00:00:05
Speaker 1: Ty Evans is one of the country’s top mule trainers and clinicians, and his journey with this misunderstood animal, the mule, has changed his life and through working with him, he’s learned what true leadership is. Yeah, through training a mule. I think we’re all going to learn something on this one. And hey, it’s twenty twenty six. I’m ready to be something different, to look at life in a new way, and to become the person I’ve always known I should be. I think you’re going to be surprised by this episode, and I really doubt that you’re going to want to miss this one.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: There’s a quote he would quote it a lot, but I learned later that it was a ray Hunt quote. They know if you know, and they know if you don’t know. That might sound like a puzzle to some people listening, but what I’ve come to find is, say the mule or the horse, they are aware of your awareness. They know what you’re paying attention to more or less.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: My name is Klay Nukem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we’ll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF Gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that’s designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. On March third, twenty eleven, in Ogden, Utah, twenty one year old Tie Evans entered the Weber State University Rodeo and what happened would change his life.
00:02:06
Speaker 2: Well, they used to send out stock cross about a week in advance, and I remember stock dross came up. I was so excited to find out what I crew. So pull it up and I’m going down the list trying to find my name, and atlanted on a horse named Dakota Kid now Dakota Kid. This horse had busted two of my friend’s legs the previous fall. This horse had a reputation it would jump out of the buck and shoot and basically spin around and hit the post, slam itself into the post behind it, which what’s between the post and the horse, Well, that’s your leg. And so two of my buddies had broken their legs in this fashion. So when I saw that horse, I was like, oh man, he was just really we would say hard to get out on meaning hard to get out of the bucket shoot on. Because of that little month, and well, being a horseman, being a trainer, I thought, well, I’m going to solve this, and I came up with a plan. I was going to have my buddy hold a pair of shaps, you know, our leggings we wear. Pull a pair of shops out over like ahead of the post a couple of feet, so it kind of tricked the horse. The horse would wrap around there and like it usually did, but instead of slamming to the post, it would hit the shaps and fade out of there.
00:03:36
Speaker 1: Dakota Kid was a dangerous horse, and Ty was a trainer. He was born in Bluffdale, Utah, into a training family. His dad trained horses and mules for a living, and Ty literally started breaking and riding them for his dad when he was eight years old. Lifelong exposure to a craft often delivers instinct and insight that can’t be taught. These people think about problems from a whole other stratosphere than the casual partaker of the said craft. Ty was like that with equine animals. So he made a plan.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: Well, I thought this was a great plan. My wife thought I was pretty dumb, just like don’t go, don’t get on this horse. And I’ll admit to you, I had a feeling I shouldn’t go, like I remember the feeling don’t go. And at the time, I’m a cowboy, thinking, ty, you’re just a sissy, like you’re just scared. Go cowboy up right? But inside you can’t put that. Well, you can talk about it, but you can’t put it away when you’re worried. And I had that feeling don’t go.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: A powerful human exercise is to do an honest evaluation of what value system drives your actions. But often we’re blind to the truth about ourselves, and it takes something powerful to drop the scales off our eyes. Was the tough it out i’m a cowboy the right way or was that actually the easy answer consistent with his cultural upbringing, or should he have listened to his wife and his intuition to quote from the book Evidence Based Horsemanship. For someone to say I’ve been doing this for fifty years doesn’t negate the fact that someone could do something wrong for fifty years end of quote. Is it possible for someone to use a wrong value system, even a long standing cultural bedrock value system like the cowboy way to make decisions.
00:05:40
Speaker 3: Is that possible for that to be wrong?
