The second half of my interview with Sam Powell happened at his ranch outside of Shelbyville, Tennessee. (I posted Part 1 here on June 18.) We strolled through his field, past the porch swing overlooking the pond and the motorized horse walker, into the barn to visit his three horses, before returning to the rugged wooden porch attached to his house. The air around us cooled as the sun dipped behind the trees that line his property.
By now I understood why Powell is a horse whisperer. Earlier that day I’d watched as a client brought in her Palomino. It was nervous, jumpy, resistant to her efforts to calm it down. After she’d left the corral, Powell approached the animal, touched its neck, spoke a few quiet words. In a few seconds the horse had settled and allowed him to climb onto its back.
There’s something magical about Sam Powell. In my last hours with him at his place, he recounted the stories behind that magic. I learned a lot about who he is and what he does that late afternoon, but I still think a lot of it is attributable to magic.
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… My great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, so I was also interested in a lot of the Indian cultures. The Indians had a lot more feeling for animals. In most Indian languages there’s no word for “animal.” There are words for horse, dog, cat, bird, or snake, but they’re not grouped as animals. If an Indian walked by a snake, the snake probably wouldn’t bite because, from the Indian’s point of view, that snake had as much right to be where he was as the Indian had to be where he was. If a white man walked by, his hostility would jump out there and the snake would bite him or the horse would kick him. But the Indian knew a way to commune with other species, which to me is a lesson we ought to look back on. So the Indians lived with each animal, not against him. That was a pretty interesting lesson on how you’ve got to understand the horse as an individual. How I work that a colt would depend on his individual personality, but I can’t change the culture that made him a horse. I can only present my way to him in a way that he understands.
That’s where a lot of the Zen philosophies came from. I got into psycho-cybernetics when I was riding bulls.
What exactly is that?
That’s envisioning something. I’d go to a rodeo and look at the draw chute, which tells you what bull you’re going to ride that night. Then I’d go back to the pen, find that bull, and look at him, to see what color he was, whether he was an angus or whatever he was. Then I’d look at the arena. I’d look at my shirt and my clothes. And then I’d go sit in a corner, someplace by myself, and visualize everything: that particular bull, the shirt I had on, the crowd, the arena. I’d ride that bull one hundred times in my mind – and it was a good ride every time. It didn’t necessarily mean I was going to ride him 101 times when the gate opened. But when I crawled down on that bull, there was no apprehension, because I’d been on this bull a hundred times. It helped me focus. Instead of going “oh, I’m scared,” I could concentrate on the now.
I used that same theory in a lot of things I did. I’ll visualize what I want to do with this horse. I work around it for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. A lot of times, when I’m doing clinics and they bring a young horse in, the owner will want to tell me a lot about the horse. I’ll tell him, “Don’t tell me about it, because it’s just your opinion. I don’t want your opinion. I want the horse to give me the true facts.” So I’ll go out there myself, and the horse and I can start on an equal footing when I walk in the pen. I’ve got no opinions of him and he’s got no opinions of me.
“I had cowboys tell me I ought to be wearing a dress out there while I was whispering to horses.”
As you expanded your imagination and your knowledge, how did you begin integrating that into your work with horses? And how did the people who knew you react to all of this?
I had cowboys tell me I ought to be wearing a dress out there while I was whispering to horses. They literally told me that. They still wanted the macho deal, and I was out there trying to get along with this horse.
But other people’s reactions to me got my attention. All of a sudden I was feeling a closeness to people around me that I hadn’t felt before. Something drew them to me. There was more of a relaxed atmosphere with people I’d meet. In going someplace where I knew nobody, walking into an airport, I’d stand there, drinking a cup of coffee, and somebody would come up and just start a conversation. I got to thinking about what brought them over here. Then I got to thinking about all the Zen deals and some of the Indian stuff that radiates good karma, bad karma, and whatever. It may sound corny, but when you become at peace with yourself, it starts going out a little bit and it draws people to you. I couldn’t put a finger on why, but I kept thinking about it.
What’s the essence of your technique with horses?
It all boils down to trying to build a relationship with that horse. I don’t care if you’re trying to build a relationship with a girlfriend or a horse; if you don’t have good communications and good understanding, it ain’t gonna work. Everything I do with a horse is starting to make it easier for the horse to do it and to understand what I’m asking it to do. Really, in all honesty, I’m not teaching the horse to do anything he didn’t know how to do. I just have to ask him to do those things and get out of his way and let him do what he does.
