first learned seven years ago from Ray Hunt, a legend in the field. Harris had worked 30 years as a cowboy and considered himself an expert horseman when Hunt, in a few hours, demonstrated how little Harris actually knew about horses. Watching Hunt calm, saddle and ride a wild horse without using any physical force “changed my life,” Harris says. Some Indian tribes, it is said, would work horses in a similar manner.

Horses, Harris explained, are natural followers. His goal was not to intimidate Hawk, Harris said, but to win over his trust so that the horse would choose him as his leader. Harris, with chest out and shoulders high, would position himself and toss the rope to work the horse to and fro, all the while speaking about “horsenality” and “the inner horse.”

In time, Hawk seemed to have relaxed.

“Now I’m going to let all my energy run out of my body and be as passive as I can,” Harris said, slumping his shoulders.

Hawk stopped the trot and eyed the cowboy. “He’s building a little more curiosity now and trying to wonder what this whole deal is about.”

Sure enough, Hawk approached and sniffed at Harris’ hand. Then Hawk followed as Harris started to walk in a circle. “I want him to feel like he did when he followed his mother.”

Suddenly, Hawk stepped ahead and kicked. The cowboy, safely out of his way, drew back his shoulders and puffed his chest. A toss of the lead rope sent Hawk trotting in a circle. “I don’t know if something scared him,” Harris said. So he started the process over again.

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A few minutes later, Hawk and the cowboy were together again. Harris stroked the horse’s neck, flank, legs. “I need this horse to know that I really do care for him. You don’t show love by treating them to carrots and sugar. That gives them bad habits.”

By the time the session ended, Hawk was under saddle for only the second time in his life. He seemed relaxed. But when Harris rose up on one stirrup, the horse cocked his head in a manner that troubled the cowboy. Chances are that Hawk would allow himself to be ridden, Harris said, but there was no reason not to wait another day.

Macho-ectomies make such decisions much easier.

Even for a city slicker, it was fascinating to watch. But since it wasn’t Sunday, I wasn’t able to watch Steve Harris carry out the rest of his work. A born-again Christian, Harris often finishes his Sunday seminars with “Cowboy Church Service.” The New Age cowboy, spreading that old-time religion.

There are a lot of similarities, Harris told me, between being a good horseman and being a good Christian.

“It’s a relationship.”

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