"You can't hold it against him for what his life has been."
Director Cindy Meehl deserves a salute for capturing the depth and importance of
her subject. Buck is a startling comment on human behavior by a man who
lived through the worst of it and moved on to an understanding of what made him
who he is; and he got there through a delicate examination of the interaction
between horses and the people whose love for them is often rooted in mistaken
assumptions.
For nine
months of each year Buck Brannaman tours the country in his carefully equipped
horse van giving clinics to owners and trainers who gather to absorb the ways of
this man now widely known as "the horse whisperer." That label derives from the
intuitive gentleness Brannaman has discovered as the path to trust, respect, and
then cooperation between man and animal. The fact that it is a two way street is
the most remarkable aspect of his work.
As a boy of
three, Brannaman became an accomplished trick roper in a touring act with his
brother and father called "Buckshot and Smokey." After performances, the boys
went home not to praise, but to repeated beatings by a drunken, violent father.
It wasn't until the brothers took off their shirts in a school locker room that
a coach saw the scars and raw wounds. With an assist from the coach, Buck landed
with the Shirleys, a foster family that was raising a small crowd of boys with
extraordinary insight and love. "Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get
bent out of shape," says Becky Shirley of the warm chaos that enveloped Buck and
his new family.
As an adult
cowboy with all the knowledge gained at the Shirley ranch, Brannaman worked to
overcome his shyness by giving clinics to horse trainers. He began to discover
that mutual respect between trainer and horse produces pride in each. Of a wild
horse, Buck says "You can't hold it against him for what his life has been."
When there is a behavior problem, he says, it is almost always because the human
has not learned to control his emotions.
At about this
point in the documentary, Brannaman's wisdom hits us. It applies, of course, to
parents with children, people with horses, people with people. The fact that
Buck was able to transcend a brutal childhood to become the gentle human being
who understands the subtleties of human and animal interaction seems nearly
impossible until we realize his awareness was gained in the years of family love
with his foster parents and then with his own wife and daughter. Trained by pain
as a child, he won't tolerate anyone who uses pain to train a horse. When Buck
says "Never be rude to a horse," he offers us the universal rule of human
behavior. Imagine our world if it could listen to Brannaman's insistence on the
soft feel of give and take as the only path to getting along.
Copyright (c) Illusion