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The horse is a part of American culture in so many ways, but there also seem to be myriad ways in which people can relate destructively to horses.
You’re right, there are lots of aspects of it, but a lot of it is money. When you get the woman who maybe doesn’t have the best marriage, she buys a horse and becomes a therapist to it. But the Old West mentality is coming back. Once in a while somebody calls me a cowboy, and that’s the greatest compliment in the world they could have given me. The cowboy ethic is so strong, that “ride for the brand” type of thing. If I’m taking a paycheck from you, I don’t care what you tell me to do, I’m going to do it because you’re paying me to do that job. And if I don’t like it, I’ll quit and let somebody else do it. That’s cowboy ethics. It’s very strong and it’s starting to come back into itself. Years ago, when you’d walk around with a hat and boots on, everybody would look at you like you were dumb. Now they want to wear that uniform. They want to be associated with cowboys. Guys like Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott are making movies more to show that cowboy morality.
If we could go back to the real cowboy era, would we have seen people working with horses differently than we see now, perhaps closer to what you’re doing?
Yeah, I think so. What I do now, I learned from my dad back in the Fifties. And he learned it from somebody else. Unfortunately, not that many people did it. Fifty years ago, even, horses were a nickel a pound. You could buy a good horse for fifty dollars. They weren’t really worth anything, so they didn’t really spend the time. Now we’ve got horses going for up to a hundred thousand dollars, so they don’t want to mess him up. I’m going to spend a little more time with him to get it right. It's really important that this mentality is coming around.
When you started your business as a holistic trainer, how did you deal with practical issues of marketing that idea to customers who weren’t familiar with it?
Well, I’d been at the ranch for twenty-two years. The people who owned the ranch turned the running of the ranch over to one of their daughters. She was twenty-five or twenty-six years old. She proceeded to fire everybody. My wife was still alive, but she was crippled with arthritis. I was a fifty-year-old cowboy, out of a job. When you live on a ranch, they furnish you the house, the utilities, your telephone, so all of a sudden I’m out of a job, I have an invalid wife, I have no house or car. I can’t get electric and telephone hooked up because there’s no record of me ever having a telephone. I’ve got no insurance. And I’ve got a wife that has to have three hundred dollars a month of medicine.
I didn’t know what to do, so I loaded up in a truck and started going around to ranches that had a lot of horses. I said, “I’ll break your colts for so much a horse.” That’s what I did: I left her with my two daughters and took off down the road. I went from one ranch to another, starting the colts. I’d send the money back home and go to another place. She finally passed away. Then I got to doing some clinics. I’d do a couple of demonstrations, back in the early Eighties, and people would say, “Boy, I like the way you colt.” I thought, “This is a good deal. I can make as much here in a day as I was making in two months at my ranch.” I started doing it. I came back to Tennessee to do a clinic. The manager of Reba McEntire’s horse farm happened to be there. She came up to me after it was over and said, “Could you possibly stay another day and help us with a horse?” She didn’t tell me whose it was. I said yeah. She gave me directions on how to get to the farm.
The next day I went out to the farm. I went, “Boy, this is quite a place.” Reba happened to be there. We visited for a while. She was showing me this horse. I worked with it a little bit and told her, “I don’t think I can help your horse. There’s something deeper going on with him.” Anyway, I went back to Oklahoma. A few months later, she called me and asked me if I’d come back to Tennessee. So I came back, and over a period of time I made four or five trips out here. At that time I was living in a little travel trailer. I just had a mailbox and that’s about it. Reba said, “Why don’t you move to Tennessee instead of driving back and forth?” So I parked my little trailer over to her place and stayed there for about a year or in an apartment over the barn. She was like home folks.
Are you star-struck at all when working with people like that?
No, because the horses gave me such an avenue to talk with people on a level playing field. They’re worth ten million or a hundred million dollars, they’re signing autographs, and I’m just an old cowboy with a tenth-grade education. But we’ve got something in common that we can talk about. So, yeah, they’re famous, and everybody looks up to them, but they put their britches on one leg at a time. And even at Reba’s, watching the lack of freedom she had, she couldn’t go out to the steak house and eat with us. I’m not so sure I like that deal. I kind of like the common part of it. I respect those people for their talent and the hard work they put into getting where they are. Most people just see where they are; they don’t see what it took to get there. I respect that because I know how hard I’ve worked these past fifty years to get to this point, and it’s nowhere close to where they’re at. It’s been a fun trip. It ain’t over yet.