00:05:46
Speaker 2: Well, what do you think I did? I went? Of course, I went right, and I had this plan, like I said, And I remember getting on that bucking horse, sitting down the chute, get my feet in this, ups my legs up under the swells of the saddle. The swells the saddle on the front of the saddle, and I get my legs up under the swells. I leaned back, tuck my chin down to my chest, lift my bronch crane that’s what we hold onto. Lift up the bron crane, put my free hand up and I remember that moment. I don’t do it. I just remember a distinct feeling, don’t do this. But then whatever, of course, cowboy up and you’re there. You’re gonna nod your head. And I nodded my head, and that horse belled out of that shute, and just as I planned, it wrapped around those shaps perfectly. I’m out of the shot. I’ve just accomplished the hardest part of this horse’s ride, getting out of the shot. I’m the horse is bucking down the arena. I’m making a good ride. We’re going jump for jump. I’m lifting on my rein, I’m I’m spurring, I’m leaning back. Everything was good, and I’m thinking myself, oh jeeze, big sissy, what were you so about? You got this? You got this? Buzzer rings. Eight seconds is up. I’ve made my bronch ride. I’m thinking check, I’m good to go. Picket men are coming in. Picket men are rescue rangers in rodeo. They come up. One comes up, fading on the left, one comes up fading on the right. They’re almost to me. My horse slams on the brakes. The cody kids stops deadness, tracks flips over backwards. I remember seeing the horse, the horse’s mane in my face, and I knew I had been flipped over on many times, so it wasn’t necessarily a dramatic deal. So as a horse is coming over, I’m thinking I got to jump out. I go to jump out to my right, just in time to not get my body smashed. But the swells of the saddle came down, broke my femur in half, snapped my femer. It gets up, the horse gets up, kicks me in the head, and it was it was touching. Go there for a minute, I remember being in the ambulance and one of the guy, one of the paramedics, saying, hey, should we go code whatever? I don’t know the codes. I can’t remember that gold code whatever meaning lights and sirens, and the other paramat goes, yeah, you better.
00:08:17
Speaker 1: Tie was bleeding out from a broken femur and had a busted and banged up head from getting kicked. The broke leg took him completely out of rodeo for several years, crushing his dream to potentially ride professionally. But the crisis catalyzed the process of evaluation in Tie, which begs the question was it actually the right thing to do to ride the code of kid, because it did bring him to a place of honest evaluation.
00:08:48
Speaker 2: Long story short, I was out for a while, couldn’t rodeo and all that down, and I couldn’t ride my mules. I was still writing for a living, I was riding Colts for living. I was a newly red I’d only been right a couple of years, and we just bought our first little house, and I remember just being sick, like, you can’t you can’t ride, you can’t work, man, what are you going to do? And so I had all this time on my hands, and I remember really thinking about what I want to do, And that’s about when that documentary came out.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: By this time, young Tie was like his father, making a complete living breaking horses and mules. They were cult starters, the most dangerous kind of training, breaking to ride one hundred to one hundred and twenty animals a year. And I want to key in on something that could sound endearing to our ear.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: He was doing it just like his dad.
00:09:48
Speaker 1: But the spirit filled Judo Chop wisdom of this story pivots on this idea, doing what your dad did isn’t always the best way. The way your dad the decisions may not be the best way. He may have been doing it wrong the whole time. In January of twenty eleven, a documentary called Buck came out that was about a man named Buck Branneman that many called the horse whisper. Buck taught what he called natural horsemanship, where you communicate with a horse through sensitivity and leadership, not punishment. This is a clip from that documentary.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: Do you see the expression on that horse? Get moves, but he’s crabby, flagging the tail, it’s annoyed. It’s like asking your kid to go take the garbage out. They take the garbage out.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: If they flip me.
00:10:46
Speaker 1: The bird on the way out of the room, it’s without respect.
00:10:50
Speaker 2: And the respect isn’t fear, it’s acceptance.
00:10:54
Speaker 4: Buck says, when you start handling horses, your own personal issues start coming out. And I was so anxious to see the saddle on Chief i rushed him to it. And now I’ve built I feel like I’ve built this fear on, this insecurity in him. But see I’m an insecure person. So the horses, they mirror you. They can’t lie.
00:11:16
Speaker 1: Good boy, Buck Brannman wasn’t the first to do this natural horsemanship. He was a pioneer in it though in modern times, and he was one of the first to be highly successful and gain national and even global notoriety. Ray Hunt, the Durnce Brothers Pat Perelli were also forerunners in this style of horse training. This method maybe took a little longer, took more patience, more precision, more attention to nuanced in detail. But the real kicker was that it took on a whole different kind of worldview about the horse. It required a whole new kind of trainer, a new mindset, a new empathy a new kind of strength that was absent in training the horse the cowboy way. In this new way was producing some incredible horses. Ty was deeply inspired by the documentary and had already been influenced by the natural horsemanship philosophy for the last several years. But what Ty realized while laying there with this broken leg was that very few people were doing this with mules. Would it even work for mules? The horse world had clinicians teaching people how to ride and train horses. The industry was huge, but mules. Very few people were training mules to the degree that they were training horses.
