The Move Most People Get Backwards With a Cow — and What It Teaches About Horse Training | Martin Black (Pt. 2)

You think the cow is the hard part.

She isn't. You are.

You get ahead of her to turn her, and she beats you to the herd every time. You spur, you pull, the horse's head comes up, and now nobody is watching the cow at all.

Martin Black has read millions of head of cattle, and the horse training lesson underneath all of it is the one almost everybody gets backwards. To cut one cow out, you leave her alone and stir the herd around her. To turn her, you turn away — not toward. The horse rates the cow the way a foal learns to rate its mother in the first thirty minutes of life. It's already in there. Our job is to stay out of the road so the horse can use it.

This is Part 2 of my week with Martin on his ranch in the Great Basin. Part 1 is the ranch, the horses, and reading the moment — start there.

We work the balance point and the flight zone, and why a cow reads your horse's head like a horn and your horse's hip like something softer. Why getting in front of a cow to block her only sends her faster. What Tom Dorrance told Martin decades ago about turning tail, and how that one idea makes a green horse handier by the day. Gene Lewis, his mother's cousin, and jumpers that rate a fence with nobody telling them where to put their feet.

Then the part that reshaped how I keep my own horses. Turnout over stalls. Bare feet when the ground allows. A crick to cross and rocks to pick through, because a horse who has to sort out the terrain grows savvy, and a horse who never has to stays a passenger.

Martin runs horses as a business, not a companion animal, and says his vet bills will stand against anyone's. Colic almost unheard of. Feet the ground keeps honest. It made me ask what I was really protecting when I bubble-wrapped mine.

The horse training here is subtraction, not addition. Cows think more like horses than you'd guess, and empathy runs under all of it.

Martin Black is a lifelong Great Basin horseman and stockman from a multi-generation ranching family, working in the vaquero tradition and the lineage of Tom Dorrance. He spent ten years starting young horses at Calumet Farm in Lexington and now teaches horsemanship and stockmanship through clinics and a ranch school.

If you want to go further with your own horse, NF+ has 70+ masterclasses at noellefloydplus.com or through the app link in the show notes.

In This Episode You'll Learn

• The move almost everyone gets backwards: to hold a single cow, you leave her alone and stir the herd around her
• Why getting in front of a cow to block her only sends her faster back to the herd — and what to do the instant she turns
• How a cow reads your horse's head like a horn and your horse's hip like something softer, so a leg-yield moves her where a headbutt would spook her
• What Tom Dorrance told Martin about turning tail to a cow, and how it makes a green horse rounder and handier by the day
• Gene Lewis and colts that rate a fence themselves, with nobody telling them where to put their feet
• Why a collected walk finally had a purpose the day Noelle worked cattle on Lady
• What ten years starting babies at Calumet and a lifetime in the Great Basin say about turnout, bare feet, and letting a horse sort out rough ground
• The barbed-wire story, and what a horse who navigates real terrain has that a bubble-wrapped one lacks

Chapters

0:00 Part 2: cutting a cow by leaving her alone
1:40 Holding cattle without a fence — what it takes
3:40 Sorting without stalking: keeping a cow parasympathetic
5:40 Cows think like horses — Dr. Peters & Temple Grandin
8:30 The old way wasn't the cruel way
10:40 After WWII: how the mechanized age lost the horsemanship
11:20 What a chuck wagon really was (Great Basin history)
14:34 [ad: Total Feeds]
17:49 The balance point & flight zone, explained
21:00 Rating: the foal, the herd, and the safe place
26:40 Headbutt vs. tail-butt: why a leg-yield moves a cow softer
30:40 The move most people get backwards: never turn into the cow
33:43 [ad: Noelle's Substack]
34:47 Predator habits that get in the way
37:30 Tom Dorrance on turning tail
40:50 Gene Lewis: horses that rate the jump themselves
47:00 Managing horses naturally: turnout over stalls
49:00 Barefoot when the ground allows
52:00 Rough terrain makes a savvy horse — the barbed-wire story
55:00 Horses as a business, not a companion animal
59:40 Advice for urban riders: get out of the arena

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Thank you for your listening!