Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / The Cowboy Who Bridges All Worlds: Classical Dressage, Ranch Medicine & the Art of Connection | Dr. Glenn Cochran | LFRF 54

Transcript

The Cowboy Who Bridges All Worlds: Classical Dressage, Ranch Medicine & the Art of Connection | Dr. Glenn Cochran | LFRF 54 · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

0:00
Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
0:01
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So now let's jump in.
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Welcome back.
0:37
I have Dr.
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Glenn Cochran, who I have known for some years from when I used to live in Texas.
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That cowboy hat is a bit of a giveaway as to- ... where he might be.
0:47
National costume and all that.
0:49
Yeah ... but Glenn has been a real influence on bringing the Western world
0:57
and the classical world together, which is so silly if one thinks about that because
1:02
it was always the same world actually.
1:04
Yeah.
1:05
And it started, of course, with the conquistadors going across,
1:07
you know, but hey, somewhere along the line it drifted apart.
1:10
And he has been a big part of helping to get working equitation get going,
1:17
while still being a working doctor specializing in the emergency room and
1:22
a working cattleman and horse breeder.
1:26
Starting, I believe, after probably quarter horses for many years, P-
1:31
Peruvian Passos as ranch horses, and then from there into the Iberians,
1:35
the, the Spanish and the Portuguese horses while still r- being a doctor,
1:40
while still being a cattleman.
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So it's a fascinating mix of worlds and I would say that, you know,
1:46
Glenn, you've lived and you are living a self-actualized life.
1:51
Sort of if one was to look up self-actualized life, you'd
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probably find a picture of you next to that in the dictionary.
1:57
So, thank you for coming on, and it's so good to see you again.
2:01
Yeah.
2:01
Can you tell us w- how did you start?
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W- tell us where are you, w- where were you born?
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How did you get into this whole horse cattleman thing?
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How did you not get so distracted with medicine that you stopped being a cowboy?
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'Cause I, I love the fact that you're a doctor and a cowboy and a classical rider.
2:22
And just, just take us through the story.
2:23
Tell us the story of Glenn.
2:26
Glenn Cochran: Okay.
2:26
Well, I, I was actually born in Indiana.
2:29
My, my parents were at university at Indiana University at the time, so my
2:35
first, the first place that, that I woke up was I was in the bassinet in the
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Marion County General Hospital, which was the, the downtown Indianapolis hospital,
2:46
mostly inhabited by Black people.
2:48
So I joke around with people, I say, "Yeah, I don't got any problem with Black
2:52
people because I was the only white bean in a whole nursery full of black beans."
2:56
But after that, I my parents moved around quite a bit but along about...
3:01
Well, and in, and in that process I was always fascinated with horses.
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Even I've got pictures of me, I'm in little short pants, probably
3:09
two years old, watching a colt run across the field with fascination,
3:12
so that's just always been there.
3:14
And then my dad, anytime- that we would be around some horses.
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He was sort of a, a, a cowboy and a horse breaker when he was younger, but when
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he started going to the, to, well, World War II kind of broke that up actually.
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And but any time we were around horses that he could get ahold
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of, well he was always pitching me up on a horse someplace.
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And of course for a while I was terrified 'cause they were so big.
3:35
But 1959 was when we moved to College Station, Texas.
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He was he taught at, at A&M.
3:41
What did he teach?
3:43
He was teaching nuclear engineering.
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He was one of the first people to actually do that.
3:48
His degree was from Pennsylvania State, and it was in nuclear physics,
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but A&M wanted to start a nuclear engineering program, and so he
3:56
built a reactor- Just before we- let
3:57
Rupert Isaacson: me just ask you a question on that.
3:58
Yeah.
3:58
Was he part of those projects in World War II?
4:01
Glenn Cochran: Well,
4:01
Rupert Isaacson: he,
4:02
Glenn Cochran: he was not so much in, in that during the
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war, but right after the war.
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He went we, we moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he was mostly interested
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in, in trying to, to start up the peacetime uses of atomic energy.
4:16
Weapons and that sort of thing wasn't so much his deal.
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But he was on the USS Nautilus program to, to get the first
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nuclear-powered submarine, and a number of other similar projects.
4:27
And then during my lifetime with him, I would hear about these places like
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Brookhaven National Laboratory, Los Alamos all these different places,
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and he would be going off to them.
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I n- I never was able to go with him, but I'd hear about it, and
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only last year I finally went to Los Alamos, New Mexico and actually saw
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the place, and man, it is beautiful.
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Mm-hmm.
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It's an amazing place.
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But getting there is not so beautiful.
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It's a hairy drive up that mountain, I'll tell you.
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But anyway, '59 we moved to College Station, and pretty soon after that he,
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he made friends with a fella who was a rancher and a horse breaker and a horse
5:04
breeder, a fella named Buck Kidwell.
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And he took me out with him to Buck's one time, and he says, he says,
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"Buck this boy needs his own horse."
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And so he said, "Well, I'll tell you what we'll do.
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He, he needs to be a member of the 4H Horse Club.
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I've got a colt that, that I can sell you."
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I bought a, a quarter horse for $250, joined the 4H Horse Club in Brazos
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County, and started working with him.
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And my, my first job was cleaning out stalls that hadn't been
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cleaned out probably in a decade, so I felt like a coal miner for
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about the first several weeks.
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How old were you at this point?
5:41
I was about 14, 15.
5:42
Okay.
5:42
Just starting high school.
5:44
Yeah.
5:44
And so I, you know, out there chunking lignite basically into a wheelbarrow.
5:51
And, and then he had me building fences and stuff.
5:54
But all along he would, he was working all the colts that he
5:57
was breaking, and he had a pen.
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It was a square pen probably about, mm, say 40 by 40 feet.
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And he would start colts with a hackamore, and he'd start
6:07
them with a lot of groundwork.
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He, he was pretty unusual in his day.
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So he, he would start with groundwork.
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He would start the hackamore work, turning them around and moving them,
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and turning around and moving them.
6:18
And then when he was ready for the monkey, guess who?
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And so he'd get his big stallion out there in the pen, and he would
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dally the colt up to his saddle horn, and ge- he said, "Get on."
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So I'd have to get on, and of course my left leg became purple from
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banging up against the other horse.
