According to Ben Quinters, modern riders have lost the subtlety that generations past had when interacting with horses. (Photo by Sean Mathis)
by SEAN MATHIS
Reprinted from Reporting Texas
Ben Quinters is in his mid-60s, but you’d never know it by the fire in his eyes and hustle in his step. His hearty handshake evinces both his direct attitude and years of physical labor. His 20-acre property east of San Antonio is home to a few well-placed trees and an efficiently sized house with no television but shelves of books. Training a horse to Quinters’ perfectionist standards is an all-consuming endeavor. He monitors their condition at key points in a day for weeks on end, so his property may host a dozen animals at a time, depending on the season and how much business is rolling through. (As of this writing, business was quite thin.)
Last summer in Colorado, Quinters could be seen working a colt in the round pen. The 20 feet of braided fibers that connected man and horse might as well have been an umbilical cord. He wore an oversized sombrero that made him look like a mushroom with a beard, and his moss-green eyes brand one’s memory. After two sentences, it is clear that he channels a lifestyle that has gone the way of old Tombstone. He speaks in complete sentences, while maintaining steady eye contact. He notices and cares about the minutiae held in simple conversation. What some dismiss as mundane, he calls sacred.
Quinters has been married and divorced twice and one of his two sons died at a young age. Hearing him speak of such experiences suggests he considers his relationship with horses particularly meaningful and enduring.
He claims to have learned how to mount a horse by watching Western movies in his youth, though the first time he actually sat on a horse as a teenager was an indelible experience. On his parents’ Texas property, his brother was thrown from a mare and badly cut his ear on a barbed wire fence that Quinters had just strung. After a hospital visit, they both returned to their task, but because his brother was pumped with medication, it was Ben’s responsibility to finish what they had started. By then, Quinters now modestly recalls, the mare had become compliant, having been exhausted by wearing the saddle.
“I didn’t know much about what the hell I was doing, but enough to get by,” Quinters says. “She filled in for me in the spots that weren’t working for me. She did things in spite of what I was doing – maybe, not because of what I was doing.”
Quinters hung up his shingle as a horse trainer after he quit his job as an airplane mechanic on the advice of a friend who encouraged him to follow his heart. The one tip he got before going into business: Get your money up front. There’s an unfortunate penchant for owners to pick up their horse from the trainer and “forget” to pay for the service. But there is no remote reset button on the horse’s memory. His investment of time cannot be erased. (Evelyn Hanggi, co-director at the Equine Research Foundation in Aptos, Calif., found that horses could retake recognition tests with varying rules, from 10 years earlier, and repeat their performance with stunning accuracy.)
He once trained a horse for Robert Redford’s daughter and denied Mr. Redford’s assistant’s request to pick it up on her behalf. He insisted that the daughter be the one to come get it, as it was her horse, and he needed to show her how to handle it firsthand. She and her father complied, taking the time to meet Quinters at his property and glean what she could about the horse’s nuances in order to ensure a successful relationship going forward. Quinters feels that level of consideration is mandatory.
One of his favorite sayings comes from a friend who vented about having to tell a novice rider: “If it doesn’t matter to you what matters to the horse, it makes me madder.”
Quinters says that in an ideal relationship between an experienced rider and a well-trained horse, the two animals work as one in unison. The slightest pressure from leg or rein can encourage the horse to respond as the rider wishes. The relationship takes on an almost psychic level. It takes patience and attention.
His approach reflects that of the vaqueros – the original Spanish cowboys – who took pride in the uniform methodology of cultivating a horse’s ability to respond to its rider. They spent centuries refining ways to make the relationship flourish, lessons they took along with them when they came to the Americas.
Quinters takes issue with industry fads that compensate for man’s growing inability to read the subtleties of the horse.
“It’s obvious to me that it’s become more mechanical, that relationship between the horse and the rider. There’s not as many people practicing those fine traditions, trying to do it the way (the vaqueros) did it,” said Quinters.
One case in point is the use of the hackamore. It is a style of headpiece that, along with the reins, forms the bridle. It is a simple strap that has no bit and rests on the snout of the horse. It is one of the first tools used to control a horse, with early varieties dating back to the first equestrians. Its use is very specific and stylized, and it’s not for the beginner.
“When the modern cowboy started using the hackamore without the understanding that the vaquero had,” he explains, “it didn’t work for him, because there wasn’t enough pain involved. When the hackamore didn’t work anymore, they made the mechanical hackamore,” which compounds the rider’s pressure on a horses’ snout.
What used to take a spark now requires a flamethrower. Quinters contends it has nothing to do with increased evolutionary apathy on behalf of the horse – it is man who has grown lazy and numb.
“We’ve lost sight of how to attain that super-sensitive feel,” he says.
