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Sound off 
Welcome to our editorial page. Here is where you will find the real news and climate of the horse world.
All opinions are the sole responsiblity of the writer and not kingdomofhorses.com
April 1. 2007
A reader sounds off
After reading your article on Pat Parelli's training seminar tours it came to me that it would be a great service to horse owners if someone would attend a seminar of all the "new non-resistance" trainers out there that are advertising on RFD-TV and basically all using the same techniques but with their own special halters, leads, sticks, etc. My daughter and I attended a Dennis Reis 2-day seminar in TN last November. The only good thing I can say about the seminar is the tickets were free - but it was still a 50 mile drive to the arena. He had one "problem" horse from the area that had leading problems. The owner said the horse would rear up and fall over. The audience never saw the problem. As far as I could tell he would balk some but with some gentle encouragement he led pretty good to be a wild dangerous horse. Mr. Reis spent an enormous amount of time doing sound checks, video checks, yelling at his staff, being really disrespectful to his wife while at the same time trying to convince the audience he had realized his mistakes as a young trainer and had acquired a new and profound respect for horses. (He had worked on Pat Parelli's staff (before taking his own shot at the money which is my personal opinion). His complete DVD set (3 courses) plus two training sticks, a halter and lead could be had for a mere $1,000.00. With this $1,000.00 purchase you also became a member of his personal club which allowed you to ride with him at his tour locations a pass certain tests geared to his training videos. After passing these tests you were allowed to use his name to further your own training business. Basically a third of the second day of the seminar was spent watching him certify his $1,000.00 club members which I imagine were following his tour around the country for the privilege. One older lady was trying for her driving test (from the ground) and was having some difficulty so Mr. Reis took over and reverted to his "old" training style. - yelling, jerking, and hitting the horse with his fist. At the beginning of the second day I would estimate there were only half as many people in the audience and they slowly left as the day progressed. My daughter and I asked a couple of questions during the question session and he came back by calling us Thelma & Louise. We felt by attending his seminar we would be acquiring information to help us have a more useful and enjoyable experience with our horses. To repeat myself, I do think it would be a great service to have all the new TV infomercial trainers covered by a knowledgeable horse person and a article written to help all us basically new horse owners. Thank you for the opportunity to SOUND OFF! Marilyn M. - Red Boiling Springs, TN,
Feb. 21, 2007
Getting ripped off on eBay
I sell new horse equipment on eBay. I do research on there to see what others are buying and selling. I am amaised at what people will buy without looking at the photos in detail. I sell mainly driving harnesses and english equipment. Right now I am making a killing on what other people have been ripped off of by. What do I mean? Several large horse equipment sellers on eBay know nothing about horses or horse equipment but people are buying from them. They are selling driving harnesses without traces (a trace is what connects the harness to the cart or buggy). I have taken advantage of this and I am selling traces to those poor souls. I guess it boils down to buyer beware on buying anything you can't see or feel but those people need a harness part and I am happy to supply it.
Aug. 24, 2006
Horse web sites that - lie to their customers
Well here I go again, sounding off. This time it's about other horse web sites. You know the ones - the big (at least in size) classified sites and banner sites that boost "we have over 100K hits a day". Well I did a little research on those "hits" and found out if the claims were true then they would be one of the most top rated web site on the internet - horse site or not. 
One of the miniture horse breed sites that I looked into claims over 140K hits a day. I went to a few ranking sites (sites that let you know how popular a web site is) and they didn't even list the site! 
It is a shame, because of their false claims they are charging and getting over a $100 per banner, for banner advertising, per month! Rip off 
Those poor advertisers think they are getting a good deal. In reality most web sites get about 5-10 hits per day and 10% of them are false readings. Why? Because search engines crawling the site will also register a "hit", as well as someone reloading a page over and over again. This web site does not count hits but "unique visitors". A unique visitor is someone (yes a person) that visits the site for longer than 10 seconds. I recently removed my hit counter on the home page because it was giving me false readings. I now have an invisible counter that I got from statcounter and it works great, Best of all it's free! My biggest surprise came 2 days ago when I logged onto Ranking.com (link to them is on the home page at the bottom) to check out Kingdom of Horses' ranking. Wow the ranking was higher than most of the web sites that I had visited for the past 10 years
Yes we are finally getting REAL visitors (current count 150-300 a day) and they are coming back again. If this keeps up Kingdom of Horses may actually start selling horse shelters (we have been contacted by a company that wants to dropship for us) I am in the "we'll see" mode about that one.
What I want to see happen - everyone interested in paid advertising on a horse web site, investigate that web site's claims of visitors first, before you lay out any money. Check out their web site's rankings. Ranking.com is only one such place to check it out, there are others.
Bottom line - be careful of false claims on the internet, even on horse sites!
