Commentary by Judy Reynolds, Grant's Pass OR

In the ten CDs of Leslie Desmond's "Horse Handling and Riding Through Feel" Audio Book, we have the rare opportunity to meet one of America's most innovative horse trainers and riding coaches in a personal and meaningful way.

Listening to Leslie, we get a sense of the person behind the philosophy that she first espoused in the book "True Horsemanship Through Feel", which she wrote with the late, renowned horseman Bill Dorrance.

There is something about hearing a person, rather than just reading their words, that has a profound effect on the learning experience, at least for me.  The inflections in Leslie's voice alert us to her feelings about the topic at hand and help to highlight certain points that may have been lost in a written work.

In 10+ hours of audio coaching, Leslie Desmond shares her experiences with horses and the opinions she has developed over the years about their nature, care and training; about our relation and responsibility to them; and about her learning experiences with Bill Dorrance.  She is the kind of coach everyone has longed for at some time or another.  Gentle but firm, compassionate but just, on your side and the horses', you get the feeling she cares.

And her sense of humor is a real plus.  "I had one that I couldn't catch for four months... that was irritating..." she says in one tape-- she uses her quick wit and dry sense of humor sometimes to defuse otherwise very serious topics, like trailer loading: "I think there are not too many things we do with horses that get us into more trouble than this prospect of stuffing him into a trailer. We can make him get in. We can ask him to get in. We can show him how we think he ought to get in. Then in the end he'll have to get in whatever way he can…or not. Some of them have the last word. They don't get in. I had years of struggle at the back of a trailer before I understood that the first thing I had to teach him was to unload."

Leslie's training tips are interspersed with the sounds of horses - galloping by (as Leslie galloped next to Bill's old truck - what a story she tells!), trotting on pavement, clip-clopping down an aisle way - and bits of music. Each CD comes in its own case with a great cover photo and includes a small illustrated pamphlets with quotes about horses and such.

From groundwork to livening up, overexposure to riding with others, Leslie gives practical and philosophical advice. Some of it is controversial and provocative. For example, she's against hand-feeding: "From the horse's point of view, if a person shows up consistently offering something to them by hand and usually before the first treat is fully chewed up and swallowed there is a second one available, it's not a surprise that the horse learns to come forward and is rewarded for coming forward into the space of the person who is feeding him. It generates a bit of confusion for a horse to be asked to step into someone's space ... and then to be pushed back."

Her views on the value of pressure and release are revolutionary, in today's world where the emphasis seems always on the pressure, and so much less on the release: "When you're on him, the release I'm talking about has to do with not kicking and not pulling…release him to go…open your leg…just have him understand you'll wait for him to go. The flip side of the pressure is the release. It just depends how much emphasis you want to put on which part of that… It took quite a while for me to understand what Bill (Dorrance) actually meant by the word release. It's just an evolution in your understanding of feel."

Whatever the topic, Leslie urges us to look at things from the horses' point of view and to adjust our approach as necessary: "When something we do either frightens him or confuses him to the point that he has to act out his need to survive, it's really important for us to take a breath and offer him a bit of space so that he can sort things out."

This Audio Book is ultimately not a "how to" but a "why to" … Its trails lead to the heart of why we are with our horses, and that heart is about having a relationship and a partnership with our horses. As Leslie says, "I don't increase pain where there are better alternatives in order to achieve submission. That's because it's not submission I'm looking for."