What is the book Think Harmony with Horses and why does it matter?

Think Harmony with Horses is Ray Hunt's primary book, published in 1978, and it represents the first major attempt to document Tom Dorrance's approach to horsemanship in a widely accessible form. The book matters in the natural horsemanship tradition because it appeared before the mainstream breakthrough of the movement in the 1990s, reaching a generation of horsemen who were hungry for an alternative to force-based training but who had no framework for understanding why a different approach was possible or what it would look like. Hunt's book provided that framework — articulating the principles of feel, timing, and working with the horse's nature in language that was both philosophical and practical, that respected the depth of what Dorrance had shown him while attempting to make it translatable to riders who had not had the direct experience of working with Dorrance himself. The title captures Hunt's core conviction about the quality of relationship he was working toward — harmony between horse and human, achieved through the human thinking about and working with the horse's nature rather than simply applying force to produce compliance. The book is not a training manual in any conventional sense: it does not provide step-by-step exercises or specific technique prescriptions but rather attempts to shift the reader's entire way of thinking about the horse-human relationship. For many readers it has functioned as the gateway to the Dorrance tradition — the book that convinced them a different approach was possible and that pointed them toward the deeper study that Hunt's clinics and Tom Dorrance's True Unity provided. It remains in print and continues to be cited by practitioners across the tradition as a foundational text.