Your Horse
as a Friend
On horses, patience and the art of not forgetting
ISBN 978-3-200-11180-6 · Laxenburg 2026
↗ Buy on Amazon
On horses, patience and the art of not forgetting
ISBN 978-3-200-11180-6 · Laxenburg 2026
↗ Buy on AmazonIn older works on horsemanship one repeatedly encounters extraordinary figures with a seemingly inexplicable power over horses. What was their secret? And why did it fall into oblivion again and again?
This book follows a trail that leads from ancient Greece through nineteenth-century Austria to the American ranch country of the twentieth century — and shows that the secret of the great horsemen was no secret at all. It was patience, attentiveness and the willingness to take the horse seriously as a sentient being.
At the centre stands Constantin Balassa (1787–1862), Imperial-Royal cavalry captain and quiet pioneer of training without force. While the American J. S. Rarey dazzled Europe with spectacular demonstrations and sold his secret for large sums, Balassa worked patiently, humanely and lastingly — and published his method for all to read. Before commissions of the Imperial Court he showed, on the most difficult horses in Vienna, what kindness, voice and understanding can achieve where whip and spur fail.
The book places Balassa's psychological approach in the context of modern behavioural science and the Natural Horsemanship movement — from Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt to Buck Brannaman. It shows that what passes today as revolutionary is two hundred years old. And it is no coincidence that the same knowledge keeps disappearing — for it demands from the human being the hardest thing: to master oneself before leading the horse.
Alfred Zangl completed the draft of this book in May 1984. The manuscript lay unnoticed for four decades, until his son Georg rediscovered it and resolved to finish the work in his place. It is a book about horses — and about patience, memory and the obligation not to let the best of the past die.
This book is far more than a guide to horse training — it is a quiet, reflective return to the essence of the relationship between human and horse. Drawing on historical sources and personal reflection, it unfolds as a work that gently reminds the reader of a forgotten self-evidence: that true horsemanship rests on understanding, patience and mutual trust.
Particularly impressive is the connection between past and present. The insights of great horsemen from earlier centuries are not merely quoted but brought to life and placed in a modern context. The result is not a dogmatic textbook but a calm, almost philosophical guide.
The language is clear, dignified and imbued with a palpable respect for the horse. It becomes plain throughout that the author is not interested in quick methods or superficial results, but in a deeper understanding of the animal as a feeling, thinking being.
A book for all those who seek, in their dealings with horses, something more than technique — namely, a relationship.
This book is far more than yet another guide to handling horses. It is a piece of cultural history, a rehabilitation of a forgotten master, and a personal legacy — all at once, and all written in a register that convinces from beginning to end.
What makes the book exceptionalIts greatest strength lies in the rediscovery of Constantin Balassa. That an Imperial-Royal cavalry captain had already developed, in 1828, a complete and psychologically grounded system of non-coercive horse training — and that this knowledge was almost entirely forgotten — is in itself a story that needed to be told. Georg Zangl tells it not as dry archival work but as a vivid, argumentatively confident account in which Balassa's voice returns again and again in the original. The juxtaposition with J. S. Rarey — the skilful salesman whose method delivered far less than it promised — gives the book a dramatic tension that carries the reader through the historical chapters.
Equally notable is the courage to resist celebrating the modern Natural Horsemanship movement uncritically, and instead to place it within the historical line. The portraits of Roberts, Parelli, Brannaman and Hempfling are fair, nuanced and free of polemic — and yet clear in their argument that the core of what this movement markets as novelty was formulated two hundred years ago. The chapter "Four Men, One Thought" is the intellectual centrepiece of the book and ranks among the finest writing I have encountered in equestrian literature.
Around the year 1800, in the county of Cork, there lived an Irish farmer who knew no horse he could not tame within half an hour. He did not pass on his secret. He died, and the secret died with him.
