What was Tom Dorrance's view on the horse's nature?

Tom Dorrance's view of the horse's nature was the foundation of everything else in his horsemanship — he believed that the horse was always trying to do what was right, that it was an honest and genuine creature whose behavior always made sense from its own perspective, and that apparent misbehavior or resistance was invariably the horse's honest response to something in the situation that the human had not yet understood. This perspective was not naive or sentimental but deeply practical: by assuming that the horse's behavior was always reasonable from the horse's point of view, Dorrance was committed to understanding what that point of view was rather than dismissing resistance as stubbornness or disobedience. If a horse was not responding correctly, Dorrance concluded that the presentation was not clear enough for the horse to find the answer — not that the horse was being difficult. This assumption placed the responsibility for the quality of the training interaction entirely on the trainer rather than on the horse, which was both philosophically distinctive and practically useful because it directed the trainer's energy toward improving their own presentation rather than toward overcoming the horse's resistance. Dorrance also believed that horses were far more sensitive to the human's internal state — their tension, their impatience, their genuine or absent care for the horse's experience — than most people recognized, and that the horse's response to a trainer was in part a response to that internal state rather than only to the physical actions the trainer took. This belief in the horse's sensitivity and genuine nature was what drove his emphasis on feel as the primary quality the trainer needed to develop.