Training horses for the film “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”: the horse has to want to jump
Remember those extraordinary diving horses we talked about a while back? If not, refresh your memory here.
In that thread and in other online discussions, one of the big questions is: how are the horses trained to do that? There are plenty of animal rights activists who are against the practice and assume it represents (or represented; I don’t think there are any venues left where it’s done for entertainment) cruelty to the animals. Even if a person doesn’t assume it’s cruel, the wonder is how it’s done at all.
Here’s an explanation of how the horses were trained for the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” a film based on the life of one of the women who rode these horses [emphasis mine]:
There are three horse diving scenes in the picture. In this picture as in all other pictures, there were doubles trained for the picture. Six horses in all were in “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” Four were trained to dive. While the real Sonora’s horses dove forty feet, the horses that made the picture never dove over ten feet, which is the maximum that American Humane Association’s Guildelines will allow.
American Humane was on the compound for the full training period. Corky Randall, one of the most cautious horse wranglers in Hollywood, was hired by Pegusus Productions to train the horses. The horses were chosen very carefully and only horses that liked the water were used. Training was done very slowly by first seeing if the horses liked to swim. They were allowed initially to swim in the tank made for the picture.
As training progressed, they were allowed to step off one foot into water, then two feet and so on until they had reached the ten foot maximum. The horses always jumped on their own. In order to achieve the forty foot height, a lot of Hollywood magic was used. The ten foot ramp was made to expand to thirty feet. A cage was designed to place at the top of the ramp so when the horses climbed thirty feet, they just walked into the cage. Footage of the assent was run back to back to make the assent appear long. Then a mechanical person on a mechanical horse, with the footage of the real audience all set against drawings of buildings in the background, made the jump appear to be forty feet. The jump is shown in cuts with only leaving the board and entering the water being the real horse jumps. The lead horse playing Lightning always made beautiful dives. However, the horse playing Redlips always twisted to the side when he jumped making it easy to fake a bad dive in the story.
But my very favorite part of the description of the training of the horses for the movie is this:
The tank at the compound had to be blocked off when not in use because the horses and dogs on the ranch would run up and jump off on their own when there was no training being done.
They apparently enjoyed it.
All this was for the movie, of course. We don’t know if the horses for the earlier dives at amusement parks were chosen and trained in the same manner (progressing to greater heights, however). But it makes sense that they were. As one of the riders said (quoted in my previous post on the subject):
Some people say they must have forced the horses to do what they did. Sonora told me many times the last thing anyone would want was to be up on a tower with a horse that did not want to be there.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a play on the old joke: Q—How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A—One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.]
“No horsing around!”, our folks used to yell at us.
Guess we can see where that comes from by the description of the trainers having to block off the tank when not in supervised use: “You guys! You horses there! Stop having fun! Just cut it out!”
Doesn’t surprise me at all. Horses like to play, just like dogs, and it makes perfect sense that they’d choose horses for training that were apt to enjoy the activity. As with most large animals, it’s difficult if not impossible to make a horse do something it doesn’t want to do. You’re much better off convincing the horse that it wants to do whatever it is you want it to do.
We don’t know if the horses for the earlier dives at amusement parks were chosen and trained in the same manner
Yes we do
it has long been suspected that the Steel Pier horses – which dove up to four times a day, seven days a week during the attraction’s peak years – were encouraged to carry out their death-defying feats with cattle prods, electrical jolts, and trap doors. Not so, contended Sonora Webster Carver – one of the most famous of the diving horse riders.
Her equine partners, she insisted to interviewers till the end of her very long life, were pampered like the stars they were. They “lived the life of Riley,” she liked to say. Carver herself suffered a grievous injury in 1931 when her horse lost its balance on the platform. Both Carver and her horse survived the fall, but she was permanently blinded from the impact of hitting the water with her eyes open. But the show must go on and Carver continued horse-diving on the Steel Pier for many years afterward.
https://www.ecology.com/2012/02/29/steel-piers-diving-horse-dives-history/
The controversial act, which was scrapped in the late 1970s, following the Pier’s purchase by Resorts International, was briefly revived in the summer of 1993 by a traveling Florida group called the High Diving Mules. This go-round, the animal daredevils were a miniature horse, a mule and a dog. At the time, the Steel Pier was controlled by Donald Trump’s organization. When animal-rights activists gathered on the boardwalk to chant “Make Trump jump,” he did indeed jump to close down the attraction.
