It fits in a coat pocket. Think Harmony With Horses, first published in 1978, runs shorter than most tack catalogs, and working horsemen have been rereading it for going on fifty years. It is Ray Hunt’s only real book, and it is barely a book in the usual sense: no training program, almost no equipment, hardly a procedure in it. What it contains instead is a way of thinking about the horse, stated plainly and then restated from a dozen angles until it starts to stick. For readers tracing the natural horsemanship movement to its sources, this small volume is one of the load-bearing documents.
A Small Book With a Long Reach
By the time the book appeared, Hunt had taken his teaching on the road, running the public clinics that would occupy the rest of his life and make him the movement’s traveling voice. The book gathered that message onto paper, assembled with the help of his wife, Milly, who edited it. It reads the way Hunt reportedly taught: plain sentences, ideas that circle back, more aphorism than instruction. Readers expecting steps are frustrated by it, and the frustration is instructive. Hunt distrusted recipes. Feel, in his view, could not be photocopied, so the book declines to pretend otherwise and works on the reader’s outlook instead of the reader’s checklist.
Fix Yourself First
The book’s central demand, paraphrased: when the horse struggles, look at yourself first. Your position, your timing, your intent, your emotional state; the horse is responding to all of it, accurately, whether or not you meant to say it. In Hunt’s telling, the horse is doing what makes sense given what it perceives, so if the answer coming back is wrong, examine the question being asked.
Plenty of writers had said kind things about horses before. What made this different was where it pointed the responsibility. The traditional economy of blame ran downhill to the horse: stubborn, sour, lazy, bad. Hunt reversed the flow entirely and kept it reversed for decades of clinics, which is much harder than saying it once in a book. That reversal, more than any technique, is what his students carried away, and it is the foundation our own teaching stands on.
The Mind Before the Feet
The book’s other pillar is about where control actually lives. Hunt taught working through the horse’s mind to get to its feet: a horse that understands and agrees moves altogether differently from a horse that merely complies. The practical corollaries are the ones the whole movement now repeats. Arrange things so the right answer is easy to find and the wrong one is uncomfortable, then let the horse discover the answer and own it. Notice the smallest change and reward the slightest try, because the try is the seed of everything you will ever build. None of those sentences are quotations, but any reader of the book will recognize them; they are its working parts, paraphrased the way they have been paraphrased around round pens for two generations.
What is striking on rereading is how little of the book is about horses behaving badly. Most of it is about people perceiving poorly: missing the try, releasing late, asking louder when they should ask clearer. The horse in Hunt’s book is never the problem and never quite the subject. The subject is the person holding the rope.
Where the Book Sits in the Lineage
Hunt credited his teacher, Tom Dorrance, openly and for his whole career; the quiet Oregon-born horseman had reshaped Hunt’s whole approach, and Hunt spent decades saying so from the middle of arenas. Dorrance’s own slim book, True Unity, reached print years after Hunt’s. So Think Harmony With Horses is the middle link written down first: the moment a quiet ranch-country idea became a portable, public argument. From Hunt’s clinics came the next generation, Buck Brannaman the best known among them, and from that generation the ideas spread into barns like ours. When Leyden Horsemanship names its lineage, Dorrance, Hunt, Brannaman, this book is one of the few physical objects that lineage can hand you, and it is why students at Ocean View Stables keep finding a copy pressed into their hands.
How to Read It, and Why It Endures
Read it slowly and read it wrong the first time; everyone does. A few pages between sessions with an actual horse is about the right dose, because it is a mirror-book: it means more every year you bring more to it. A beginner reads it and nods. A rider ten years in reads the same page and winces, recognizing the late releases and loud asks it is describing as their own.
It endures because it names the part of horsemanship that does not date. Tack fashions change, training systems bloom and wilt, but attention, fairness, and timing stay the whole game, and the book is about nothing else. That is also why it keeps traveling hand to hand, the way it always has: someone finishes it, thinks of a friend who is fighting their horse, and passes it along.
Most horse books tell you what to do with the horse. This one keeps asking what you brought into the pen, and that is why it is still in print while its critics are not.
The lineage did not stop with Hunt, either. For a look at what his students and their students are doing with the ideas now, read where the tradition is heading.
The best way to understand Hunt is to feel his ideas work under your own hands. Book a first lesson at Ocean View Stables and we will start where he did: with the person holding the rope.