00:12:40
Speaker 3: Few were making what they call.
00:12:42
Speaker 1: Bridle mules or bridle horses, which describes a very high level of training that takes many, many years and it produces an animal with incredible safety, precision, control, and comfort. For thousands and thousands of years, the mule was considered a beast of burden, and Tie started to think about mules differently, and he learned a new way to train that required shuck in the past. Tie is now in his mid thirties. It’s been fifteen years since the rodeo wreck, and I’m riding behind him and our friend named McClain Meekham, a well known man the lion hunting and mule world. It’s the fifth day of a mountain lion hunt. The last four days we’ve been riding in some of the roughest country in the West. So I’m in Utah right now with behind Tie Evens this pretty round mule.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: What we doing to having the best day eversday alive? Little kidding?
00:14:16
Speaker 1: All right, we just busted some brush.
00:14:19
Speaker 3: What we’re doing is following a lion.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: So we’re we’re about probably two and a half miles from the truck and we’re we’re following dogs through real thick and canyon, so we’re having to bust a bunch of brush while we’re riding.
00:14:36
Speaker 3: Kind of treacherous.
00:14:37
Speaker 2: You might get raked off your mule, so you.
00:14:41
Speaker 3: Kind of got to have a lot of control.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: This is when you need real control of your animal, need to be able to steer them precisely. And that is exactly what Tie Evans is good at, training them to be precise.
00:14:58
Speaker 3: To have control with a mule.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: This is the kind of place you want to be sitting in the saddle of a good mule that you have complete control over, one that trusts you so that you can trust it. Places like this are why Tie has dedicated his life to training mules. The backcountry is a good place to die, and a trustworthy steed is invaluable. You see a mule is across between a mare horse and a jack donkey. Hybrid vigor creates an animal more sure footed than a horse, with more stamina day in and day out. It has a longer working lifetime, and mules are easier to keep healthy than a horse. But mules have their drawbacks too. They’re harder to find than horses. They’re just less of them because they’re sterile. They have a very strong self protection mechanism that the world has interpreted as stubbornness for thousands of years, which can make them more challenging to train than a horse, but it also can make them safer. I’ve heard it said that you can train a horse to jump off a cliff, but a mule ain’t jumping off no cliff. Horses can also be so compliant, which is a wonderful thing, that he’ll cross a raging river that you and that horse are going to drowned in. A mule ain’t crossing no river that he’s going to die in. Horses are incredible animals that are faster, quicker, and generally easier to bring to a place of compliance, and are often better on the ranch and in the rodeo arena, but in the back country, without question, a mule is the animal that I want to be on, and most people that ride equines in the back country agree, And that’s why I love mules. So we just came up over the ridge and it sounded like a freight train. The dogs had, we think, jumped this line. We’ve been trailing for two days. Pretty pretty unique thing to be following the klan and tie hunting a line on meals, I wouldn’t have a rare human experience, I’d say, with two guys that are some of the best in the world at what they do.
00:17:28
Speaker 3: Tay, how how far do you think we’ve rowed this week on mules?
00:17:32
Speaker 2: This week we’ve probably wrote, Well, this morning I was I was at sixty eight miles, but I had to trot some mules up. Yeah, so I’m a little bit more. But but by the end of the day we’ll be over seventy miles, will be over some miles five days And I was actually thinking that might be some of the longest miles, non non cowboying miles I’ve ever done. Me and a cowboy when I’m working ranch and stuff, we’ll do miles like that. But it ain’t miles. It ain’t lying miles. You know what they said, line miles don’t lie. So I don’t know if I’ve ever done over seventy miles riding this crazy, wicked mountain like this before. In five days time.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: I want to learn about Tai’s backstory and how he transformed into a completely different trainer than the generation before him.
00:18:28
Speaker 2: Born and raised in Utah my whole life, I loved you my whole life. I love Utah. It’s home. I love everything about Utah, over the mountains, the desert canyons, all of it. Growing up where we were a very outdoors family. For sure, I’m super grateful my dad took us camping and hunting and fishing and riding all the time. Part of that was because it’s what he did for a living. He rode a lot of cults for a living, so young horses, young mules primarily. He started out with horses, But like any trainers trying to make a living, you know, people say, hey, what about a mule, Did you take a meal for training? And I remember, I still remember the first meal he started working with, UH, and that kind of opened the doors for him becoming the mule guy.