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But he'd drag me around that pen and after a while the colts got used
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to having somebody on their back, and so he'd start letting the rope
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out little by little, and then just e- eventually just hand it to me.
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And then all I was supposed to do, I wasn't supposed to use my
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legs much at all, just sit there and just let the colt walk around.
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And when the colt finally, you know, his head was hanging down and
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sweating and everything, well then he'd say, "Okay, you can get off now."
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And so, I'd do that.
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So that was my introduction to horse training.
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So then as time went on, well, he gave me more and more responsibility and we had...
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He would get horses in that were like, some of the big cutting horse
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trainers would bring in to him.
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And, and I remember one time my dad was standing by the fence with John
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Carter, who was a pretty well-known cutting horse trainer, and he says my
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dad says "What's wrong with this horse?
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How come Buck's got him?"
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He says, "Well, he was bucking people off while he was trying to cut cattle."
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He says, "Well, that's not a good thing."
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He says, "No."
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He says, and then my dad says, "So, so how's he doing now?"
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And he says, he says, "Bob, they wouldn't dare buck with Buck on their back."
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And so, and so he would put me up on some cutting horses.
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And of course the other thing he did was rope, so I, I got into calf roping
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and stuff when I was in high school.
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I went to some rodeos.
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I never was a big champion or anything, but, but I, I liked calf roping and
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I liked the whole concept of working cattle with a horse and all that.
7:57
And I thought I knew something about cutting horses, but only about a year
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or so ago I started working with Cletus Hulling, who's a fairly well-known
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cutting horse trainer down in Brenham, and I found out the hard way that I
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didn't know squat about cutting horses.
8:12
Now I'm starting to learn, you know, the, the actual pattern.
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And it's the same thing like you talk about with classical stuff.
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There's a way that the horse has to work.
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You build that into them, and then they learn how to move their bodies.
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But they, you know, all they wanna do is, is run the cow natively.
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In fact, this horse I'm working with is a Lusitano, comes out of primarily bull
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fighting bloodlines from the Vega family.
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And all he wanted to do was just tear that cow up, and he was about to lose me.
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I went down to start working with Cletus- And he says, "Well,
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you don't do it like that."
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He says, "You do it like this."
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And he had a mechanical cow down there, literally a, a fiberglass cow on a
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rail that he, he could- Yeah ... when they, it would change directions,
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the cow would change directions.
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Scared the living daylights out of my horse.
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And every time I'd go down there he'd, he'd say, "Okay, Glenn, you ready?"
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I says, "I think so."
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And he'd hit the button and, brr, the horse- But we finally got used
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to it, and then he got me on live cattle, and he's a really good coach.
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And in fact, we're gonna have a a cow clinic for part of the working equitation
9:17
here in Caldwell in a few weeks, and he's gonna be the clinician for me for that.
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So he's really good.
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Well anyway, I go along went off to college, and I would come back
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and visit with Buck periodically.
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And, and I remember one time I had...
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This was when I was a senior in college and I'd gotten accepted to
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medical school, and I went down there with Sally, and she'd met him before.
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But we go back in there to, to the corrals.
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He was working with a cow, trying to milk out a cow with a swollen udder,
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and he kept throwing the rope over the top of the cow and trying to catch it
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down below, and he was, he was missing.
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You know, by this time he was in his 60s.
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So I, I said, "Buck, you want me to go get a chicken catcher?"
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A chicken catcher basically is a, is a clothes hanger that's been stretched
10:01
out and it's got a hook on the end, and you can reach underneath the cow and
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catch that rope and bring it through.
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And he, "I don't need no goddamn chicken catcher.
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I'm a cowboy."
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And Sa- Sally has never forgotten that.
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She thought that was the funniest thing, and she's told that story
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millions of times to people.
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But that, that pretty well gives you the personality of Buck Kiddle.
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Did he make it?
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Did he, did he rope the cow in the end?
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Oh yeah, he got the rope, and he, and he didn't get kicked either.
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But anyway, we we kept, after we got married during my first year of
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medical school she was teaching school and, and we got married and lived in
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Houston for three years and a half.
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And but we would go up to the ranch every weekend, and it got
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to be where we'd go earlier and come back to, to Houston later.
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And so we were almost making a three-day weekend out, out of it.
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But she would ride- And then she was teaching, so she'd
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go back to work teaching.
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She says Monday mornings were pretty tough sometimes, 'cause she was pretty
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bowlegged and kind of sore, 'cause you, you know, you ride for two days and then
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you don't ride for five days, and- Yeah
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but anyway my dad had a little ranch.
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Actually, he was right next door to, to Mr.
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Kidwell's ranch, which was about 1,100 acres, his place.
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My dad's place was only 50.
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And but he ha- he had some quarter horses, and we had some mares, and we bred them
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to whatever stallions we could find, you know, to get, to make some babies.
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So we was always raising colts and starting them under saddle, pretty much
11:27
with his techniques using the hackamore, and then e- eventually when they started
11:31
learning how to turn around and all, well, then you put a grazing bit on them.
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And there was no fore-rein stage or anything like what they do in California.
11:38
It was just- Yeah ... hackamore un- until they pay attention to you, and then put
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the grazing bit, and then just ride them.
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And we called ri- When you say grazing bit, do you mean a snaffle?
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It's...
11:47
No, the snaffle, we used the snaffle some along with the hackamore, but
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a grazing bit is, is a solid bit.
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It's got a, a solid mouth and, and the, the, the cheeks are swept back.
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That's what, that's what makes it called a grazing bit, 'cause they
12:01
can actually graze and, and the cheeks don't get in their way.
12:04
Okay.
12:04
But there, but there's no swivel to it or anything.
12:07
The, the old-timey ones that we had.
12:08
In fact, I've still got the first bit I ever had.
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So
12:10
Rupert Isaacson: it's still a shank bit, but it's a shank bit
12:12
that- It's, it's a, it's a sh-
12:13
that is swept back
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... Glenn Cochran: yeah.
12:14
Okay.
12:14
Shank bit.
12:15
And at the...
12:15
in those days, we had leather curbs.
12:18
Mm-hmm.
12:18
No chain curbs.
12:20
But now we, we use chain curbs some.
12:22
But but it was, you know...
12:23
And, and we referred to anybody that used two hands on the reins as plow reining.
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That's- Yeah ... that's how much respect that had, you know.