Life After Machismo
Horses were always a part of your life. Even when you were a kid, did you relate to horses as you do now? Or did you go through a period of a more dominating relationship?
I went through that thing of, “Just go ahead and get tough with me. I’ll just get tougher. I’ll make you do whatever I want you to do. You want to buck, go ahead; you can’t buck me off.” I didn’t have any compassion for them. I didn’t have much compassion for anything. I’d get in a fist fight just as quick as I …
It wasn’t just horses, then. It was how you related to life.
My whole thing was to get in your face. If you push me too hard, I’d push back a little harder. By the time you get a little older, every time I’d pick myself up off the ground from either a fist fight or a horse bucking me off, I’d get to thinking there had to be a better way to do this. Then I started changing about thirty or thirty-five years ago. I had to find another way to get along. The horse didn’t want to have any trouble; I was creating it.
So you liked horses even then, but the way you related to the world kept you from feeling that.
I’ll give you a good example. My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven or ninety-eight years old, I guess. One day, when I was about twenty-five, she came to me and gave me a little wooden box. It was like a sewing box, but it had a lock on it. I said, “What am I going to do with this thing?” She said, “Well, I would suggest you put your ego in there, lock it up, and throw the key away, or you’re never going to have any success.” I thought about that for a long time but I didn’t really understand what she meant.
“Ego gets in the way of everything.”
Then as I got older I began to understand that ego gets in the way of everything. Ego will not allow you to accept responsibility. It’s easier to blame somebody else. If you’re picked up for speeding, you blame the cop for putting the damn speed zone in there. So we always blame. As I got older I realized that I was blaming the horses for a lot of stuff. It wasn’t the horse’s fault; it was my responsibility. Grandma asked me one time, about twenty years ago, “Did you throw the key away to that little box?” I said, “No, Grandma, I didn’t.” She said, “How come?” I said, “I kept finding out I had a little more ego to put in it, so I couldn’t ever lock it.”
It took a long time to get rid of that ego. To me, civilization is made up of people that won’t accept responsibility. You can listen to the news, you can listen to politicians, you can listen to anybody you want to, and everybody’s blaming somebody else for what’s going on.
When a politician gets caught doing something wrong, he always gets up there and says, “I made a mistake.” No, he didn’t make a mistake; he did something wrong.
We do two things, and the newscasters and the politicians are great examples. Number one, we’re not going to accept responsibility because the Republicans are going to blame Democrats and Democrats will blame Republicans. The other thing is that the art of listening is gone. You watch two of those newscasters or two politicians, and they never shut up to listen; they’re talking at the same time. They’re not interested in what you have to say; they’re interested in what they can tell you. But you can’t do that with a horse. I have to really listen to that horse. He can say, “Look, I don’t understand this. I’m a little troubled about this.” If I’m listening I’ll get that before he throws me in the dirt.
“Yesterday is like a canceled check and tomorrow is like a promissory note; neither one of them do you much good.”
Was there a time that you first heard that kind of a message from a horse?
That was thirty years ago, but it was a gradual thing. You learn, in a sense, to be fine-tuned to hear that horse. He’s so subtle in his language that you have to be totally aware of things. So I read a lot for years, trying to understand a little bit more about other things. I got to see how much common ground there was.
That started when I had acupuncture done on my knee. I was talking to the acupuncturist down in San Antonio. He was Chinese. Even Zen philosophy has a lot to do with the horse. Zen, basically, is that you live in the now. That’s where the horse is. He’s always right now. He’s not thinking about what he’s going to do after lunch. He’s not thinking, “Where do I want to go?” He’s worried only about right now. So I’ve got to stay in the now with him. I can’t get out ahead of him and I can’t get behind him. Yesterday is like a canceled check and tomorrow is like a promissory note; neither one of them do you much good. You’ve got to stay right now, with the horse. And I can only reward or discipline what’s going on right now. It’s not like when you were a kid and your mom would say, “Boy, when your dad gets home, you’re going to get your butt busted.” You can’t do that with a horse.
[Powell offers some snacks. “Beef sticks,” he says. “I’ve got to keep all my friends in the cattle business alive.”]
