Quick Take
- Narration: Kevin Young’s steady, unhurried delivery suits Rashid’s storytelling style, letting the horse training wisdom emerge through narrative rather than instruction.
- Themes: Partnership over dominance, seeing from the horse’s perspective, patience as a training philosophy
- Mood: Warm, reflective, and quietly practical
- Verdict: A book that earns its place on every horse owner’s shelf and in every serious listener’s queue, whether or not they currently have a horse in their life.
I do not own a horse. I grew up around them briefly, at a summer program in my early teens, and have thought about them the way people think about experiences they never quite had enough of. Considering the Horse reached me through a recommendation from a listener who said it was the book that had made her cry the most while also teaching her the most practical things she had ever learned about equine behavior. I was not prepared for that combination, and I was not prepared for how readily Rashid’s specific, patient prose makes you care about animals you have never met.
Mark Rashid has been training horses for decades, and this book reflects the accumulated wisdom of someone who has approached countless difficult horses and found, reliably, that the difficulty originates somewhere other than the horse. The premise of the book is elegant in its simplicity: in the relationship between a horse and its human, it is almost always the human’s framing that generates the problem. Considering the horse means taking the animal’s experience seriously as data, not as inconvenience to be corrected away.
Stories That Teach Without Feeling Like Lessons
Rashid structures the book around specific cases: a horse that tosses its head, one that refuses to load into a trailer, one with mounting problems, one that resists new accommodations. Each case arrives as a story rather than a manual entry, and that is the book’s great structural strength. He describes the horse, the owner, the context, his observations, and the solution that emerged from treating the horse’s behavior as communication rather than defiance. The solutions almost always involve some version of listening more carefully rather than asserting authority more forcefully.
One reviewer who was new to horses described devouring three of Rashid’s books in just a few weeks and already communicating better with their horse as a result. Another, writing years earlier, described weeping at several passages, particularly the ones involving horses at the end of their lives or horses that had been failed by previous handlers. Both responses are available in this book, sometimes within a few pages of each other. Rashid does not separate the technical from the emotional because in his understanding of horses, they are not separate things. That integration is what makes the book genuinely rare in the training literature.
Kevin Young and the Right Pace for This Material
At just under eight hours, Considering the Horse is not a short listen for its content category, but it never feels padded. Kevin Young’s narration is a strong match: he reads with the same unhurried quality that runs through Rashid’s prose, and he does not try to add drama to material that generates its own momentum through specificity and honesty. The horse training vocabulary, head tossing, trailer loading, mounting problems, comes through with enough context that listeners without deep equestrian background can follow along without confusion or the need to pause and look things up.
One reviewer noted that the book was written when Rashid was younger and that some techniques have since evolved in his thinking. This is worth knowing if you intend to apply the training methods directly. The core philosophy of the book, that training is partnership, that the horse’s point of view contains information the handler genuinely needs, is durable and has not been revised. Specific technical applications may have been refined in his later work. For listeners who find this book opens a door, Rashid has written several more volumes, and his thinking has continued to develop in ways that this first book sets the foundation for.
For Non-Equestrian Readers and Listeners
Something I want to name directly: this book works for people who do not own horses and have no immediate plans to own one. Rashid writes about animal cognition and about the ethics of interacting with creatures in your care with a clarity that extends well beyond the equestrian specific. The chapter on a horse adjusting to new accommodations, and how Rashid reframed the problem from the animal’s perspective to find a solution, contains more practical wisdom about listening and observation than many books explicitly marketed on those themes for a general audience.
One reviewer described their non-equestrian friends being drawn into Rashid’s stories for his humor and his directness. That is consistent with my experience of the book. You do not need to understand the technical vocabulary of horse training to understand that the impulse to control what you should be listening to is a deeply human pattern that shows up in all kinds of relationships. Rashid writes about horses, but he is always also writing about attention and patience and the gap between what we think we see and what is actually happening.
Who This Is Genuinely For
Horse owners, especially those dealing with specific behavioral problems, will find practical frameworks alongside the narrative that they can bring directly to their work. New horse owners or people considering buying a horse will find it invaluable preparation for the real behavioral challenges they will encounter. Anyone interested in the philosophy of interacting with animals on their own terms, rather than on terms that prioritize human convenience, will find it thoughtful and specific enough to be genuinely useful. And listeners who simply appreciate a writer who knows their subject from the inside and writes about it without condescension will find eight hours with Rashid well spent.
The 4.8 rating with over four hundred reviews is not an accident. This is a book that readers return to and recommend with the specificity that comes from genuine usefulness, not from generic enthusiasm for the topic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Considering the Horse useful for someone with no horse experience who is considering buying one?
Reviewers consistently describe it as valuable for potential horse owners. It sets realistic expectations about the behavioral challenges horses present and provides a philosophical framework for approaching those challenges before they arrive.
How practically applicable are Rashid’s training solutions, and do they require professional guidance to implement?
Most of the approaches Rashid describes are accessible to a capable, patient horse owner. He writes from a natural horsemanship perspective that emphasizes observation and communication over force, which reduces the dependency on special equipment or professional intervention. For severe behavioral problems, professional guidance is still advisable.
One review mentioned that some of Rashid’s techniques may have evolved since this book was written. Is it still current?
The philosophical foundation of the book, seeing training as partnership and approaching problems from the horse’s perspective, remains fully current. Some specific technical applications have been refined in Rashid’s later work. Treat this book as an excellent entry point into his thinking and follow it with his more recent writing if specific techniques become important.
Does Kevin Young’s narration work well for a non-fiction audiobook that blends story with technical equestrian content?
Young’s pacing is well-suited to material that weaves practical instruction through storytelling. He keeps the technical sections clear without flattening the warmth in Rashid’s narrative passages, which is the key challenge of narrating this kind of book.
