Lessons for Horses and Teens

Problem horses learn the ropes from students who gain humility to boot Educating EQUINES

FOR SOME HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS, WORK REQUIRES a daily nightmare of dealing with problem students, but that's not the case for Wayne Wiseman and the adolescents he shepherds at Bowie High School. His concerns don't involve problem students. No sir, his are with problem horses.

To tell the truth, it's not so much problem horses as uneducated horses. Almost any of the 36 teenagers who make up the student body of Bowie High School can tell you that, and a handful of them do something about it. They're taking Wiseman's equine-education class in which they learn to break horses. In the process, they also learn patience and humility, characteristics that do not seem native to either horses or teens.

So, if you have a wild horse hanging around your yard, you can send it to high school in Bowie in southeastern Arizona. After roughly 45 days, your unruly beast will be "green broke," Wiseman says. That means the horse will be gentle enough to saddle and ride.

You won't have to chase it with a rope to get it to stand still.

It will not throw you in the dirt or kick you in the belly button.

If you step into a round pen, it may even walk right up to you, dip its head and blink its moist brown eyes. Hi, Clem. Isn't that nice?

Wiseman, a native of Casa Grande, got interested in horses during his own high school days.

"I was riding people's problem horses. I was competing in rodeos, roping. And I learned that, really, it's not a problem horse, it's a problem person who taught the horse to do the wrong thing."

After high school, he worked at a feedlot and eventually bought a couple of horses there. One of them, a stallion named Poco Flick Bar, indirectly propelled Wiseman into a new career as a trainer of cutting horses. Cutting horses learn to separate a single animal from a herd. A cowboy sort of aims him in the direction of the yearling steer or old mama cow he wants to "cut" or "carve" out of the herd, and the horse does the rest of the work.

C.P. Honeycutt, a Wiseman family friend, lived in Maricopa and showed cutting horses. When he saw Poco Flick Bar, he thought the animal had potential as a good cutting horse. Wiseman took Poco to Honeycutt for training.

"Once I got on a trained cutting horse, I got the fever and that was it," he said. For the next 20 years, he spent nearly all his waking hours training cutting horses. Many men who work around horses and roping will give it up reluctantly, usually because their bodies can no longer handle the jarring rides or the loss of any more fingers to a tangled rope. In Wiseman's case, it was a couple of heart attacks that made him realize he was no longer up for the stress of the cuttinghorse business.

Many cowboys don't have a fallback option, but Wiseman had a degree in agricultural education. He started teaching equine-education classes at a community college near his home in Chandler. Then a friend called from Willcox to tell him about the job opening in Bowie.

"When I came, it was a typical vocational agricultural program," Wiseman said. "We started developing new programs, and I asked the kids what they wanted to learn. They knew of my background with horses, so they said they wanted the equine program."

Federal education grants provided funds for the pens and related equipment, and students designed the program, which also serves As a business. Owners pay $200 per month plus feed; the students will train the horse, keeping it for up to two months. They've gotten horses from as far away as Snowflake in the White Mountains.

"It takes us nearly two months to gentle a horse and get it ready to ride because we work real slow," Wiseman said. "We study the training tapes from some of the best horse trainers in the country, and then we go out and do the hands-on.

"These kids really learn life skills responsibility, consistency, planning, teamwork. But they're also learning to read and write and budget and do math. When they wanted to get a pen for riding these horses, they had to figure out the size and how much it would cost and how that would fit into a budget. They also learn a little humility."

Students who become truly humble can become good horse trainers, and when they are good horse trainers they can typically earn up to $100,000 annually.

That is why, Wiseman implied, you train the student first to be a good human, and then you train the horse. All