That little debacle didn’t seem to faze Tony Catanoso who – along with his brother William – is the new owner of Steel Pier Associates. No horses were ever harmed in the entire history of the stunt, he explained when announcing the return of the diving horses. And really, it’s hard to say otherwise, since only those with a vested interest in keeping the act going were privy the welfare of the animals. Still, in addition to the Sonora Carver story, there are several anecdotal accounts of show horses being injured. There was the gelding named Black Beauty that panicked the first time he hit the water and began to sink. Turns out he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – swim. He was pulled out of the water and retired. Another horse, which was frightened by a camera flash, reared back on the platform and injured his rider. And yet another drowned after being dropped in the ocean and losing its bearings.
Well, that’s reassuring to know. Thanks.
Neo, one lightbulb joke deserves another…
How many physical therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?
“Grasp the lightbulb. Now hold it… HOLD IT… HOLD IT… feel the burn… HOLD IT…”
Some years ago, we made a tour of Wales that included a sheep farm, and were instructed in the various varieties of sheep (there are dozens of breeds, some very strange, and black sheep are the smartest, just so you know) and had a lecture / demo on the training of sheepdogs.
The speaker said that most dogs bred for herding took to it quite naturally, but there were some who never did learn how, because they just didn’t like it. He said you could not make them like herding if they didn’t have the temperament for it, and there was no point in trying to train them.
Artfldgr:
I meant we don’t know if the pier horses were trained in exactly the same way as the movie horses. When I was writing this post I had already read the descriptions that said the pier horses were treated well, and had already read the material you later included here. So I was already familiar with it. But none contained detailed descriptions of the actual training methods used. That’s why I was glad to find the article with specific details about training the movie horses.
“The tank at the compound had to be blocked off when not in use because the horses and dogs on the ranch would run up and jump off on their own when there was no training being done.”
One of my German Shorthaired Pointers (GSPs in bird-dog parlance) just loved to swim. She would jump into the 30 acre lake where I had my camp, and swim around in its middle in a straight line, changing course when she got too close to a shore, would not come when called as I was getting anxious about her possible fatigue, 300 ft away. She swam about a half-mile per swim, emerged, shook herself and then loped off in search of quail.
Dogs can’t sweat. Cool water is good!
Our daughter’s hobby is riding and training hunter-jumper horses. She buys young horses and trains them to be jumpers. Some horses are wonderful jumpers and seem to take to it naturally. Some never learn to jump well. In that way they are much like humans – different temperaments, different skills. It takes about four years of constant training to turn out a passable hunter-jumper horse. But some just never become reliable or willing. She has a feel for those horses that have the right dispositions, and quickly sells a horse if its disposition isn’t right for jumping. It’s a bit different from jumping off a tower, but I’m sure not all horses can be trained to jump from high towers either.
J.J.: Great story!
Horses seem so passive in the movies. Jump on ’em, use the reins, maybe the whip and off they go. Like cars.
Somehow it gladdens my heart to hear about horses and their pursuit of happiness.
I once rode a horse at one of those rent-a-horse places. The horse was old and I had the sense it didn’t like carrying me but it wasn’t going to put up a fuss. I felt sad afterward and I didn’t want to do it again.
Wonderful posting and discussion. I love anything to do with horses, dogs, cats, and various other beasties.
Assuming the horses were humanely treated and happy, I wish the act had been allowed to continue. And that I could have seen them.
As Aesopfan notes, the odds that your dog will be interested in the work you want done goes up when the dog has been bred for that specific kind of work, whether it’s herding sheep (or children; sheep dog breeds will do that to the point where you really don’t need a babysitter), pulling sleds, retrieving ducks, flushing pheasants, or treeing mountain lions.
But just because a dog is bred to be a certain kind of specialist doesn’t mean the dog will have the aptitude or the interest in that task. On the other hand, just because a dog is a general purpose breed like a German Shepherd doesn’t mean the dog won’t want to do what you want it to do.
Take hunting. A friend of mine as a kid had a German Shepherd that was a great hunting dog. I suppose at this point I should point out that no human being has ever trained a dog how to hunt. Any dog is born knowing more about hunting than a person could learn in a hundred lifetimes. When it comes to training hunting dogs, what we mean is we train the dog to hunt in cooperation with us. This kid and his German Shepherd had a bond, the dog was naturally cooperative and enjoyed being with his owner, and figured out on his own what made his friend happy and then he just did it.