Lots of people start riding horses because they’re not in the present. They see a picture of themselves in the future on a horse, like John Wayne or some sort of archetype. They’re using the horse to construct a self-image.
It’s like people driving. You ride down the road. You’re thinking about going to Nashville. You get to Nashville and I say, “Did you see that dead deer along the road? Did you see that house that burned down?” No, you didn’t. All you were interested in was that destination. You’re not interested in the way the journey takes.
When I look at the horse, I’m interested only in the journey. I’ve got to have a destination; I don’t get in my truck without having a destination in mind. But I’m also very much aware of the journey as I go down the road. That’s what keeps me from having wrecks. I drove over a million miles and I've never had a wreck, because I’m aware all the time of everything that’s going on around me.
The Eyes Have It
When you get your own horse, what attributes matter to you?
The first thing I look at is his eyes. That’s the window to his soul. But that shouldn’t be a strange thing. You look in people’s eyes yourself. There’s a certain look that we can’t ever take away from our eyes. With the horses, it really works out well. I fell in love with Rooster’s eyes. They were soft and kind and inquisitive.
Do some horses look you in the eye and others turn away, like people?
Yeah, and some of them have a hard look in their eye – a challenge. Some of them have an eye that’s scared to death of everything that moves. I look for the eyes to be the same. I don’t want to see a blue eye and a brown eye. I want exactly the same eye on both sides. That’s the only way I can get a horse to be exactly the same on both sides.
What does it mean for a horse’s eyes not to match?
It means his vision is different. Some people who try to wear contacts, one for reading and one for looking far away, have a terrible time balancing their lives. The horse is the same way. So I look for two eyes that are exactly the same, and I know I’ll have a better chance of balancing that horse.
“When that horse comes up and … he’s got his head over your shoulder, you think, ‘He just loves me.’ No, he doesn’t.”
Does affection play any role in your work?
Well, I think everything a horse does will relate back to its natural instinct, when it was in the wild. I know some people believe their horse loves them. Well, they don’t. They have no concept of affection. They have a concept of security and comfort. If I give him security and comfort, yeah, he’ll stick with me. Rooster knows that if something troubles him, I am his source of comfort and security. He’ll come looking for me, but it’s not because he loves me.
Now, I think dogs really do have affection. I’ve known dogs that, when their owner dies after they’ve been together for years, the dog dies. But then again, you’re looking at two different cultures: Horses are prey animals and dogs are predators. We’re predators, so we’re kind of on the same wavelength. That’s the hardest thing to get across to people. When that horse comes up and he’s pushing on you and he’s got his head over your shoulder, you think, “He just loves me.” No, he doesn’t. He’s trying to get you to step up and say, “Don’t do that. I’m the boss and you are invading my space.” So you say, “Get back!” And he gets back and the first thing he thinks is, “Whew! That’s good. I need a leader in my life, and he’s my leader.” That’s what gives a horse security and comfort: a leader he can respect. When you allow him to push around on you, he has no respect for you.
In an ideal world, where people and horses might live as they were intended to rather than how people think they should, would there be competitions and walking horses? Or would it be closer to your holistic vision?
It would have been closer to the holistic part of it. A hundred years ago the horses were essential to everyday survival, so they bred the horses and made the confirmation more suitable to the job they were intended to do. And then money came into the deal for a recreation thing, and the recreation part of the horse business started. That changed things. Now we’re cloning world-champion horses. We’re transferring embryos out of mares that have produced world champions. A breeder will take that embryo and put it in another mare and breed her again. They’ll take five or six embryos out of one mare, trying to produce more winners. I don’t believe that cloning will work. I realize the DNA is the same, but there are too many variables: the environment, the way they’re handled, the trainer’s ability, will all enter into it. Even the mother that raises that DNA clone is going to have to be identical to the mother that raised the first one, because so much of the horse’s behavior is learned from the mother.
With cloning becoming part of the picture, are people still relating to these animals for what they are?
They’re looking at them as a means to an end. The end is going to be money or prestige. They’re losing the essence of the horse.
Your clients must surely know how you feel, yet you and they still choose to do business.
That’s true up to a point, but if you look around, I don’t have sixty head of horses, like some of these other trainers do. I don’t believe in that part of it. From an economical point of view, mine is probably not the most lucrative idea to have. But I sleep well at night.
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