Janice Hinterlang - editor, Kingdom of Horses
Aug. 1, 2006
RFD-TV: the cable channel you love to hate
RFDTV for those of you that are unfamilar with it, is a cable tv channel that caters to those people that primarily live out in the rural areas of the USA.
When I started watching RFDTV about 4 years ago, I thought what a great service they are doing for the horse owners everywhere. At the time they were just about the only place to see horses on tv on a regular time schedule. 
That sounds great, but what's my beef about it? As I said, that was 4 years ago. RFDTV has changed since then. 
Gone are the many horse shows, only some have remained. I can tune in and find only about 2 horse related programing shows during my waking hours a day. The horse programing that has remained are western style training videos that are a poor disguise for an infomercial. Email them you say and voice your opinion
Well I did and gotten no response
Not only am I upset about the quanity of horse programing but the quality too. Where does it say that because I live in the county I must like western riding? I would like to see more english related horse programing too, but why stop there? How about competive driving, how to trim your horses hooves, international horse tours (sorry that one is for the Travel channel). You get the idea. As horse lovers and owners we need to stick up more for what is dished out to us on TV, after all we are all paying for it in high cable bills.
Janice Hinterlang - Editor Kingdom of Horses
July 15, 2006
Pat Parelli - what can I say about him and his company?
Yes I did buy one of his first books about 8 years ago, yes I was impressed by him when I saw him on a documentary about horses - also a few years back. But I can also tell you that I was bored by his book and lost interest in it about half way through it. After all that I was still interested in learning about what he does and how he does it.
I have owned and trained horses for the last 15+ years and still think that I could always learn a new tip, technique or method that might help out when I encounter an unusual situtation. So when the offer came to attend a Pat Parelli clinic in Albany, Oregon in May 2006, I jumped at it. I planned to go both days and take my very experienced riding daughter with me.
The day came and we found seats at the top of the grand stand of the indoor arena. The "show" was set to begin at 9am but the doors opened at 8:30am for people to arrive and get good seats. We got there about 8:45am. 9am came and went and we kept waiting. 9:20am and the annoucer said we would be starting shortly. 9:35am and finally the show began.
The first 20 minutes with Pat was interesting but covered everything I already knew about horses - old hat stuff. I liked the fact that he said "don't buy every new training gadget out there." This was someone that I liked - until...... until he started mentioning "his" gadgets and pricey too. Then his wife came into the arena and told us about how she met Pat and on.....and on....and on.....it was very boring. I wanted to see more about the horses!!!
After about another hour of speechs they finally brought in the horses. They did wonderful things like riding and jumping bareback without a bridle, just a rope around the horses' neck. Now this was the stuff I came to learn more about. They took another 1/2 hour break for Pat and his wife to sign autographs and let the crowd buy some pricey clothes and lesson tapes. My daughter wanted a t-shirt or hat as a souvenier but when I saw the prices I had to say no. T-shirts that were priced at $23 and up, an unlined fleece vest with a small Parelli emblem on the front was priced at $150.00. His lesson plans and tapes were out of this world price wise - $395 for the first step in his lesson plan, there are 3 steps that he was pushing that day. I think that the biggest turn off for me was his prices. After all, the area where the "show" was at was a small working community with the closest "big city" over 2 hours away. Average wages around here are around $20K- $30K a year. It was during this break that I saw my first group of people walk out in disgust. Even a friend of mine heard one man say to another "I paid MONEY to see this!"
When the show began again they started to cover beginners stuff like loading a horse in a trailer, which was fine except that my "problem" horses had already mastered that one. Next was leading and they brought in a "problem" horse that would not lead properly, the horse would walk all over the owner. After about 20 minutes it was more apparent that the problem was not the horse but the owner since the horse would do anything that Pat asked of it including loading into the trailer they had in the arena. Nothing was covered that I wanted to know or that I knew how to handle already.
It was slowly becoming apparent to me that the "games" that Pat kept referring to were in reality another name for training. I was disappointed with that fact because my daughter and I really do "play games" with our horses our in pasture without any equipment what so ever.
Another break and then we were back for the final section of the day. More horses and their owners were brought in and they demonstrated what they could do with their horses and told everyone how many YEARS it took to get the horse to that stage. Granted a well trained horse does take time to train and get use to being taken to strange surroundings but it should not take years to just train a horse to ride at the same level as a green broke horse, unless the horse had some abuse problems. None of the owners indicated that the horses were rescues or had been abused in some way.
I came away from this clinic with the opinion that Pat Parelli and his wife are strictly for beginning horse owners. Horse owners that have lots experience with their horses have other methods that work just as well as Pats' do and are far less expensive, oh did I mention the price of his full training set of DVDs and books? - $1500.00! For that price just send your horse to a trainer and you don't have to worry about getting bucked off or stepped on, which might happen if you are a beginner and go it alone with just a DVD to follow.
Janice Hinterlang - Editor, Kingdom of Horses