What did Tom Dorrance mean by feel?

Tom Dorrance's concept of feel went considerably deeper than the physical sensitivity to the horse through the reins and lead rope that the word might suggest to a casual observer — it encompassed the trainer's total awareness of and attunement to the horse's internal state, intention, and readiness at every moment of the interaction. Dorrance described feel as something that went both ways — the trainer needed to develop feel for the horse, which meant genuine sensitivity to what was happening inside the horse at any given moment, but the horse could also feel the quality of the trainer's intention and attention through the physical connection between them. A trainer with genuine feel communicated something different to the horse than a trainer without it even when the physical actions appeared identical, because the quality of awareness and intention behind the action was part of what the horse was experiencing. Developing feel, in Dorrance's view, required the trainer to genuinely care about what the horse was experiencing rather than simply about what the horse was doing — to be interested in the horse's inner experience, its confusion, its tension, its moments of understanding and release, as the primary information guiding the training rather than the external behavior alone. This is why feel was so difficult to teach: it was not a technique that could be described and replicated but a quality of attention and genuine interest in the horse that either developed through authentic engagement or did not develop at all. Ray Hunt often said that Tom Dorrance had more feel than anyone he had ever encountered, and that this feel was visible in how horses responded to Dorrance — not as horses responding to a skilled trainer but as horses responding to someone whose understanding of them was so complete that they trusted him absolutely.