At roughly the same time, a young Austrian officer observed in Vienna that horses which had for years resisted shoeing with all their might stood motionless after a brief, calm conversation with him — it was scarcely more than that. He wrote down his method. It was introduced throughout the imperial cavalry and then forgotten.
Twenty years later, an American toured the European capitals and sold his secret for good money. His secret was no secret. It was — in part at least — the same thing the Irish farmer had known. And the same thing the Austrian officer had written down.
A hundred and thirty years later, a quiet man from Montana rode across the United States and showed what he had learned: not from his father, who had beaten him, but from horses, which had shown him. What he did had no name that could be sold. It was the same thing.
That is the riddle of this book. Not: what was the horse tamers' secret? That question has been answered. The real riddle is: why did the same discovery have to be made afresh each time? Why did the knowledge vanish every time, shortly after it had been found? And what does that tell us about the knowledge itself — and about us?
Before the three epochs are examined individually, the thought itself must be named. It is simple. Its simplicity is the reason it has so often been overlooked. The horse is by nature no enemy of man. It is a flight animal. It resists not out of malice but out of fear. Whoever removes the fear removes the resistance. Whoever replaces the fear with trust gains a companion.
That is all. In these four sentences lies the entire knowledge that Sullivan did not reveal, that Balassa wrote down, that Rarey marketed and that Brannaman embodies. The behavioural science of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has translated the same sentences into the language of science. It has added nothing essential. It has confirmed. The question, therefore, is not what the thought is. The question is why it is so hard to hold.
The Man Who Said Nothing
James Sullivan, who died in 1810 in the county of Cork, left no writings. What we know of him comes from eyewitness accounts, themselves handed down at second and third hand. He shut himself in a stable with the horse. After half an hour, during which little or no commotion could be heard, he gave the sign. The door was opened and the horse was found lying on the ground, Sullivan playing beside it like a dog.
What he did with the horse in that quiet half-hour he told no one. His contemporary Jumper was the opposite: loud, brutal, dressed in red plush, riding a buffalo. Jumper conquered horses through exhaustion and overpowering. Sullivan's horses obeyed. Jumper's horses were broken. The difference is not small.
What Sullivan Knew
Balassa, who was familiar with the reports about Sullivan and Jumper, wrote: "It is said that in England there are horse tamers who enjoy a reputation for sorcery because they calm the wildest and most vicious horses simply by saying something into their ear. But if the fact is not invented, it undoubtedly rests on charlatanry; for the horse will indeed allow something to be said into its ear, but shakes its head and remains as before. It is possible, however, that these horse tamers possess a secret method of calming these horses and seek to deceive the onlookers merely by the whispering into the ear."
Balassa's conclusion is the right one. Sullivan did not deceive the onlookers because he was a fraud, but because he considered the onlookers irrelevant. What he did, he did for the horse. The whispering was incidental. The effect came from something else: from patience, from fearlessness, from a posture that communicated to the horse: "I am not an attacker." The horse understood. It lay down.
Sullivan carried this knowledge within him like a physical ability: not acquired from books, but from countless hours with horses, from a feel that language cannot easily capture. "Such qualities are entirely the personal property of the one who possesses them, so that they can be transmitted to others neither through pamphlets nor through lessons" — this sentence, later written about Rarey, applies to Sullivan more deeply still. The knowledge died with him because it was not knowledge that could be written down. It was an attitude.
— The book is published on 5 May 2026 —
— ✦ —Classic works on horsemanship from the public domain — free to download. Many of these sources form the foundation of Your Horse as a Friend.
Alfred Zangl completed the draft of this book in May 1984 — after years of research in Austrian archives and immersion in historical works on horsemanship. The manuscript lay unnoticed for four decades.
Georg Zangl, his son, rediscovered it and completed the work. He modernised the style with care, added insights from modern behavioural science, and wove the historical sources into the present. The book is published on 5 May 2026 in Laxenburg, Austria — in the Year of the Fire Horse.
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