Customer Reviews

Getting in TTouch: Understand and Influence Your Horse's Personality

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This focus of this book studies a horse's physical characteristics as providing insight into a horse's personality. Linda Tellington-Jones has complied information on over 1500 horses and in the process has noted some astounding connections between physical traits and personalities. She presents separate sections analyzing a horse's profile, muzzle, lips, ears, nostrils, eyes, chin, and jowls. Line drawings illustrate the various shapes, positions, or placements these features take. Linda then notes her observations for each physical type. For example, she notes that horses with small, complex muzzles tend to be "opinionated" and that "fine, fluted" ears usually mean the horse is intelligent, but ones with tufts in their ears tend to be willfulness and inflexible. After focusing on each feature, she has a section of horse photographs to allow the reader to practice analyzing the entire package. She includes her assessment of the horse's personality with each photograph.

Of course, while all of this made for interesting reading, I wasn't sure at first if it really meant anything. I quickly found her observations all the more fascinating when I started to take a hard look at the physical characteristics of horses that I knew. I would run home from the barn to compare the horses' physical features to the personality descriptions in the book. By and large, she's right! The most uncanny part was her assessment of horse personalities given particular or unusual facial swirls. The remainder of the book goes into how a horse's conformation and health (and soreness) may affect his personality. She concludes by briefly introducing her method of equine massage called "Ttouch." (This was the least meaningful part of the book for me.)

This book presents a very unique approach to understanding horses. It opens the horse person's mind to allow for different personality types and adjust how he or she may interact differently if the horse is withdrawn, uncomplicated and steady or if the horse is anxious, clever and timid.

I volunteer as a horse wrangler with a non-profit group and get to work with a number of different horses. I read this book cover to cover and carry it with me whenever I'm around horses. It is All the horse people I work with borrowed it so much I had to buy a second copy just for myself! The information in the book is very easy to read and understand. Every time I see a horse or look at a picture, I look for the "moose-nose", the "pin ears" and the forehead swirls. And its amazing how these characteristics are tied into personality! A must have book!

I was hoping for something a little more scientific. For the most part it reminded me of common sense (studying the horses expression) and a little bit of palm reading ( "almost 70 percent of horses she knows with a certain characteristic display a certain behavior" seems to imply that over 30 percent DON'T). I was hoping for a book that included a bit more on how the different horse personalities respond to different handling and training methods. I didn't get as much out of it as I had hoped, but if you like esoterik books you will like this one.

This book helped me understand my comlicated horse. I just sat out and watched her graze, and wrote down everything that she fell under. After words, I read everything and it explained her perfectly. Now She and I have an unbreakable bond!

What a wonderful celebration of the horseand the relationship we all long to have with our horse! This is a beautiful book for anyone who loves the majesty and grace of the horse. The photos are wonderful! Another one of my favorites is a training book called Horse, Follow Closely by GaWaNi Pony Boy. Check them both out!!

Great details to evaluate a horses character, potential and limitations. Too bad there isn't a book for horses to evaluate people! A great read and re-read!

This book was awesome. It told you ways that you could tell its personality before you bought it. It was so interesting.

After buying and carefully reading this book, I found it akin to voo-doo and phenology (the ridiculous Victorian era study of bumps on the head to determine character). After working with horses for 40 years, and having a degree in science, this book is full of delightful wivestales and lacks in any clinical substance whatsoever.

There is no clinical measuring standard, data or reasonable efforts to back up the claims about how many hair whirls a horse has determines the animal's character.

I highly recommend, Dr. Robert Miller's books and videos on equine behavior. At least it is based in equine natural history and DNA behavior. That is true substance.

Avoid this book and don't spend the money.

I bought this book and was well into it before I realized it was TTouch book (procounced "tee-touch")! My only previous experience with TTouch was a late night info-mercial several years ago. Their angle to snag buyers was to make it seem almost magical. Simple touch excercises completely changing an animal's personality! I was sold, but never got around to making the call.
The majority of the book points out facial characteristics which were incredibly helpful for me, one who is notoriously horrible at recognizing horses, but the validity of Tellington-Jones' theory that they corrolate with aspects of their personality and intelligence was quickly and paradoxically disproved by the author! This made for a very confusing read, in the end.
Unless one took the time to memorize the first section which is littered with too-vague illustrations and too many differentiations of anatomy, you'll be either lost, or constantly flipping to the beginning for the rest of the book. Like I said and many reviewers will contend, this is a very interesting book that's pretty hard to resist for most horsemen. If it takes, however, assurance of mystical properties to make the modern horsemen realize a horse's personality is as sensitive and complicated as yours and mine, indeed traditionalism has plagued equestrian sports.
By the way, my horse found the TTouch excercises interesting at first, but quickly caught on and now only gets annoyed when I start the "clouded leopard" excercise. Did I mention the ridiculous excercise titles?