00:19:28
Speaker 1: Ty’s dad, Dion Evans, was and is an incredible trainer and mentor for time. I want to pull back this idea of the time being pitted against his dad and training methodology because he was doing something wrong.
00:19:43
Speaker 3: People like Dion did the.
00:19:44
Speaker 1: Best they could with what they knew, and it worked. In a perfect world, a son starts from the position his father stopped, building upon his father’s lifetime of experience, and that is exactly what happened here with TI.
00:20:02
Speaker 2: You know when I when I tell you I started like working for my dad when I was eight, I really mean it like I was working for my dad. When I say he started us out with like these little ponies. I remember one little pony named Patches. That son of a gun could buck like it could buck, and we’d ride it as long as we could, fall off most of the time, get back on write it again, UH. And then pretty soon that turned into, like I said, me working for my dad. And I don’t know, maybe for lack of better words, I was a crash dummy. You know, he’d put us on cults for the first ride, so he would handle him on the ground. He’d have him by the lead rope, and he’d get a saddle on him, and you know, he would do his version of what groundwork would be, which would be getting the saddle on without them trying to kill him. And and then we would climb on and he would hang on to him and they’d buck around or whatever. But back in those days, a lot of times it was bucking them out. And my dad worked for so many horses and mules. He was he was a really good hand. And in those days you took whatever type of horse or mules that would come for work. A paycheck was a paycheck, right, and he would take them on the way my dad would start something back then is you get in a round pin, and a lot of times people would they’d drop them off. I remember one of my dreaded feelings is when somebody would back their horse trader up to the round pin, opened the gate, opened the open the back of the trailer and let that thing out, because that meant it wasn’t broke to lead. That meant it was probably pretty wild probably a little what we call touchy or wash spear, a little watchy, meaning they don’t probably didn’t like humans much, right, And that was always that would always get me riled up, like, oh, here we go again, you know. So he would do some round pin work, move him around in a round pin. We use a round pin in training then and now, and it’s pretty historic because there’s no corners. But we’d get them and we would lunge them around in the round pin, and we would get them kind of more or less tired, and then we’d finally get him caught. A lot of times you could, you could catch them, but a lot of times you had to rope them and then kind of get a saddle on it, and it might buck a saddle off, it might kick you, and it was, I guess, for lack of otherwise describing it, it was a fight a lot of times to get those suals on. I’ve been kicked more times trying to saddle the horse or mule than anything else back in those days especially, you know. But we’d get them saddled up a lot of times, we’d you tie up, be hind legged, and that kind of restricted their movement. It didn’t. It wouldn’t hurt him or anything, but it would restrict their movement. They couldn’t. They couldn’t like run off and they and if they tried to buck it was really really mud. You’d get on them and then turn that leg loose. Then would and then I would go for a bron ride and hope I stayed on and you learn you learned to stay on like I got. I had a lot of bron crides in as a young You got a picture like a little kid doing this. I’m not a very big guy eight nine, ten, eleven, twelve year old tie you know, out there trying to stay on, and I looking back, I’m grateful for those moments. The old way, so people called the old way. It was hard, but it taught me to grid. I learned how to run. I learned how to fight for something, which in that case was my life, trying to stay on like you really hadn’t learned stay on because it was easier to stay on once than to stay on five times. What I mean is it didn’t matter you got bucked off or guess what you are getting back there. It’s non negotiable. As long as you were physically healthy, and that is even negotiable, like what is this, Well, nothing’s broken, you know, the saying nothing’s broken long way from your heart. Okay, get on.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: It’s easier to stay on once than five times. I like that TI has done a good job of describing the old way, the cowboy way of training, which is basically a tough man contest, a battle against fear. And it was the playing field of proving the cowboy way. But he would learn there was a better way. Haven’t they always trained horses the cowboy way?