Equines are the same way. I’ve been around them all my life although you wouldn’t know it to see me ride. I am, at best, a passable rider. That isn’t even true any longer since my hips wore out (on the plus side I can use my walker as a ladder to climb onto the horse, I suppose, but having that saddle hit me where the good Lord split me brings tears to my eyes and they are not tears of joy). But I did enough odd jobs at nearby stables to learn horses have different personalities among other things. Some are just naturally mean. It isn’t as if anyone abused them; like some people, they just seem to enjoy it. Most aren’t mean but you don’t want to surprise even a normally calm horse.
On the previous “diving horses” comment thread I wrote about how the Army used rewards to train cavalry horses to like the sound of gunfire. Of course, the cavalry wasn’t making a movie or putting on a show so they had to work with what they got. Still, they developed methods that allowed them to work with just about every horse. And when I say work with, I mean horse and rider are a team.
Would you ride a horse that hated you into battle? I believe Sonora when she says the last thing you wanted was to be on top of tower over a pool of water with a horse that didn’t want to be there. Here’s what I know about rodeo; that’s no place for one.
huxley, what kind of movies have you been watching?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM4juKcdx-U
“ROGERS RANCH 19 SECOND RIDE”
Here we have a pinto in a classic tale of pursuit of happiness. This pinto is not combustible in the Ford style (if you’re old enough to remember that sorry tale) but this pinto is still explosive as he/she expresses the strong desire not to have a rider. And then dumps the rider.
Hardly passive.
The thing was, the rider was trying to be gentle. Still, the horse wasn’t having any.
As far as the rent-a-horse thingy, I wouldn’t worry about it. Horses generally can carry a rider until at least twenty, and as long as they don’t develop arthritis or some other orthopedic or chronic health condition they are OK to ride until a little over 30. You don’t want to do steeplechase or cross country endurance rides on a 30 y.o. horse but you can ride them if they are otherwise in good condition.
I think what you may have experienced is the fact that these horses have been conditioned over the years to just ignore the person on their back. They’ve learned the route they’re supposed to walk, they stay together as a group and walk it, then it’s back to the barn. It isn’t that they’re particularly old. It’s just that you and I bore them. They’re going to walk the same route they walk for every other (insert pejorative term for paying customer here) and we’ll like it.
Did that horse do anything more than walk? Could any force on earth make it break into a trot (more on this in a moment)? I rest my case.
One of the reasons I say I’m a passable rider is that I have on occasion persuaded one of these rental horses I knew what I was doing and we’d break away from the herd and go exploring on our own. I wear a watch to this day because these horses have a better sense of time than most people and they know when your rental period is up. Usually everything went smoothly until I rented a horse near Lake Tahoe back in the ’90s, and we went out on our own, and got kind of boxed in by some downed timber.
And you could feel the horse saying, “Fraud! Liar! You don’t know what you’re doing.” And then he galloped back to the barn. Once you lose a horse’s trust it’s gone forever.
Which highlights another interesting thing about these horses. It’s not like they’re not capable of considerable speed. Another time we had visitors from Japan when I was stationed in San Diego. So naturally we rented some horses and went on a trail ride. On the way back to the barn we had to pass underneath a highway overpass and a bunch of homeless dropped down out of nowhere.
Rodeo! I normally don’t like to grab the saddle horn as I consider that the mark of rank amateur but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to stick to the saddle.
Don’t be fooled, huxley. They’re not that old.
I grew up on my own horse.
We were a team, both sensing subtle cues from one another, like a slight shift in the saddle by me, or the barest knee pressure on one side or the other. Rode every day it did not rain, and rain came rarely. I could ride my horse standing erect on his unsaddled back as a teen. He was basically not rideable for any other comers, being so used to me and my (idiosyncratic) ways. Stubborn!
That said, it is a mistake IMO to glorify horses.
They are creatures of habit. Smarter than cows, but but not by much, and few critters are as dumb as bovines. Skittish, easily startled. Rent-a-horses do not count; they are bored, somnolent plugs who just endure your hour in the saddle because you’ll never ride them again, and so many of their riders, novices, are just doing it for the novelty…no bonding possible.
Steve57: Good to hear from you, but that YouTube isn’t like any Western I’ve ever seen. Presumably because Westerns are about the humans and the plot, not the horses.
Unless there’s a plot point about the human and the horse as in “Giant,” where Rock Hudson’s sister, Luz, expresses her dislike of Hudson’s newlywed wife by treating the wife’s horse cruelly and the horse kills Luz.
“Giant” is still a good ole movie, back when Texans were an eccentric, but still respectable breed of Americans.
I love the early scene when Rock Hudson is meeting Elizabeth Taylor’s aristocratic family back east and trying not to boast about the size of his ranch. After his evasions, they guess 20,000 acres and force him to be specific. Rock states, “595,000 acres” then covers his mouth with his coffee cup.
