A Conversation With…John Lyons

In late March, the inimitable John Lyons conducted a three-day symposium (followed by a three-day clinic) in Little Rock. Of course, we couldn’t let a golden opportunity to converse one-on-one with America’s Most Trusted Horseman pass us by. So we joined 157 other brave (or were we foolish?) horse lovers and spent a Friday evening shivering in a 37-degree arena at the State Fairgrounds to learn a thing or two from the master. We weren’t disappointed.
The weekend did provide a few surprises. While introducing himself to the crowd Friday night, Lyons mentioned not only that he is divorced (and has been for almost two years) but that the woman we might see him kissing on was his girlfriend of the past year, Jody Davini. At the time, that seemed a curious thing to address right from the get-go.
Thankfully, the weather warmed enough over the weekend to keep the frostbite at bay. On Saturday, Lyons spent a good chunk of the afternoon working a horse that a local woman had brought him because she had trouble leading it (in fact, it broke free a couple of times before she could get it in the arena). Lyons worked a bit of his trademark magic on the formerly skittish horse and had it calmed down in no time.
Sunday, however, brought the true test. Shortly before the lunch break, two men showed up with a gorgeous 5-year-old Saddlebred that had never been shod, that had only been saddled a handful of times (apparently, the men had used a chokehold to do so; in another attempt, they convinced a girl to jump on the horse’s back in a pond) and had not removed its halter in a year and a half because they couldn’t get near enough to do so. When the crazed horse careened into the round pen, its state of panic was palpable. That several hours later, Lyons not only had managed to remove the halter but had bridled the horse, had easily inspected its hooves and had the horse calmly following him around was nothing short of amazing.
It was during the Sunday lunch break that Roundup editor Lisa Broadwater met with Lyons. Actually, she joined Lyons and Davini in their trailer. As Davini whipped up a little lunch for the couple, Lyons and Broadwater tackled the Q&A. But, alas, not all Conversations go as we hope….

HR: Is this a typical symposium?
Lyons: No, this is pretty light. Usually we have 300 to 400 people. It's not Arkansas' fault. We didn't get the advertising out enough; we didn't let people know. But that's okay. I've been doing this since 1980; the people who are here are just as important — if there's one or 100 or 400 or 700. We've had as many as 700 come.

HR: I would think that the participants would be able to get more out of it when it's not so crowded.
Lyons: Maybe a little bit. One thing for sure is that, with this size audience, everybody ends up with a good seat. When there was 700, there were eight or nine rows, and it's really hard to see, since we don't do them in elevated arenas.

HR: Do you cover the same ground each time?
Lyons: No, because I'd get bored covering the same thing every weekend.

HR: How much time are you spending on the road?
Lyons: Not as much as I used to. But, still, probably this year about 15 to 20 weeks. I used to spend 40 weeks or more.

HR: I thought you had stopped traveling.
Lyons: I tried — several times — and didn't quite get it done. I kind of take it as it comes. I plan on slowing down even more a great deal.

HR: How soon?
Lyons: I'd like to keep that a secret, but at the end of this year. When I finish this run (which is about four or five more weeks), I'm just gonna do a few more things.

HR: Do you ever have any layover time to catch your breath?
Lyons: No. [Road manager/ranch manager] Kevin [McIntosh] starts on Friday morning with the setup, then we do Friday night, which generally ends about 10 or 10:30. Then all day Saturday and all day Sunday; then we do clinics Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We drive on Thursday and set up on Friday.

HR: What do you travel with?
Lyons: Just Jody and I, and Kevin. There are generally seven or eight volunteers in each city that help put on the weekend symposium. Jody's at home much of the time; it's just rare weeks that she can come out and we get to play and have time together.

HR: How many horses?
Lyons: Three. I have Zip, Seattle and Preacher.

HR: Are you going to use Zip today?
Lyons: I was planning on it, but then these guys came up — just like a story out of the '40s. They roped this horse, choked it down and it was just a huge fight. They dragged it into a pond and put a saddle on it.

HR: That was mind-blowing to me — some of the things they were saying they had done.
Davini: But I don't think they even knew it was really bad.
Lyons: No. that's what he said. He said, “I had no clue about all this [round-pen training] until three years ago. I just did it the way I learned to do it.” And it's done worse than that in many areas of the world.

HR: Is that frustrating for you? Do you ever ask people, “What the heck do you think you're doing?”
Lyons: Why? Are they bad people?