00:25:04
Speaker 2: People will ask, so is this how people have been riding and training animals for one hundreds of years? The answer is now in that answer, what I mean is I call it Industrial age horsemanship. So at the turn of the century, the industrial age, everything’s faster, right, and it’s kind of like what we deal with now with with our technology like a microwave, we won’t think so fast. When when cultures started changing with the horsemanship, it went from taking time to do stuff well and having the time to do stuff like think of these guys that you know back then there’s a lot of ranches, and there were guys there were full time buckers. They were full time horsemen. And they were cattle with those horses, but primarily they’re full time horsemen, so they spent a lot of time with their horses. And those old bookers, those old cowboys, those v carols, all those cultures, they they would they’re with these horses all the time. Like making one of my passions is making bridle meals, and that is a long process. Well even now, but especially during the turn of the century. You go telling somebody you’re going to be taking six, seven, eight years to get them finished out in a bridle. They go, what that’s you know, because they’re not because that puts them, That puts them between eight to ten years old before they’re straight up in a bridle finished out. And you tell all people that, they’re like, yeah, right, no way, they want it now. They want them wearing a bridle now. Anyways, turn the sentry, do it faster, do it faster. And so that’s where I think a lot of the bronx stomping came in. Now, don’t get me wrong, his trucking ranches do they go for a lot of bronc rides. I guarantee it. Like look at the old Charlie Russell paintings, you know, he’s not making that stuff up. He was there with seeing it. There was some rough stuff. Like I’m not saying that it wasn’t rough. It was for sure rough. But I think later on people wanting it so fast, go go go, go go push it, you know. And then you also got to think about Hollywood all the Westerns. It depends, but it’s not really fun to watch a horse just ride around real nice. They kind of like a little grounk, right, And so I think a lot of people grew up watching that, including me, Like I didn’t. I thought, well, yeah, they’re gonna buck in. And to be honest, Clay, I kind of liked it. Was it was fun. So starting colts with my dad and all that was was a blast. I loved it. It was hard, it was tough, but I loved it. Can we talk about when things started to change? Yeah, So I think I was about fourteen years old, and I remember my dad got hurt really bad. My dad has the highest pitch whistle you would ever hear in your life. He would stick both pinkies in his mouth and just do that crazy high whistle. Well he was on a meal one day, did that loud whistle. So he sets the reins down and when he whistles that meal takes off lights it up, bucks him off, and he busted up a bunch of stuff, hurt his hip really bad. But he was he was beat up, beat up to the point that he was pretty well ready to be to call it. So got to that point where he was ready to kind of be done and quit training for the public. Anyways, at that point I kind of took over and took it on myself and that was my gig. That’s what I did. Yeah, yeah, So I’d get home from school and I’d ride I’d ride meals and horses, and I did that all through middle school and then in high school. Of course you can get work release, you know, and I that was my job and I loved it. About that time, about time I was a senior in high school and kind of getting out of high school, my dad had a good buddy that give him some Brad Cameron VHS tapes. That’s how loungo. It was VHS tapes, right, and I wore those tapes out watching them. And Brad Cameron was a bridleman, meaning he made bridle mules. I didn’t really know what a bridal mule was I didn’t really understand. I’d seen some bridle horses and people do that, but I didn’t ever think you could make a bridle mule. Well, here he is, that guy’s doing the thing. I wore those tips out, I washed him over and over again. I loved him. That opened my eyes to a lot of well, well particularly it opened my eyes to this thing called groundwork. I mean my version of groundwork up to that point, working with my dad and stuff was well, we’d sack it out a little bit, like literally, like with a feedsack or something. We’d rub it all over, or get a tarp or something and get him used to the tarp or things like that. But to get the sadlo on. Okay, check, now we’ve done our groundwork. Well, Brad was doing all kinds of stuff like moving him is this way in that way, and he’d he’d send the meal around in a circle on that lead rope on a loose rain, meaning no tension in that rain. He’s not pulling that meal around. It was. It was going freely, and he was moving these feet in all kinds of ways that I didn’t understand. He’s using terminologies that I’d never heard before moving the hinds moving the fronts. I didn’t know this stuff meant. Well I do now. I mean, we’re going to move the hind feet one way to the other. We’re gonna move to the front feet. That’s what it means. And so I started playing around with that stuff, and well, by golly, it made things a lot easier at that point when when I was I guess towards the end of high school in graduating, like if I had ten horses or mules, I was starting, out of ten, probably eight of them would buck. Now that’s bad statistics for a trainer, that’s bad news. Well, it’s because how I was doing it. I was just, I was just I thought I was a cowboy. I thought I was just doing cowboy stuff, just riding them, and I was just bucking them out, and that’s just what I did. Well, I started doing this, you know, I call it Brad Cameron stuff back then, and that eight out of ten bucking went down a lot to like one out of ten. Now, you tell me how does that work? And I didn’t know. I thought I was just moving around. Maybe I was getting them tired, you know whatever. I didn’t understand the psychology of it in that mule or that horse. I didn’t understand how their minds were changing. What I really didn’t realize back then is how I was changing. What was changing to me, like I started to see the mule different.