Cicero, I don’t glorify horses. I don’t glorify dogs. My dog will eat its own puke. I hate that. But I like my dog.
I can not afford a horse.
Anybody care for a steak?
Thanks for the stories, guys.
Huxley, Steve57 beat me to it, but I was about to say that your rent-a-horse was probably bored, not sad – though it’s sad to think of a bored horse.
About not doing what horses don’t want to do: I had a horse as a child and teen who loved trail-riding in the woods and who was a naturally skilled and joyful jumper — as long as the jumps were in the woods or open fields. She’d jump over the bank into a stream, splash across and jump up the bank again on the other side, leap stone walls or fallen trees, anything, and then eagerly look for the next fun challenge. All I had to do was to hang on and refrain from interfering. But she would not, flatly would not, jump in a show ring. She’d flatten back her ears, hump up her back and refuse the first or second fence. Three refusals and you’re out — that was me, pretty much every time. Friends and teachers with more skill with horses had no more luck than I did. She just wouldn’t do it. I had the distinct impression that, while she loved the adventure of finding out what was around the next bend on a trail, she found going around in a circle inside a white-painted fence, hopping over fake obstacles, to be a worthless exercise. Really, she had a point.
Mr. Ed has nothing to say.
Seriously, excellent equine anecdotes.
Huxley, Steve57 beat me to it, but I was about to say that your rent-a-horse was probably bored, not sad – though it’s sad to think of a bored horse.
Mrs Whatsit: That’s good to know. It’s tricky enough to read another human’s emotional state, much less another species.
So horses are like cats. You can train them to do anything that they already want to do.
The Savitsky Cats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0z3-iZ_TY
Aesop, — Awesome! I love it! Thanksabunch!
https://www.necn.com/news/new-england/Injured-K9-Nero-Visits-Yarmouth-Police-Department-480946611.html
If there is such a thing as reincarnation and justice, I will come back as a Navy dog handler.
Diane Wilson on June 10, 2019 at 1:37 pm:
You can train dogs to do things they don’t want to do.
Guess what?
They won’t do them.
Sincerely, the Dog Hollerer.
Because, I hear you.
I learned this, oddly enough, in falconry. If you aren’t careful the animals will train you..
“Hey,” the hawk sez, “If I just fly up to a perch eventually the idiot following me around will offer me some meat to fly down.
A lot easier than hunting.”
Falconry is a lot of work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=OjtRR40oHJM
Which probably explains why the royals and nobles “offshored” everything.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=run+silent+run+deep#id=2&vid=03bdc21facac01640ac203b70a408a47&action=view
I would like to reinstate I was never in a paid flight status.I never received combat pay or anything like it.
I bet some of you think that I, single handed, defended the country for two decades.
Easy mistake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oUtJxE4sjs
I love how Reagan can not pronounce “Benavidez.’
Steve57 on June 11, 2019 at 1:06 am — hawks and dolphins.
I have a souvenir plaque that says “Dolphins are so smart that within weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand at the edge of the pool and throw fish at them.”
Which brings to mind a wider question: do people support political parties because they have “trained” their leaders to have compatible ideologies, or do party leaders train their people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung
Die Lösung The Solution by Bertholt Brecht
about the uprising of 1953 in East Germany.
Thinking about Max Boot et al., and Tim’s remark on the types of Changers.
If there is such a thing as reincarnation and justice, I will come back as a Navy dog handler.
What makes you think you weren’t one already?
The nefesh of dog spirits are lower quality but can still be found and related with across the Veil.
Animal Activism is misguided in many instances. When they prevent the union between man and animal, they disrupt the divine agreements made between the spirits of man and the spirits of animal across the Veil. Politically, activists get power and dominion, unfairly, over animals and men. But then again, isn’t that what they complain about, that mankind has unfair dominion over animals?
So how is what they do, dominion over men and women, any better?
Which brings to mind a wider question: do people support political parties because they have “trained” their leaders to have compatible ideologies, or do party leaders train their people?
Very close, Aesop. Very close.
My favorite thing. I say that ironically.
Aesop fan, when the s*** hit the fan and the blank hit the fan who could you count on?
I have no comment.
We used to train the regular Iranian Navy in the art of war.
It was an actual pleasure to meet up with them. You could hear in the background AC/DC Hell’s Bells playing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAgnJDJN4VA
I’m not talking the revolutionary guard corps. Or worse, if you want to make me puke, the baseej.