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But you, you would plow rein with the hackamore until they got started, you
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know, bending their necks and all.
12:35
So I went along with that kind of training probably until 1971.
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We were living, at that time just outside of Denver, Colorado, and I, I was in
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a bookstore and I found this book.
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It, it was 1971 and, and it had just been published and was called Dressage,
12:53
and it was written by Henry Winmullen.
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And in that book, of course, he talks about dressage, and I read all that
12:59
stuff, you know, 15 times and tried to figure out how you do all that, you know.
13:03
So then I started working horses with a, with a, just purely with a
13:06
snaffle bit and, and a lot, a lot more bending, but still I didn't really
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have the, the flexion going yet.
13:13
And, He, he mentions in the book the flexions of Baucher.
13:18
And so I thought, that's very interesting, but the problem is
13:21
he didn't explain what they were.
13:22
Rupert Isaacson: A few years later, I get- A dressage writer writing for-
13:26
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
13:26
A few years later- ... an informed audience
13:28
Rupert Isaacson: and not explaining anything.
13:29
Yeah,
13:29
Glenn Cochran: yeah.
13:29
Yeah, that's it.
13:30
So a few years later I got Albert de Carpentier's book that's published- Yeah
13:34
... by Xenophon Press, Richard's outfit, and he mentions it, and then in his indexes
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he actually talks about it, and he, he explains his version of how to do it.
13:46
So I kinda had an idea then.
13:48
Well, after we w- of course we wandered around in Colorado and, and
13:54
I lived in New Mexico for a while, and I cowboyed in, in probably about
13:57
five different states in the process.
13:59
And all this time I was either a resident or an intern or I was a
14:02
flight surgeon for the Air Force.
14:04
That was during Vietnam.
14:06
And so, I was, a- any spare time I had I was out helping people with their
14:10
cows, you know, riding horses, riding in the mountains, all that kind of stuff.
14:14
We went elk hunting and all.
14:16
Of course, we never got anything, but it was great just to be
14:18
out there in the mountains.
14:19
It, it's,
14:19
Rupert Isaacson: it's just a great excuse to go into the mountains, elk hunting.
14:21
That's it.
14:22
That's it.
14:22
It's like f- it's like fishing.
14:24
You, you don't go to catch it.
14:25
That's- You just go to hang out by the, by the river.
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That's it.
14:27
Glenn Cochran: You- Yeah You how to know when you're done fishing?
14:30
When there's no more beer in the cooler.
14:36
So anyway, we we got back here to Texas and the quarter horses were all we had
14:42
to start with, and we bought, my, my dad, my brother, and I bought this ranch.
14:46
It's about...
14:46
W- what we bought was about 500 acres.
14:49
And we, we lived in a, in a house trailer for a while on it, and then we
14:53
built this house that I'm in right now.
14:55
About finished that in 1981.
14:57
And as time went along, Sally started developing the empty nest syndrome when
15:03
the kids started going off to college.
15:06
So she was looking for something to do, and she met up with a lady named
15:09
Eileen Craig, whose husband was a parasitologist over at the vet school.
15:14
And she had been, they had lived in, she's from, originally from South Africa also.
15:18
She's from Bloemfontein and went to school over in, in Southwest Africa.
15:22
Okay.
15:22
And then her family, they moved over to, to New Zealand, so she was kind of more
15:27
of a Kiwi than, than a, a Afrikaans, but she still spoke the language.
15:32
And so she married this guy who's a parasitologist at, at A&M, and they were
15:38
living in South America for a while, and she brought these Peruvians to Caldwell.
15:42
They had a place there not too far from us.
15:45
Rupert Isaacson: So- Peruvians being horses, not people at this point, yes
15:48
... Glenn Cochran: yeah.
15:48
So, so Sally got to working with Eileen, and Sally had wanted to ride
15:53
sidesaddle, and she figured, "Well, this is the perfect combination.
15:56
This is a smooth horse that doesn't bounce."
15:58
Mm-hmm.
15:58
So she started riding sidesaddle.
16:00
That built...
16:01
We, we started getting experts from Europe, from England, and
16:04
all over the place would come in and do clinics for sidesaddle.
16:08
And so then guess who gets to train all the Peruvian horses that the
16:11
girls are using for their sidesaddle?
16:14
And then they formed a team called the Texas Ladies Aside which is actually the
16:19
in the state of Texas it's the official equestrian drill team of the state of
16:23
Texas, but it's not very active anymore.
16:25
Okay.
16:26
But the, so I was training Peruvian horses.
16:28
Well, I started learning from these guys from, from Peru- Okay ... how
16:32
to, how to use the pole to work around how to use their version of a bosal,
16:37
which is very different from the California bosal, and how to use four
16:41
reins when you're going from bosal into the, to the, the brida, the bridle.
16:45
Yeah.
16:46
And fascinating, 'cause all the rawhide stuff and everything, I
16:49
would just eat up with all that.
16:50
And, and so, went through that stage.
16:53
Well, then one of the teachers, a guy named, or a lady, excuse me, named Irene
16:57
Benjamin, she was originally of Scottish origin, but she worked all over Kenya
17:02
and all kind of stuff, but she was, she was indeed a, a sidesaddle expert.
17:06
She said, "You know, there's a type of horse that I think you might be interested
17:10
in," and she talked about the Andalusians.
17:13
And she had a friend that lived in Louisiana, which is
17:15
several hours away from us.
17:17
She said, "This, this lady is a student of Nuno Oliveira."
17:22
I said, "So who's Nuno Oliveira?"
17:24
She says, "Well, if you don't know who You- Nuno Oliveira is,
17:27
you need to know who he is."
17:29
And so we started working with her.
17:32
Her name was Diana Christensen.
17:33
She's passed away since.
17:35
But Diana was Well, and, and we had a f- a family that we knew in,
17:39
in San Antonio, the de la Parra
17:42
Rupert Isaacson: family.
17:42
Glenn Cochran: So Maritza and Rafael Parra were raising Spanish horses also.
17:48
And so but they were using Nuno.
17:50
They, they had, their kids were being trained by him and that sort of thing.
17:53
So I, I heard Nuno, Nuno, Nuno.
17:55
And Diana basically was a very strong Baucherist and, and taught pretty much
18:01
everything the way Nuno taught it.