00:32:20
Speaker 1: This is worth stopping to consider what TDD just said. He went from eight out of ten mules bucking to one in ten, But he recognized that it was actually him that was changing as he started to see the mule completely differently, producing a new set of considerations. The mule was no longer an adversary to be conquered by force, but a potential partner that just needed convincing to give its loyalty, which it actually wanted to give. In twenty twelve, this book called Evidence Based Horsemanship came out and redefined the way people viewed horses. It pointed out how people had anthropomorphized horses, thinking that a stubborn horse with bad behavior made choices like a rebellious child, or that a horse didn’t like people. But the authors, one of them a neuroscientists, described the psychology of the horse as desiring security and leadership. They’re herd animals. They’re always looking for a leader, and if a leader doesn’t arise, they have to become the leader. And therein lies the conflict of the cowboy way, where leadership is taken by force. But Ty would learn that he could create the circumstances where a mule would give itself because of his true leadership, and this was revolutionary.
00:33:46
Speaker 2: Brad Cameron used all kinds of terminologies. There’s a quote. He would quote it a lot, but I learned later that it was a ray Hunt quote. They know if you know, and they know if you don’t know. The puzzle to some people listening. But what I’ve come to find is they the mule or the horse, they are aware of your awareness. They know what you’re paying attention to. More or less, they can see it, they can sense it. So in my high school days, I wasn’t aware at all. It was just me like totally physically manipulating and manhandling these horses and mules. I was getting along just with my brute force and strength. And the more I started learned about the mind of the mule, the mind of the horse, and my own mind and how I acted, and you know, how I carried myself around an animal, the less troubles I have, the troubles started fading away, and it was getting easier.
00:35:00
Speaker 1: What Ty learned was that a mule spoke a completely different language than a human, and when he started communicating correctly with them, they were ready partners. I’d like to read a quote from evidence based Horsemanship. The horse brain is about the size of a large grapefruit and proportionally one six hundred and fiftieth of their body weight. The human brain is one fiftieth of our body weight.
00:35:26
Speaker 3: They have a.
00:35:27
Speaker 1: Large cerebellum for balance and smooth movement. Most of the brain area is dedicated to motor and sensory functions. Horses do not have a huge frontal lobe like humans. They are unable to make fun of someone in return to share a joke with their pasture mates. Although they have personalities based on how they behave, it would be anthropomorphic to assign human personality traits to these animals. The temptation to want to believe that horses process things in the same way as humans may make us feel better, but it is inaccurate, leads to false assumptions, and is often at the expense of the horse’s welfare and well being. End of quote. The cowboy way of breaking mules assumes that compliance must be taken by sheer force like a military dictator. That does produce compliance, but not the same kind of compliance as when it’s freely given you see a prey. Animals love language is security. Their primary motivation in life is safety and not to get eaten. Natural horsemanship uses pressure and pressure, meaning like when you’re trying to make an animal turn to the left and after this pressure when they do it, there is an instant release of that pressure as a reward for compliance, which these neuroscientists learn dumps a huge hit of dopamine. The mule loves a dopamine hit like Brent Reeves loves and honest Tree and Walker Ty learned that a mule will do anything to get a pressure release. It may sound like jiu jitsu, but just hanging there and it takes less and less pressure once the mule learns that you’re speaking its language of release and security. It’s all about communication. I think there are life lessons in here. Sometimes the solution to your problems might be getting a completely different outlook, not more of the same that isn’t working. And good luck Brent finding an honest tree in.
