Talk:Pat Parelli

Linda Parelli

To my way of thinking we can just put a section about her here (maybe just retitle the personal life section since it's mostly about her anyway) and then create a redirect. I can't find stuff about her separate from Pat and as far as I know she wasn't famous at all before she married him. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 16:50, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree. I would be OK with naming the article Pat and Linda Parelli, though I'd want to see how much info we can find on Linda before we do the move; she doesn't have to have half the content, but she should have some unique contributions; I do think she's the brains behind the expansion and market branding of the Parelli franchise to the multimillion dollar business it is today; I also think that "Horsenality" was her creation. (Regardless of its scientific base, I think it's her idea, not Pat's). I'm not sure if she was college-educated, but she might be, worth looking up her education. Montanabw^(talk) 03:28, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

What you found is cool, for some reason my searches on Google Books and News didn't bring it up. (The source I found described her as a dressage rider, although I took that to mean lower level--when a person makes it to Third or above, they generally say so because that's a fairly hard thing to accomplish and makes them look good.😉) We can do a rename or redirect later if we find more on her. I also think she's probably the brain behind Horsenality, because Pat doesn't seem to have used the term before he married her. I have a big collection of old Western Horseman issues, some of them with articles written by him, and none of them use the word "Horsenality" or the right brain/left brain concept (which I don't believe anyway because my horse has a weird, fairly distant personality: I think if horses could gag he would when he's hugged! Anyway, he doesn't fit any of the four types). White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 23:13, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Lamb and Miller do describe her as a dressage rider, but that article in "Cowgirl" suggests that she took it up in desperation when her eventing horse wouldn't behave. If she was in Pony Club as a kid, it makes sense that she would have been exposed to all three disciplines and have some familiarity with them, but there seems to be no evidence that she trained dressage professionally or competed as a "dressage" rider; she apparently just took lessons. Perhaps a wee bit of (more) puffery, I suspect. Horsenality is just the latest thing, before this where was that other gal who was trying to resurrect phrenology and tell us that we could assess horse personality from their head shape; and then there still are the people who swear by hair whorls. Montanabw^(talk) 05:34, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I figured she also wasn't big into it because of Pat's "tight rein=no brain" comment when he was talking about dressage. Personally, I see a person riding down a trail in a halter and think no brain there. The one and only time I've ever been hurt riding was when I was riding in a halter and lead rope in the unfenced barn lot and the horse started to run away from a dead chicken. I couldn't stop him because the halter couldn't put any pressure and he was too upset to listen to voice commands. I jumped off with him still going, landed flat out and hurt my back. Technically it worked because he stopped (he seems to have been taught to stop when his rider bites the dust, which is a training technique I really recommend), but I still got hurt. People may put faith in safety stirrups and that kind of stuff, but I'd rather put faith in actually using the right gear for the job rather than using the wrong gear and trying to make up for it, and to me that's a bridle with a real bit. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 03:38, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Heh, personal riding experiences may best be back at user talk. That said, I am not a fan of the rope halter riding thing; the real item is called a bosal. Montanabw^(talk) 23:09, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know how the Parellis start their young horses, but I know a lot of the older western trainers did use the traditional rawhide or leather hackamore, then the snaffle, then the combination, then the curb... I don't know how many still do all that though. The Dorrances were probably the masters of that kind of training for control--and sort of ironically, that's what they first called "western dressage". It's not likely Linda would have grown up seeing that in Australia, but it seems that Pat probably would have. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 00:18, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

There's a good summary of the vaquero method at Sheila Varian and at vaquero. Old fashioned bosals could be pretty harsh in the wrong hands, but done properly was an art form. See also hackamore. Montanabw^(talk) 01:35, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

First use of "horse whisperer"

According to [1] the term goes back to the nineteenth century. Brianhe (talk) 05:49, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, Sullivan, Rarey and a few others, who were popular in the 1800s but are nearly forgotten now, were referred to as whisperers. I've never heard even a guess on who actually coined the term, but it exploded in popularity and became a trendy word after the (fake--real horses are a lot harder to retrain) movie with Robert Redford came out in the '90s. After that, half the horse trainers in America were whisperers, and then they started using it for dogs and other animals too. White Arabian Filly ^Neigh 21:16, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Parelli gets the nod for "natural horsemanship, and Evans' book popularized the phrase, but I'm cool with having a more accurate etiology for "horse whisperer" that goes to the 1800s. We can probably put that bit into the Natural Horsemanship article and not here. These days, (see new source I just added) the phrase "horse whisperer" is generally viewed as a slam on someone who is perceived as fraud. (Probably always was, actually, but...) Montanabw^(talk) 17:27, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

“Famous quotes” section

I’ve never seen another Wikipedia page have this section and there’s only one quote in it. I’ve also never heard anyone ever quote this in my life. Perhaps it’s more famous in equestrian circles but articles on Wikipedia are written for a general audience. Should I just remove the whole section or is it notable enough to be worked into a different section, TLDR: should the “famous quotes” section be deleted, reworked, or kept mostly intact? -Tax Fraud! [she/they] (talk | contrib.) 21:44, 7 June 2022 (UTC)