18:03
And so we would, we wo- rode with her quite a bit.
18:05
And so that's where I started doing the in-hand work with the double bridle.
18:09
And then you know, for several years we'd, we're going over there and coming back.
18:14
And one day she calls me up and she says, "Glenn, I've got a
18:19
proposition that you can't refuse."
18:21
And I said, "Diana, you'd be- That's, that's a good accent ... amazed, yeah,
18:25
you'd be amazed at what I can refuse."
18:28
And she says, "Well, I don't think you'll refuse this."
18:32
That she had a, a, a young horse named Solitario who was a yearling at the
18:37
time, and he was a Regalito's son.
18:39
Regalito was the son of Regalado who was the son of Levitan, who's one
18:43
of the Criollo Caballos stallions.
18:45
And she said, "I, I don't want to castrate him, but if he stays here,
18:49
he's gonna have to be castrated.
18:51
But if you can take him, I'll make you a trade.
18:55
If any time in the next 10 years you can bring me a gray Peruvian that I can ride."
19:01
'Cause she got interested in Peruvians.
19:03
So I said, "Well," I talked to Sally about it.
19:07
We decided, let's go over and get him.
19:09
We, we were on our way back from picking the horse up on the 21-mile long Chafallay
19:17
Bridge when I blew a tire on the trailer- Oof ... with a, probably a $20,000
19:23
Andalusian stallion in the trailer.
19:25
And there's no place to go.
19:27
I mean, it's concrete on this side and concrete on that side.
19:30
Trucks are just blaring by.
19:32
But this, this young Black I guess Creole kid comes by, and
19:36
I couldn't even understand him.
19:38
He says, ". Yeah, whatever."
19:41
He changed the tire for me with the trucks sailing by.
19:44
Wow ... and I, and I, and I said, "You know, I really
19:48
appreciate what you've done.
19:49
I, I wanna pay you something for this."
19:52
He says, "No, no, no.
19:53
I can't do.
19:54
You, you can't pay me, no, no.
19:55
It's my thing.
19:56
That's what I do."
19:57
So, okay.
19:58
So I said, "But I'll tell you what.
20:01
I, this is not really repayment, but, but y- I'd really like to know where
20:04
to get some really good boudin."
20:07
And he says, "Oh, Henderson-Cecilia, actually on roadside of the bridge."
20:11
You know, I said, "Could you say that just a little bit slower?"
20:14
It turns out on the west side of the Chafallay Bridge is Henderson one
20:19
direction, Cecilia the other direction.
20:21
And he said, "If you turn right, there's a filling station down there that's got
20:25
that red boudin, blow your head off."
20:27
I says, "That's what I want."
20:31
So we got the horse home and I started him under saddle and, and course I,
20:36
you know, kind of still, I, I had a little bit of knowledge of in-hand
20:41
work because of working with her, and so we, we got things started.
20:44
But, Then after that, we had, we've had a succession of stallions.
20:49
We sort of, I guess the, the first one I was working with Eastern Region Andalusian
20:54
Horse Association as their announcer.
20:56
That's back in Virginia.
20:58
And I would meet these judges from, from Portugal and from Spain.
21:02
Juan Llamas being one of my favorites.
21:04
He's a crazy man, but he, he passed away a few years ago.
21:07
But he would actually come stay at our house and stuff, you know.
21:09
He was great.
21:11
But he's, he just w- loads of stories.
21:14
And so we, we learned a lot from him.
21:17
Mostly stories, not so much horse training, but he's
21:20
pretty good at that too.
21:22
And well, I found out about the Portuguese horses, and he, he
21:26
started teaching me about the Rejonel, the bull fighting horses.
21:29
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
21:29
And
21:30
Glenn Cochran: it was somewhere along in there was when, when I found out
21:33
about the, the clinics down at Magnolia at Alas dos Cava- I can't say it.
21:38
Alas dos Cavaleros.
21:39
Dos Cavalos, yes.
21:40
And I'm trying to learn Portuguese, but it's a struggle.
21:43
Anyway that was when we started working with Manuel.
21:46
And it was funny because the first time we went down there he just had
21:48
everybody set lawn chairs out and he, he just gave a lecture, and then
21:51
we started working with the horses.
21:53
And I had...
21:55
I think it, I think the first, first few I w- I may have been working with that the
21:59
the stallion now being s- somewhat older.
22:01
But anyway I said, I punched Sally.
22:03
I, I says, "Does this guy sound like a Spaniard to you?
22:06
Name's Manuel Trigo.
22:08
That should be Spanish, right?"
22:10
And she says...
22:11
Well, Sally's never been too good at, at accents, but I says, "He talks like
22:16
he is more likely he is a Frenchman."
22:20
"Est-ce que vous voulez en francais?"
22:25
And he, he said, "Well, here's the deal.
22:27
I was born in Badajoz, Spain, but my family moved when I was young to the,
22:32
to the French canton of Switzerland."
22:35
He said, "So I grew up speaking more French than Spanish."
22:37
And sure enough, he, he hi- his accent is very French, but he, he
22:42
can speak Spanish too, and actually I think he speaks a certain amount
22:45
of, of German and, and some English.
22:47
His, his his...
22:48
I, I tell him, I say, "You know, you got a slight English accent
22:52
to your Spanish sometimes."
22:55
But that, but he does the best he can to explain things, and I've
22:59
learned a huge amount from him.
23:00
Meanwhile since I was working in the emergency room over in College Station
23:06
this was after I'd done about 20 years of family practice here at Caldwell.
23:10
And I starved out, so I needed to be able to make a living, so I
23:12
started working the emergency room.
23:15
Well, the, one of the professors at the vet school had a guy, a husband
23:20
of one of his graduate students.
23:21
He says, "You need to meet this guy.
23:23
He's just sitting around watching TV, but he's from Spain and he's a horseman."
23:27
And so, you know, I finally consented.
23:29
You know, I don't know how this is gonna go.
23:31
So this guy shows up, name is Fermin Carrera, and Fermin was an
23:35
international jumping horse rider up until he had some kind of an injury.
23:39
I never did quite get straight what that was.
23:42
And he said he says "Let's, let's start to work these horses the way
23:46
this old man in Madrid taught me."
23:50
And he started working with them, and I says, "This flexion that
23:53
you're doing, is that by any chance the flexion of Baucher?"