HR: No, but what they're doing seems cruel.
Lyons: But that's where you're coming from and your horse knowledge and what you've had an opportunity to learn. They didn't come from that, so their perception of what a horse is and the way it's handled is the way they were taught when they were growing up. What's right and wrong is only determined by the time and the place. At one time, our own government will say it's okay for you to take a gun and shoot people. But if you walk out here right now and shoot somebody, the same government will tell you it's wrong. So is shooting people right or is shooting people wrong? It's pretty confusing…
HR: So what do you say to those guys? Or do you just accept that it's their way?
Lyons: I accept that they did it. I don't look at it as being bad. I try to show them something different.

HR: You try to give them an alternative without any kind of judgment?
Lyons: That's right.

HR: That's hard to do.
Lyons: It's only hard to do if we have the attitude that we're better than somebody else, that we don't make mistakes, that we know more than somebody else. Then all of a sudden, by us knowing more, it puts us better than somebody else and then we stand on their shoulders and tell them how wrong they are. That's how people get involved in people's lives when they don't need to be.
So the idea is not to stand on their shoulders to make me taller, not to belittle them for what they did or to criticize them for what they did. Because if I'm criticizing somebody, what I'm saying is I'm better than they are, I'm smarter than they are, I'm a better person than they are. Which makes me look more important to somebody else.
So what I'm doing is standing on those two old men's shoulders trying to make the audience think I'm better, since I'm criticizing what they do. That's not my job. My job is to explain to the audience what has been done to the horse and for them to explain what has been done to the horse.
I feel sorry for the horse — because of what the horse has had to go through. I feel sorry for the men because I know how hard that is. Because it's a huge fight — no one wins in it. The men don't win. It's a struggle for them, and they don't want to choke the horse down. They love horses; that's why they're around them. I don't love horses or you don't love horses any more than they do. Plus, they've been around horses a lot longer than the both of us. You know?
The only reason they did what they did is that they didn't know any different. No one wants to look bad with a horse; nobody wants the horse to put up a big fight. Everyone wants to make it look easy: “Look how much I know.” So the only reason they did what they did is they didn't know there was an easier way to do it.

HR: What's your motivation for being out here? Because I would assume at this point in your life, you don't have to do this.
Lyons: No, I don't. I do it because I enjoy the process of helping people, I enjoy the cards and letters and those things that come back in, where people say how much it's helped them. So I do it for that satisfaction. Not for really any ultra-puristic reasons, trying to help the horse world. I mean, we do that, for sure — we want to do those things. But it's really just enjoying what you're doing and helping people.

HR: How much have your methods changed since the early days of your clinics?
Lyons: They don't have percentage points that high. Whether it's 100 percent or 10,000 percent, they've changed a phenomenal amount.

HR: Is one of the differences the importance on having control without pain? I remember you say during the symposium that "Pain doesn't help you train a horse, but it makes you feel more like a cowboy." Was there a day when you trained differently?
Lyons: Oh yeah. Sure. What I teach people is that if you came to a clinic and you learned something, and then you came back in six months, if I was doing the same thing, don't ever come back again. Because it would mean that for six months I've wasted my time; I should have changed by then. The idea is that we continually learn, not that we find something that works and stay doing that same thing forever.

HR: I remember reading that in the first few clinics, it was just a few people sitting in a freezing arena.
Lyons: Yeah, the first clinic I did had one owner, two horses and one observer. During the first couple of years, I did a lot of clinics where I was the only one there.

HR: But people are willing to sit in 30-degree weather and participate. Why?
Lyons: Because they love horses. And they love their hobby, and they love what they're doing. They want to improve that so bad they're willing to sit through that cold.

HR: What's the single most important lesson you teach in one of these weekends?
Lyons: I don't have a clue.

HR: Then, what do you hope people walk away with?
Lyons: A change in perception that either the horse is a dumb animal or that they have to fight and force the horse to do things. That so many things that they do are easier to do than the methods they're currently using.

HR: What's the most important lesson you've learned?
Lyons: That people are good people, no matter where you go. There's no bad people.

HR: What about horses?
Lyons: For sure, there's no bad horses.

HR: What's the most important training lesson you've learned?
Lyons: How to make a lesson plan for a horse — how to set a goal, define the goal (what I'm teaching the horse, what I'm trying to achieve) and then getting a starting place, getting the steps in between the starting place and the goal. Learning that formula and learning how to use that formula is probably the most critical thing.

