John Saint Ryan wrote this book, reads this audiobook, and turns up in the publisher field as well, so author, narrator, and imprint are one name repeated three times. A Voice for the Horse runs seven hours and twelve minutes, was released on May 4, 2022, and carries a 4.8 average over sixteen recorded votes. The self-published route explains a good deal about how this listing behaves, including its single strangest feature, which is the description itself. Nothing about the writing feels amateur, and that is worth stating up front, because self-published equestrian audio is a category where the caveats usually pile up faster than the praise.
First, the Big Picture
Tom Dorrance is the name anchoring the whole enterprise, credited in the description as the mentor whose lessons John Saint Ryan is passing along. One reviewer makes a point of saying the credit is given rightly and given often, which in a field crowded with people selling their own method as a revelation is worth saying out loud. The approach here is presented as inherited and refined rather than invented, and that humility sets the register for everything that follows.
Carol Worcester's four-star note from April 2024 runs to a single line and concerns delivery: the book arrived quickly from a seller, and it is a great book. That is a shipping review filed against an audio edition. It happens constantly on pooled listings and deserves naming when it does, because it tells you this response column is drawing on print buyers as much as on listeners, and each entry needs weighing accordingly before you let it influence anything.
Tiffany Massung's June 2022 entry, filed seven weeks after release, is the one that engages with the actual argument. After listening, it says, you understand how little most people around horses grasp about how horses learn, and the list of people named covers trainers, vets, farriers, riders, owners, and stable owners. That list is the book's real target. The claim is not that beginners need educating. It is that the professional world has been running for decades on assumptions nobody rechecked.
The Best Parts of A Voice for the Horse
Equestrian Sports is the tag, and for once it broadly fits, though the book sits closer to animal behavior and learning theory than to sport. The description promises the science of learning applied directly to the horse, a dismantling of dominance strategies and coercive practice, and gentler alternatives defended on scientific rather than sentimental grounds. If you were taught that a horse needs to know who is boss, this book is arguing with your instructor for seven hours, politely and without ever raising its voice.
Penny's four-star response is two words long and dated May 30, 2019, which lands almost three years before the audio edition was published in May 2022. That entry cannot be describing this recording. It is a print or ebook response pooled into the same column, and once you have noticed it, the sixteen-vote average printed at the top starts to look like a figure assembled from more than one edition of the same text.
Martial arts and acting are named in the description as the disciplines John Saint Ryan drew on, and that pairing explains the delivery better than any horse credential could. Stage training shows up in the pacing of a seven-hour reading, and martial arts pedagogy, the notion that timing, pressure, and release can be taught as a physical skill rather than described as a feeling, maps almost exactly onto the training program sitting at the center of the book.
A Few Reservations
Self-published titles are usually the ones where the description has been written by the author. This one has been written by somebody else, about the author, in the third person, and it is frankly complimentary: a rare and admirable practice, agility, openness, humor, grace, and the blunt assertion that the recording is a joy to listen to. A description that reviews its own audio edition is an odd object to encounter on a product page, and the sensible response is to read it as a blurb rather than as a summary of contents.
May 4, 2022 is when the recording appeared, and the responses scatter loosely around it from 2019 through 2024, which for a self-published equestrian title is a healthy spread rather than a suspicious one. Sixteen votes is not a large sample. What the written entries do have is unusual consistency about what they value: the clarity of the explanations, the fairness shown to the animal, and, in one case, the sound of the voice doing the explaining.
Horsemanship of this school is hard to teach in any format, and audio walks straight into one specific disadvantage that the description advertises without noticing. The book culminates in a one-month training program, offered as a checklist usable with any horse you ride, not only one being started under saddle. Checklists want to be looked at, in a barn, with cold hands. Nothing in this record indicates whether a written version travels with the recording or whether you are expected to take notes.
Should You Listen to A Voice for the Horse?
Riders who have felt uneasy about dominance-based instruction and could never quite articulate why will take the most from this. So will anyone working around horses professionally who suspects the received wisdom deserves another look. The strongest recommendation in the column comes from a reader who owns both formats and says plainly that the print edition is good but the voice is where you actually meet John, which is about as direct an argument for the audio as a listing can carry. Anyone who has spent money on training videos that show a technique without ever explaining the principle underneath it will find the balance here reversed, and that reversal is the whole value of the seven hours.
Owners looking for a step-by-step manual on starting a young horse should treat this as the theory and find the checklist in another form. Anyone after competition technique, or expecting a sports memoir with a horse in it, has walked into the wrong barn. And if a description that praises its own subject in the third person makes you suspicious, that suspicion is entirely reasonable, though the written responses suggest the book earns most of it back. Tom Dorrance's lessons reach you secondhand here, carried by a voice that plainly still hears them.
Does John Saint Ryan read the A Voice for the Horse audiobook?
Yes, and the publisher field carries the same name, so the title is written, read, and issued by one person. One reviewer who owns both editions argues that the recording is the better of the two, on the grounds that the voice conveys something about the teacher that print leaves out.
Is the audiobook useful to somebody who does not own a horse?
Partly. The learning theory, the argument against coercion, and the case for reading an animal accurately all travel well beyond the barn. The final program does not. Anyone listening out of interest rather than need will find the first two thirds far more rewarding than the last.