23:57
He said, "Exactly."
23:59
And so then the books that I'd been reading, and, and by that time I think
24:03
I had Hilda Nelson's book, Fr- Francois Baucher: The Man and His Method.
24:07
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
24:07
Glenn Cochran: So things started kind of falling into place at that point.
24:11
I had, I had the, the Nuno concept through Diana, and then
24:15
Fermin started working with me.
24:17
And he would come over on a Wednesday.
24:20
We would, we would gather up about four or five young horses that I was
24:24
starting under saddle, 'cause I was doing that the whole time I was doing
24:28
medicine, anytime I had spare time.
24:31
And, and then he would say, "Okay, I'm gonna work the horse
24:34
first, but you be right behind me.
24:38
Watch everything I'm doing."
24:39
And he says, "You'll watch my hands, watch where my body is, and then when,
24:43
when I get to a certain point, then you're gonna come up and take the
24:46
reins and I'm gonna be right behind you, and we'll work through it."
24:49
For about six months he worked first.
24:52
We'd work four or five horses in an afternoon.
24:56
I would, I would come along and we would change positions, and I'd work behind him.
25:01
And then finally one day he says, "Okay, we're gonna change this.
25:05
You gonna start first, I follow you."
25:08
And so sure enough, I started the, the in-hand work, and he would make, you
25:13
know, he'd make suggestions and stuff, and then he would work with them.
25:16
And what he was doing was testing to see if I had, was developing lightness.
25:21
And I thought, "Ah, okay, I see you, foxy devil.
25:24
I see what you're up to."
25:26
And but, but sure enough, you know, he would say, "Okay, little more
25:30
outside rein," or, "You need to, to push on them with your, with your
25:33
elbow or your hand where your leg is gonna be," this kind of stuff.
25:37
And gradually I learned the feel of, of the of the in-hand
25:41
work with the double bridle.
25:42
And a lot of people say, "Well, I want you to teach me that."
25:44
I says, "You got about a year?"
25:46
Hmm.
25:48
'Cause it took me about a year to really kinda get the hang of it,
25:51
and then every year since, and that would've been, shoot, when was that?
25:54
That was probably, like, in the 1990s sometime.
25:58
Every year since then I've learned another little bit of this and another
26:03
little bit- Yeah ... of that, you know?
26:04
And so y- you're always improving.
26:06
I don't think I'll ever get- Yeah, the nuances
26:07
Rupert Isaacson: never, never, never cease.
26:09
Yeah ... you get around one bend and there's another bend waiting for you.
26:12
That's it.
26:12
Glenn Cochran: That's it.
26:13
Yeah.
26:13
Like a mountain road.
26:14
Yeah.
26:15
Rupert Isaacson: So,
26:16
Glenn Cochran: and meanwhile, all during this time I'm going and, and
26:19
day working with the various ranchers and neighbors wherever we were living.
26:23
I day worked in all over Texas and the Panhandle and New Mexico and Colorado.
26:27
For those, for
26:28
Rupert Isaacson: people who are not cowboy savvy, what does day working mean?
26:31
Glenn Cochran: Day working means that you go to work for a rancher usually if
26:34
he's trying to round up and work a bunch of cattle, and they all do it different.
26:38
It's amazing the, the geographical difference in clothing, the way
26:42
the horses are rigged up, the way they work the cattle, you know,
26:45
whether they have pens or not.
26:47
There was one place up in the Panhandle I worked, we pushed about 350 head of
26:52
pairs up into a corner of a fence, you know, like a six wire barbed wire fence,
26:57
with one little bitty extension of, of fence coming out the side, and there
27:01
was about seven or eight guys sitting on their horses holding these cattle up.
27:05
And then we started sorting the cattle out, leaving more calves and only
27:09
a few few cows kind of as nurses.
27:12
And then, then the roping started.
27:13
The rope and drag out, of course at, at that outfit I, I got off my horse
27:18
and I became one of the ground crew.
27:20
So then ground crew, the guy comes out dragging the calf by its hind legs.
27:26
You have to grab the calf, get it on the ground, get the people on top
27:29
of it, throw his rope back to him.
27:31
This guy was so fast that if you didn't get that rope off in time, he'd start
27:35
dragging a calf back into the herd.
27:38
His name was Buddy Lowery, and he was, he was one of the old cowboys from
27:42
back in the Cowboy Turtle Association back in the early rodeo days.
27:46
So he was pretty slick with that rope.
27:48
But as, as luck would have it he found out I was a doctor and so he says,
27:52
"Okay your job on the ground crew is you're gonna be the castrator."
27:56
So, so I was, I was doing surgery.
28:00
But they would feed us, and, and course before you get started doing the cow
28:04
work, you, you, you cover probably several thousand acres horseback gathering these
28:09
cattle out of these hills and so forth.
28:11
Yeah.
28:11
And and so that was pretty good.
28:13
And and then I worked some in, in New Mexico, mostly around
28:17
Clovis out in the flat country.
28:19
Mm-hmm.
28:19
And, Yeah ... and then up in Colorado up in the mountains.
28:21
We were, we, where we lived in the mountains in Colorado was on the
28:25
western slope, and the, there you had to get the cattle out of the
28:28
mountains by the 15th of October, 'cause that's when elk season started.
28:33
So we're up in these c- terrifying mountains, pushing these cattle
28:38
out and and sometimes you ended up in a snowstorm too.
28:41
It wasn't that unusual.
28:43
If y- by October it's usually getting pretty snowy up there.
28:47
But it was fun.
28:48
I had a good time, and I was young enough that I could tolerate the
28:51
cold weather and all that stuff.
28:53
Rupert Isaacson: Let me ask you a question about that kind of day working.
28:55
So you're a working doctor- Yes ... you've got your own cattle ranch, you've
28:59
got family, and you're learning, you're s- and you're colt starting.
29:05
Right.
29:05
So how do you possibly have the time to drive up to the Panhandle, which
29:10
is, you know, a day's drive away or wherever, and cowboy for somebody else?
29:16
That's question one.
29:17
Question two is, is that a paid gig, and how, how do those jobs come your way?
29:25
Like, is it some sort of interesting network?
29:27
Like, I'd, I'd be fascinated to know that.
29:30
So the first thing, how did you find the time with everything you had going on?
29:33
And second- Well, yeah ... is it paid or how is it organized?