HR: What's the most common mistake you see people making?
Lyons: Inconsistency because of a lack of knowledge. Inconsistency in their cues, in their behavior to their horse. Then the horse becomes inconsistent. None of us realize how inconsistent we are in our signals. It's impossible for consistency to come from inconsistency.

HR: Is consistency the most important thing to have when working with a horse?
Lyons: Oh yeah. And understanding. We spend a lot of time in the arena trying to teach them one thing, and then get two steps outside the arena and do something different.

HR: You said you've made a lot of mistakes. Name a few.
Lyons: I never focus on them.

HR: You just move on?
Lyons: Yeah, you forget them and move on. Because if you dwell on the mistakes, pretty soon it cripples you from going forward. You get too worried about the mistakes or focus on the mistake itself. So the idea is to learn from the mistake, then forget it.

HR: Do most people who come here have a Western background?
Lyons: No, not at all. Maybe 40 percent ride English.

HR: You use cones in the round pen similar to what's used in dressage. How long have you followed dressage?
Lyons: The first dressage riders came to a clinic in 1981 in Michigan.

HR: Are there any differences in...
Lyons: They think there are, but no.

HR: What do they think is different?
Lyons: They think contact is different, they think the horse is different, that somehow collection is different. But that's getting to be true less and less. Dressage riders are beginning to understand that they can look outside their individual styles of riding to improve their horses.

HR: There were a couple of points you made that I'd like you to elaborate on. First, “99.9 percent of riders can't control the elevation of a horse's head.” Why not?
Lyons: They don't know how.

HR: Why is that important?
Lyons: How are you going to tell the horse where to put his head? When he's excited, where's his head? How are you going to help him calm down? It's a cue I know to get him to calm down when a horse is rearing. How do you get a horse to stop rearing? Use a Coke bottle over his head? That's what those two guys [who brought the Saddlebred] would do. Or maybe a water balloon, a bat, a crop. Or they might pull him over backwards and turn him down.
So how are you going to get a horse to stop rearing?

HR: Get him to drop his head. So you're saying that's fundamental to doing everything else, and if we don't understand that...
Lyons: Well, if we can't ask the horse to drop his head, then how are we communicating what we want from the horse? What system are we using? We have little to no control over his head. We can pull him left and right, but we really don't have a way to talk to the horse's head — to say, “Go up a little bit; go down a little bit; go over here a little bit.”
Controlling his head elevation gives the calm-down cue, it gives the stop-rearing cue, it gives us control of his balance. It helps us teach him how to round his back out, how to soften his shoulders, how to take some of the weight off his front end and put it to his hind quarters. There's lots of different reasons I want to control the elevation of his head besides “The judge says it's pretty at this level.”

HR: Here's another: “You don't gain control by riding the whole horse.” Do most people assume that's what you do?
Lyons: Sure. They try to ride a horse the way they drive a car.

HR: Elaborate a little.
Lyons: The person who has a horse bucking with him, what piece of the horse do they have control over?

HR: None.
Lyons: The horse that's running away with someone on his back. What part do they have control over?

HR: None.
Lyons: The horse that's rearing up...

HR: None.
Lyons: So is it important to be able to control a part of the horse. Yes. Why? So you can stop these kinds of things. When we have no control over any part of the horse, we lose control of all the horse. When we have control over part of the horse — if I can get the horse's nose to the feed bucket in the trailer, the rest of the horse is going to be pretty close to the trailer.

HR: Have you ever had a horse that was untrainable?
Lyons: No.

HR: What would you tell someone who said to you, “My horse is untrainable”?
Lyons: Not true. The horse is very trainable, if not by you by somebody else. So you don't ever have to kill them just because you can't train them. When somebody wants to put a horse down because they don't want to sell a horse that's dangerous, what they're saying is they're the best trainer in the world, and if they can't work for the horse, nobody else can. Even if I couldn't fix a horse, there's somebody out there who could. I'd give it to Jody.
Okay, you know what I need to do? Since we have to start back in about 20 minutes, what I want to do is, we can pick this up a little bit later today. That would be great. When we're on the road, I don't get to spend too much time with Jody, so I need a little private time with her.

With that, Broadwater was escorted out of the trailer. She attempted to continue the Conversation with Lyons again at the afternoon break (she had gotten about halfway through her prepared questions), but Lyons was swarmed with fans and autograph-seekers for the duration of the one-hour break. She tried again at the end of the day, waiting around for an hour as Lyons chatted and signed autographs and fans posed with Zip. After overhearing Lyons tell the group he had to leave to make a date with Davini, she put away her tape recorder and called it a day.