Caring for Horse-People: An Interview with Ren Hurst (vegan), Part 1 of 2

Ren Hurst started her journey with horse-people when she was just a teenager. After experiencing a difficult childhood, Ren found that her time with horse-people was a saving grace that gave her a sense of pure freedom.

“I started out just training horses, the way that young women in rural Texas do, the rodeo type way. And then got on board with the natural horsemanship movement, right as it was just coming to be a thing, [and] was very successful at that for a number of years. And that just kept leading me down this path of constantly questioning things because even natural horsemanship was quite a bit different than traditional horsemanship, in terms of allowing the horse to have some sort of say in the interactions.

And so, that constant questioning and re-evaluating just kept leading me deeper and deeper into different esoteric paths in regard to relationship to horses, until I eventually stumbled upon Nevzorov’s Haute École which is a horsemanship school out of Russia that uses no control whatsoever beyond the basic needs of the animal.”

Ren’s journey from being a so-called horse whisperer to reconnecting with her wild wisdom, which saw animal-people on an equal level with humans, has been just as rewarding for herself as it has been for the horse-people. “So, what it means to be a horse whisperer is to be a master manipulator and even more so than that, I’m so grateful for my horse training journey. I don’t think I could do the things I know how to do today, if I hadn’t trained horses for 20 years, because I trained horses with energy manipulation, and so, for 20 years, I didn’t realize I was training myself, how to control my emotions in order to control the emotions of the animals in my care. And so, when you’re interacting with animals, it’s so important that you understand that when they’re captive dependents in your care, especially like our dogs and our cats, everything that we feel is affecting them because they don’t have this, this like autonomous relationship to themselves, unless we support that and cultivate that for them, they are being influenced by how we feel day in and day out.”