00:37:36
Speaker 2: Walker Brad, I learned how a mentor himself named Buck Brannman. And so when I learned that Brad learned a lot from Buck, then I started paying attention to him. And that that was at a little later on about the time where Buck Brownman had a documentary come out on its life. It’s called Buck and it was about Buck teaching clinics and his life. But I remember more or less seeing Buck’s job, and I knew about clinics from Brad, but Buck was making a career out of this, teaching people and helping people and studying Brad and Buck. I had so much change in myself. And you know, when you find something good and you can see the good and you can see like the joy coming into your life, you just want to share it with others. And when I saw that documentary that he was doing that, I said, I told my wife, and we were newly wedded at the time, we had only been married for a couple of years at that time, I said, I want that job. That’s the job I want. Getting bucked off and having that wreck breaking my leg, what it did is that I’m a go getter. I’m ninety miles an hour all the time, drives my wife crazy. But that wreck slowed me down. It forced me to slow down, and I believe, I believe it was it was God saying slow down, Ty, get on the right track, because I think I was going off track. But that wreck slowed me down and reoriented my life. And I had all the time to think about it. I had all kinds of time to watch videos. I watched so many training videos sitting on the couch with a busted leg, and I just would learn and I would read, and I said, I’m gonna make I’m gonna make a go of this. I’m gonna I really want to do this. And so I didn’t get back on a bucking horse for a couple of years. And when I did go back to rodeo and I went back, I wrote it for summer. I went to fourteen rodeos that summer. Coming back finally took me, yeah, two years to my leg to heal up and to get muscle back. But when I came back, it didn’t have the same drive. I remember sitting on the back of a bucking shoot in Sant Quentin, Utah, looking up at the at Mountain Nebo, beautiful Mountain, and I think to myself as I’m sitting there, man, I’d rather be up there with my mule. I’d rather be riding. I’d rather be camping anything. And so that was my last rodeo. I was in twenty fourteen, and up to that point I had actually started doing a couple of clinics like at home. I couldn’t ride mules after that wreck for a period of time, but I you know, later that that summer and that fall, I got to riding again, and I got to training again, and we started doing lessons, and we started doing like little clinics at home, and our first clinic was in I believe it was May of twenty twelve. Where I work with meals now is a lot different than I did back then, not in the sense I mean, you can only do so much with the mule, Like while I’m talking about the actual training pieces. You can go forward and back and side to side, hopefully not up and down. So in that sense, it didn’t change, Like we still accomplish the goal, and the goal for me is to make a nice, dependable, reliable partner that we can go out and go for a good ride. I can go work cows, I can rope, I can go on pack trips, we can go hunting a reliable partner. But it’s how I get to that point. It’s how I get there that’s different now. Back then, in those old days, it was a lot of force. And I’ll admit to you, I forced a lot of meals horses, and I have a lot of regrets. There’s a lot of them that I wish I could have a second chance at. However, I do realize that some of those meals and horses were kind of the I guess, for lack of better words, the sacrifice for today’s mules. They had to deal with old tie, so that these mules today can rape the benefits of new tie, you know, the new tie events. And today I spend a lot of time using what we call free agency, teaching free agency and letting these mules have a choice. So I’ll set up a scenario where I want it to be easy for the mule to do whatever I wanted to do. There’s a principle we teach, make the right thing easy, wrong thing difficult. Well, you got to be careful with that, because some people can take their anthing difficult part all the way to the bank. They just want to make wrong thing difficult, long and difficult. My focus is making the right thing easier.
00:43:11
Speaker 1: I’ve got to stop right there and ponder the applications of this principle outside of training mules. As a father, I often find myself focused on making the wrong things hard, but putting little focus on the reward of the right thing. As I look back the way I’ve fathered, I see that I’ve used conflict inaccurately. I’ve applied too much pressure in the wrong places, trying to get an external response that really doesn’t teach my child anything or it doesn’t actually change them. But as a more broad application, after hearing Tai story and learning about natural horsemanship, I realize the solution to some problems isn’t achieved by doing what you’re already doing.
00:43:56
Speaker 3: Just harder.
00:43:57
Speaker 1: I hope that makes sense, but may be it’s the adoption of a completely new paradigm that will show you a solution you had no idea existed.
00:44:08
Speaker 3: Here’s some specifics.
00:44:09
Speaker 1: Of this make the right thing easy philosophy.