29:36
Glenn Cochran: The, the time thing was I just had to take time off, you know?
29:40
I and sometimes there was a lot of resistance to that, 'cause the
29:42
partners in my, my practice felt like every time I took time off,
29:46
that was taking time away from them.
29:48
Of course, never mind they would take two weeks to go to
29:50
Europe or something, you know?
29:52
But but anyway, so you just take time off and go.
29:55
Yeah.
29:55
And then I would usually drive a truck and a two-horse trailer and
29:59
sail on up up to the Panhandle.
30:01
It'd take me all in one day to get there.
30:03
Sure.
30:03
And the connection was I had friends ranchers and cowboys around here or
30:09
wherever we were living, you know, I'd, I'd just gravitated to 'em.
30:12
I, I couldn't- Mm-hmm ... help myself.
30:14
And so they, they would say, "Well, you know, you like to work cows, don't you?"
30:17
And I said, "Yeah."
30:18
"Well, we, we're gonna be working this weekend up here.
30:20
Why don't you come on up?"
30:22
And one time this is when I was in Greeley, Colorado, working, I was
30:26
doing my family practice residency.
30:28
One of the nurses said, "We're gonna be moving some cattle some horses, I
30:32
mean, up to fish camp up in Estes Park.
30:35
You wanna come along?"
30:36
And course the answer was yes, and so Sally and I both went up there.
30:40
We met at, I think it was Loveland, and they have, they had truckloads
30:44
of horses that they brought in from Briggsdale out in the plains.
30:47
They unload all these horses and some of them were, were already
30:51
broke, so we were supposed to bring our saddles and bridles and stuff.
30:55
Sally got a pretty nice well-broke mare that she was riding and, and he
30:58
says, "You know, you, you act like you kinda know a little bit about
31:02
riding some of these younger horses."
31:04
And I was trying to, trying to stay covered up , you know,
31:07
but he, he figured me out.
31:09
He says, "We got one here that he's kinda green, but I think you can handle him.
31:13
He's, he's a hackamore colt."
31:15
Well, I just happened to have my hackamore along, so I got him all rigged up and
31:20
spun him around a few times and got him where he was not thinking about
31:23
bucking so much and, and off we went.
31:25
It was 66 head of horses, and we went up through the hills, the foothills
31:30
of the Rockies and on up, and eventually got up into, to Estes Park.
31:35
But on the way up there we saw things you would never see from the road.
31:39
You know, we went through one rancher's place and, and he came out on his
31:43
horse and visited with us and stuff.
31:45
So we get to the, to the highway that goes into Estes Park.
31:49
I forget what the number is, but we're going, you're kinda, at that
31:52
point, you're kinda coming downhill and it's a fairly narrow highway
31:56
and the, the, the hill rises up on one side pretty steep, and then it
32:01
kinda slopes off on the other side.
32:02
And, and when we came into it, we're coming down the hill and then back up off
32:07
on the road and, and we had to run these horses right down the highway 'cause there
32:10
wasn't any place else for them to go.
32:12
Well, of course that stopped traffic.
32:15
And the neat thing was the, the kids, you know, they see this line of horses
32:18
going down and there was, I don't know, seven or eight or nine of us riding,
32:22
and the kids, "Oh look, Mom, cowboys.
32:24
Real cowboys."
32:26
Kind of an ego trip there.
32:29
You kind of ride a little higher, you know, "Yeah, I'm a real cowboy."
32:32
And then so this one guy was driving what, some real fancy European
32:37
car, and he was just cussing us, I mean, just letting it go.
32:40
And one of the horses went by and kicked out his headlight,
32:44
and we all just kinda turned our heads and just rode on, you know.
32:47
He's, he's still cussing and fuming, but the traffic is stopped, so
32:51
there's nothing he can do about it.
32:52
And, and we just rode on and took the horses up to the camp.
32:56
But after that everybody, we were sitting around and everybody said,
32:59
"Wonder, wonder if that guy ever figured out who the hell we were."
33:05
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
33:05
You hope at that point that your business card doesn't accidentally fall out of
33:08
your back pocket or something like that.
33:10
Yeah.
33:12
Ah.
33:13
Yeah
33:14
I-
33:14
interestingly, you, you had this medical life going on parallel with all this.
33:20
I presume a- along with your passion for horses and for cowboying, you probably
33:26
have a passion for medicine, right?
33:28
Otherwise, you wouldn't have stuck with it- Yeah ... and done it.
33:30
It was- Talk, talk to us about that, and talk about the parallels between- Okay
33:34
that and your horsemanship life, apart from castrating cows.
33:37
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
33:39
Well, the parallels are, are pretty good, because what I really was interested in
33:43
from very early on was biology and art.
33:48
In fact, I really thought I was gonna be a medical illustrator for a while.
33:51
Okay.
33:52
Some of my, m- but most of my pictures that I drew on the, on the the,
33:56
the, the sides of all of my papers in school were horses, of course.
34:00
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
34:00
Glenn Cochran: But I loved to draw, and so I loved to draw horses, 'cause
34:03
I loved horses, and I loved biology.
34:06
And being an only child after school, before I started my homework, I was
34:10
usually out in the woods someplace.
34:12
So I- Mm ... I, I ended up having a fairly feral upbringing, you know?
34:16
But, but being out in the woods and watching animals and plants and all
34:20
that kind of stuff, that was, that was pretty much where my fascination was.
34:24
So naturally, when I went off to college, I got a degree in biology.
34:28
You know, the the college I went to was Baylor, which is up in Waco, Texas.
34:32
Rupert Isaacson: Yes, I know that one.
34:33
And
34:33
Glenn Cochran: so, the biology degree then was pretty natural
34:37
pre-med type of a, of a degree.
34:40
But that actually went further back than that.
34:42
My grandmother, who had worked in that hospital that I was born in
34:45
back up there in Indiana she wasn't a nurse, but she was, like, an
34:48
admitting clerk or something like that.
34:50
With an eighth-grade education, coming from a German family, you know, she,
34:54
she still, you know, when we were d- doing something in the house, if you
34:58
made a sound she didn't understand, she, she says, "Was ist los?"
35:01
Or if you ask her a question- Mm ... she didn't know the
35:03
answer, she's, "Ich weiÃ nicht."
35:05
You know?
