HONORA BAY—The morning sun is starting to warm things up as the first class of riders at the Honora Bay Riding Stables canter about the arena under the watchful eye of Sean Patrick. Mr. Patterson has been coming North to Manitoulin from his home in the US to train riders for over a decade and such is his fame that riders from across Canada and the US come to learn.
Mr. Patterson has been a horsemanship trainer for around 33 years and has collected a number of awards for his efforts, but he remains very low key about it.
“Over the years, yeah, it’s kind of how that works, sometimes it’s just small shows, and sometimes it’s, you know, somebody accredits you with something,” he said. “My specialty is the foundation, so I kind of take everybody back, no matter their discipline, I take everybody back to the basics and we work on our horses. We learn how to teach them better and how for them to be more confident, more trusting and then more skillful. To kind of keep breaking it down into bite-sized chunks that people can kind of understand, because when you first get into horses it’s hard to always relate to them on their level and know what they’re thinking and why and how. And so, we respond to them sometimes either inaccurately or ignorantly by accident. The same with the person handling them. They could be green as well, and just innocently making mistakes. So, part of my job is to take people back and kind of reboot the system and say, ‘hey, this is how they actually learn.’ And this is how you can teach them better and more effectively and more efficiently. So, I really work on the basics.”
Like any skill, horsemanship needs to be revisited. “A good muscle memory,” he said. “You need good, quick, go-to moves in your brain when something goes wrong or right, and you need to know what to do,” he said.
