What would Tom Dorrance think of the natural horsemanship industry today?

Tom Dorrance would likely have found much of the contemporary natural horsemanship industry both foreign to his own approach and somewhat at odds with what he was trying to convey, though he would probably have expressed this view with the characteristic indirection and generosity that marked his engagement with people regardless of their level of understanding. Dorrance was explicitly and consistently resistant to the systematization of his ideas — he resisted creating a program, a method, or a teachable system precisely because he believed that what he was working toward could not be packaged and transmitted in those forms, and that attempts to do so inevitably produced something different from and shallower than what the packaging claimed to contain. The commercial natural horsemanship industry — with its branded programs, proprietary equipment, levels systems, and instructor certification networks — represents exactly the kind of institutionalization that Dorrance resisted, and he would likely have observed that the marketing of natural horsemanship programs was producing more program followers than genuine horsemen. He would probably have been troubled by the appropriation of natural language and concepts to market approaches that produced compliance rather than genuine feel and understanding, and by the gap between the marketing claims and the actual depth of horsemanship development that many programs produced. At the same time, Dorrance was not a bitter or cynical person, and he would likely have found something valuable in the fact that the ideas he cared about had reached an audience that never would have encountered them without the commercial vehicles that carried them — even if what those vehicles delivered was a partial and sometimes distorted version of what he had been working to share. His primary concern was always with the horse's experience, and any genuine improvement in how horses were trained and handled that the movement produced would have mattered to him more than any assessment of the movement's philosophical coherence.