35:05
Yeah.
35:05
So it's like, you know, she was still German and English were
35:08
kinda interchangeable to her.
35:10
And I, and I've, years later I finally figured out why she,
35:13
when she moved to Florida, she couldn't say the R in Florida.
35:18
And I said, "Well, that's, that's the German accent."
35:21
She, she said, "R is not a letter that you pronounce in German very often," so.
35:27
But anyway where was I?
35:29
So- Medicine ... so, she was the one that wanted me to be a doctor, and I,
35:33
when I was five years old, for Christmas I got a, a little cardboard box.
35:38
It was a little country doctor kit, you know?
35:39
And I, and I was kinda interested in that, but then the main thing I
35:43
thought about doctors was they were gonna stick you with a needle, and
35:46
I wasn't too interested in that, so.
35:48
But as I went along, I found out that there was quite a connection between
35:51
all this biology that I was interested in and, and the concept of healing And
35:57
I wasn't old enough to realize that you had to heal from anything, 'cause when
36:01
I got sick I got well anyway, you know.
36:02
But but during my time in college of course you start reading different things.
36:09
I read a lot of Anton Chekhov and all that sort of stuff, and, and found out...
36:13
And of course Baylor is a, is a, is a Baptist school, so I had to take
36:18
a lot of religion courses, so we studied biblical stuff and all that.
36:22
And the, you know, the doctor and the healing and all that was kind
36:26
of floating around in my head, so my roommate and I both applied to medical
36:30
school as, as juniors, and we both got accepted at Baylor in Houston.
36:34
And so, of course the, the...
36:37
And we, we were studying night and day.
36:38
I mean, that's all we did was study.
36:40
Or of course most of my classes were in the biology department,
36:43
so we were out doing field trips, catching frogs and snakes and
36:47
fish and, you know, categorizing plants and all that kind of stuff.
36:51
And so that, that suited me just fine.
36:53
You know, not being in the classroom and being out there in the, in the swamps
36:56
and near Waco was just fine with me.
36:59
But we we thought, you know, we really wanted to get into medical school.
37:03
And, and as time went on in medical school, I began to realize, you know,
37:08
there's a lot of different things about medicine, but the thing that
37:13
made the most sense to me was, was what the new specialty of family practice.
37:18
'Cause there you're just working with the people that you live with.
37:22
And and my mom was one of those kind of people that she was always working with
37:25
the people that we lived with anyway.
37:27
She had a, a degree in, a master's degree in psychology.
37:30
Of course her, her main thing out of college was she was a combined French and
37:36
mathematics major, so she spoke French and she could do, like, differential calculus,
37:41
which she helped my dad later on write his book about nuclear fuel cells and stuff.
37:47
So she was a pretty unusual lady, but she spent a lot of time talking to
37:51
other faculty wives and stuff like that, and she would, you know, have
37:55
tea with them and just sit and talk.
37:57
And a lot of them had all kinds of psychological problems, and she was a
38:00
good listener and, and an active listener.
38:03
She could ask questions and she could talk to them and then get them going,
38:06
and then she would listen to them.
38:08
And she was one of those kind of people that her, her b- she, she had
38:12
been Catholic as a child, and her belief system was you know, Jesus
38:16
says love one another, and that was...
38:18
You know, her religion was pretty simple, actually.
38:20
And interestingly enough- Her mother was a converso.
38:24
She, she had been Catholic be- she had been Jewish before she became Catholic.
38:29
Her mother?
38:30
Yeah.
38:31
So, so actually- In Spain.
38:33
Yeah.
38:33
Ge- genetically, I'm Jewish.
38:37
So, so she...
38:38
Rupert Isaacson: Jewish from which tradition?
38:40
From- Her, mostly Ashkenazi, I think.
38:43
They- Ashkenazi.
38:44
So Eastern Europe.
38:45
Yeah, in, in, Yeah.
38:46
Okay.
38:47
They- That's my, that's my father's family, too.
38:50
We're Ashkenazi.
38:50
I, I- Yeah.
38:51
Glenn Cochran: I, I kind of figured.
38:52
Scottish on one side,
38:52
Rupert Isaacson: Ashkenazi on
38:54
Glenn Cochran: the other.
38:54
Yeah, the, the, the...
38:55
I know very little about that because she suppressed that.
38:59
She, she wouldn't talk about it, and s- and my grandmother died,
39:03
I think I was two when I died.
39:05
I barely remember her, but she became, like, super Catholic, you know?
39:09
But- Yeah ... but I've read some of her letters later on that, that she
39:13
wrote to my mom and, and the, the tone of those letters, this would
39:17
be turn- during, like, the last 10 years of her life, the, the guilt
39:21
trip that she would load on my mother.
39:24
I said, "Okay, I get it," you know?
39:27
There, there might be a question in somebody's mind about whether
39:30
she was Jewish or not until you read those letters, and then you
39:33
know for damn sure she was Jewish.
39:37
But anyway so, so that was my mom's religious background.
39:41
Her, her father actually was Irish Catholic, so that, that makes
39:45
a real interesting combination.
39:46
Yeah, it does.
39:46
Yeah.
39:47
Particularly when you start thinking about healing and stuff like that, you know.
39:49
You got a very spiritualistic type of tradition in there.
39:53
And I was, you know, shit, I was in my 50s before I even started
39:56
thinking about stuff like that.
39:58
But that was inter- well, my dad, his family had been Protestant,
40:02
and they got married during the war dur- with the justice of the peace.
40:07
So after the war was over, then Dad says to Mom, says, "Well, I
40:13
guess we need to start going to church now that we're married."
40:17
And he, he says, "Where do you reckon we're gonna go?"
40:19
And she says, "Well, St Mary's, of course."
40:21
He says, "Well, St Mary's is a Catholic church."
40:25
He was a 33rd degree Mason.
40:27
Look at that.
40:29
Whoa.
40:29
So, so- That's a hoot, yeah ... Mom said, "Well, let me, let
40:33
me ask you a question, Bob.
40:35
You came to my house.
40:37
There were seven kids and two adults.
40:40
There was a cross up on the wall of the kitchen, and we ate at a picnic table.
40:44
And when we got done praying, we did this, all of us.
40:48
What about that didn't tell you that I was Catholic?"
40:53
But he didn't know.
40:54
I mean, he just didn't have anything to go from.
