Horse Trainer Prefers Whispers to Whips

Ernesto Rojas was 5 when he saw a horse whipped to death by its trainer.

The boy, visiting Mexico with his family, had been drawn by curiosity to the horse’s pen and stood watching as the man struck the animal. Finally, the horse fell to the ground, dying. The trainer left to find another horse to drag the body away.

“I went in there, and I looked at the horse,” Rojas recalled 27 years later, a horse tamer standing by his own round horse-training pen.

“Maybe it was my shock or my fear, but I could feel the horse relating the message to me--his message being that he was trying to understand what the man was saying but couldn’t. That’s all he was trying to do.

“That’s why I decided I would help the horse to understand people, and I would help people to understand the horse.”

So was born his dedication to amansando en unidad, taming in unity.

His gentle-touch method is meant to establish the tamer at the top of the equine pecking order through communication instead of force.

“Some people want to get on a horse and ride it whether it likes it or not . . . not let it understand anything, just make it behave and make it get under submission,” said Tom Hickey of Dripping Springs, an admirer of Rojas’ method. “You can make ‘em learn by being hard on ‘em--but they don’t like that, and they remember that.

“Then there are other people who will be gentle with the horse and try to make the horse understand that he’s a partner kind of, and a friend,” Hickey said, watching Rojas work with a registered Paint named Pudden Head Dude.

“He still imposes his authority over them, but in a friendly way, and then they’re willing to do anything he wants.”

Blowing air through his lips, kicking up dirt, giving comforting strokes, flicking a horse-tail quirt, Rojas mimics the moves and sounds horses use to communicate with each other.

“I teach him what my language is by using his language. . . . I become half horse and him half human. That’s what I call a union,” Rojas said.

When he needs something more than horse talk to get the attention of Pudden Head Dude, he uses a lariat, its coils unwinding and touching the animal as it moves around the pen. The horse was brought to Rojas after its owners said it was lent to a friend and came back a changed animal, underweight and difficult to handle.

“It was embedded in him so well that he didn’t have to do what I asked him to that I had to remind him. This is my way of reaching out and giving him a little, slight kick, but I’m not actually hurting the horse,” Rojas said.

Training horses in a gentle fashion has become a popular trend, said Patti Colbert, executive director of the Horse Industry Alliance and a director with the American Quarter Horse Assn.

Interest has been spurred by a new Robert Redford movie, “The Horse Whisperer,” based on a best-selling novel, and a recent nonfiction book, “The Man Who Listens to Horses.”

“What this is is the ability to communicate with a horse using techniques that have been developed through analysis of the horse’s herd activity and communication with the other horses,” Colbert said.

The trend is a good one so long as people realize it’s not a magic, one-time procedure, she added. Training a horse takes time, knowledge, experience and education on the part of the animal and rider, she said.

“It doesn’t happen in 30 or 60 days. It doesn’t happen in a round pen in 30 or 40 minutes. It takes a lot of time and effort to create an animal that will willingly perform for you,” she said.

Rojas--who has been a locomotive engineer, soldier, Christian singer and Rocky Mountain park guide and now works for a ranch near Houston--said he’s convinced that his gentle-touch message is needed.

But he is uncomfortable with all the attention, including newspaper and television interviews. He said he plans to keep a lower profile until the hoopla surrounding horse-whispering subsides because he doesn’t want to compromise what he considers a gift.

“It’s no longer a gift if you start to make money on it,” said Rojas, who recently conducted a horse clinic in Austin with a portion of the proceeds benefiting a scholarship fund. “I don’t want to cash in on the trend.”

Still, he believes that his message is needed. And although he emphasized that he has seen worse treatment of horses in the United States, that childhood memory from Mexico stays with him.

“Every time I go in the round pen with a horse that I don’t know, I remember that horse that died . . . so many years ago.”