00:44:15
Speaker 2: So if I want to get something done, all I have to do is let it be the mule’s choice to do that, and set up that scenario to where that thing that I want to do, whether it’s go across that water, load up in a horse trailer, walk up on a mountain lion, it make that easy to do. I want it to be easy to do, where before in the old days I might just kick and pull and force them to get there. Either way we’re going to end up there. It’s just how I do it. And I might be able to force that horse or force that mule to do something one time, but the chances of me forcing it to do a couple of times probably slim. So it’s easier to set up the situation where they want to do it. And then when they do it and you give them the reward, which the reward really is just relief for a release, meaning you leave them alone, you stop asking them, you just let them dwell and relax. That’s the best reward. And so when they do that or they get a big dopamine hit and it feels good to them, and so when they finally accomplish the task you’re trying to get done, they’re like, hey, I like this. It’s a good experience, and so then they want to do it again, just like anybody else. You have a good experience and you enjoy you want to do it again. Probably one of the best things about my journey I’m really grateful for it is how I’ve changed. I realized the emule’s meal horse is a horse, and a humans a human, and it’s all about how we think. And if I want to get along with these animals, I need to understand how they’re thinking. But in order for me to understand them, I need to understand myself. Like if I don’t recognize when my adrenaline is high, how am I going to recognize when THEIRS is high? If I don’t recognize when I have some fear or doubt or even excitement, or maybe overly overly brave, you know, or overly I don’t know, cocky, you know, or or too forward, like if I don’t recognize the life in my own body that I’m put now, it’s really going to be hard for me to control the animals. If I can’t control my emotions, how can I expect to control theirs? Like One of the principles that we teach in our clinics, we teach leadership in our clinics, and one of the principles of leadership in our clinics is to this two parts. We begin with the end in mind? So what is it that you want your mule your horse to be like? Well, what’s the end in mind for you? Is it? I want to make a really good calmule. I want to be able to rope. I want to be able to trail ride. I want to be able to hunt, I want to pack, I want to barrel race. Oh, it doesn’t matter what it is. Maybe you just want to pass your pet. Cool, But what is that end? What do you want them to be like? And then the second part is you have to be what you want them to become. And that’s my favorite part is be what you want them to become. So how can I expect my mule to be confident if I’m not confident? So if I come to an obstacle and we ride some rough country here in Utah, we ride some tough stuff. And if I come to this obstacle and it might be a crazy rocky slope, it might be some ravines or some deep canyons, whatever it might be. If I go, oh boy, I don’t know about that, my mule’s going to fill that. They’re going to fill that and it’ll take a really confident meal to overcome my lack of confidence. But if I come up with the obstacle, I’m like, Okay, yeah, we got this, we can do this. That is contagious to the animal. If I want my mule to be relaxed, calm, whatever words you want to use, I have to be all those first. That’s what a good leader does. I can’t tell you to calm down and I’m freaking out. That doesn’t make any sense. Everybody calm down. No, I need to be calm. I need to be that example and an exam. Being an example to an equine or a horse is not exactly the way human to human work, but it’s very similar.
00:48:57
Speaker 1: A mule mirrors your confidence, in energy and insecurities, and the followers of a leader also mirror a leader’s confidence, energy, and insecurities. The primary function of leadership and listen to this man, take this to the bank. The primary function of leadership is to be the pattern and the example of exactly what you want those who follow you to be.
00:49:27
Speaker 3: That’s it.
00:49:28
Speaker 1: This is the key to true leadership. Period leadership as a parent, as a business owner, as a member of a basketball team, as a productive member of your community or as a mule trainer.
00:49:42
Speaker 3: The natural, physical, and spiritual.
00:49:44
Speaker 1: World responds and rewards authenticity and rejects falsity. Tie’s journey of transformation and the way he trained mules also highlights something that can be hard for human beings, and that is to realize that you’re doing something wrong and completely change. Today, Tye and his wife Sky are successful mule clinicians traveling all over the country teaching people how to communicate, ride train their mules. You can find them all over the internet as TS Mules. You can check him out on Instagram, Facebook, and the TS Mules Podcasts.
00:50:26
Speaker 3: Tie has a podcast.
00:50:28
Speaker 1: These are some really great people and I’ve learned a ton from Ty’s story and I hope that you guys will follow along. And we’ve got some more coming from Tye next week. Thank you so much for listening to Bear Grease Brints this country Life and Lake’s Backwoods University.
00:50:50
Speaker 3: It’s twenty twenty six.
00:50:52
Speaker 1: We’re excited about the new year and keep the wild places wild because that’s where reversed the
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