40:56
So anyway, we ended up being Methodist most of the time growing up.
41:01
But my cousins, some of them were Catholic, and so I would go to
41:04
the Catholic church part of the time, and I'd go to the Lutheran
41:06
church part of the time, and then I'd go to a Methodist church.
41:09
So, I, I got pretty ecumenical, if you wanna use that term.
41:13
Mm-hmm.
41:13
And I've kinda carried that concept of ecumenical into the horse world-
41:18
Okay ... where it's okay to be a cowboy, but it's also okay to
41:22
ride classical stuff, you know?
41:24
I hear
41:24
Rupert Isaacson: you.
41:24
Interesting.
41:24
Glenn Cochran: And the, it all fits together.
41:26
You know, it's all one thing.
41:28
Just like people, we're all one thing.
41:29
We are one DNA, therefore there is no such thing as races or anything.
41:34
We're all one.
41:35
And so anyway, that, that, that all kind of fit together.
41:38
And the the, the medical part, I was I was introduced to a guy
41:43
named William, or the concepts.
41:45
He was in, he was back in the 1800s, a guy named William Osler.
41:49
And William Osler's style, he was British I think, and his style of medicine was
41:53
to, to sit down on the patient's bed, get the patient started talking, let the
42:00
patient tell you what their problem is.
42:02
He says, "If you, if you spend enough time with them, they'll tell you the diagnosis.
42:07
You don't have to wonder what it is.
42:08
You don't need a lab test, x-rays.
42:10
They'll tell you what's wrong with them if you just listen."
42:14
And sure enough that was the way I chose to practice medicine.
42:19
And I remember I had started working in the emergency rooms.
42:23
One of the radiologists who was reading the x-rays down at Belleville,
42:27
which is about 45 minutes south of here, called me up one day.
42:30
He says, "Cochran, you need to be working in Belleville."
42:32
I said, "Well, why do I need to be working in Belleville?"
42:34
He says, "'Cause there's nothing but a bunch of dumbasses down there.
42:37
All they do is do x-rays and lab.
42:39
They don't know anything, and they all order CAT scans on
42:41
everybody w- comes in the door."
42:43
He says, "You order an x-ray when you need an x-ray.
42:47
You order a lab test when you need a lab test.
42:49
Otherwise, you practice medicine, and we need somebody like that
42:52
down there in Belleville."
42:53
And so you know, I, I thought he was just flattering me, but then the more, the
42:57
longer I was there, the more I realized that what he said was exactly right.
43:02
You know, these guys had a formula.
43:03
You walk in the door, you order everything you know how to order
43:07
about whatever that chief complaint was before you ever even see the
43:11
patient, and I never would do that.
43:13
I'd say, "Well, let me go meet them."
43:15
You know, nurse would say, "Well, we need to know, we need some orders."
43:17
I'd say, "You're gonna get your orders when I get done visiting with
43:21
them, but I wanna visit with them.
43:22
I wanna know who they are.
43:23
I wanna know, you know, how they think and what's going on."
43:26
And more often than not, I came out of the room and they'd say,
43:29
"Well, what do you wanna order?"
43:29
I'd say, "I don't need anything.
43:30
I just need you to give this one a penicillin shot."
43:33
Mm-hmm.
43:37
And it's, it's not that I'm such a great guy.
43:39
What it is, it's the concept, the concept of Oslerian medicine, and
43:42
boy, do we need that to come back now.
43:45
I guess part of the reason why I'm not practicing medicine anymore,
43:48
part of it was the COVID epidemic.
43:50
It was 2020 and I was covering up, you know, mask and gown and washing
43:53
my hands 50 times a day and all that, and I was doing 24-hour shifts, and I
43:57
was thinking, you know, shit, I'm...
43:59
What was it?
44:00
I was s- 75 years old at that time, and I said, "You know,
44:04
I'm at risk for this stuff.
44:05
If I get sick, I'm gonna die, and I don't really, I'm not quite ready yet.
44:10
I've got more horse training I wanna learn how to do."
44:13
And so I just, I told them, "Don't sch-" It was August of 2020.
44:16
I just said, "Just don't schedule me for September and I'll think about it."
44:19
Never went back.
44:20
But the other thing that was, was on my mind was so much of, of what
44:25
was going on was, like, when in the hell did the medical profession
44:31
become the medical business?
44:34
'Cause it was never about money for me and, and I just, I just had it.
44:39
You know, I couldn't stand that anymore.
44:41
And I, I couldn't change it, but I could change me.
44:44
And so now I practice medicine on cowboys and my friends.
44:49
You know, I, I don't, I don't do lab tests or anything.
44:52
I just sit and listen to them, and I make suggestions, and I tell them
44:56
who they ought to go to over in Bryan to go see about that, and I tell
45:00
them what I think maybe is going on.
45:02
And they appreciate the fact- I've, I've just
45:03
Rupert Isaacson: been, as you've been talking, I, I just did
45:05
a quick Google on my phone.
45:07
As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm an autism dad and we have
45:12
a whole career before this podcast in helping people with neurodivergence,
45:19
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45:22
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45:23
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45:30
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45:35
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45:36
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45:42
autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
45:45
Temple Grandin.
45:46
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45:47
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45:52
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45:57
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46:01
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46:06
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46:10
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46:13
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46:20
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46:23
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46:26
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46:31
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46:47
We really want to know.
46:47
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46:52
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
46:56
This is...
46:57
You, I'm so glad you, you mentioned this, man.
46:59
So Oslerian medicine, I, I, I looked it up.
47:02
Yeah.
47:03
And I just want to read this for the people who are listening and- Good
47:07
... watching, 'cause I think everyone, I think this is really interesting.
47:09
Oslerian medicine is a patient-centered humanistic approach to healthcare
47:15
established by Sir William Osler, 1849 to 1919, emphasizing bedside teaching,
47:21
compassionate care, and scientific rigor.
47:24
It promotes learning through direct patient interaction, ward
47:28
medicine, rather than just lectures, cultivating professionalism,
47:31
ethics, and a love for people.
47:33
Key principles of Oslerian medicine include bedside teaching, shifting
47:37
medical education from classrooms to hospital wards, where students learn by
47:41
observing and examining patients directly.
47:44
Humanism and compassion, focusing on treating the patient as an
47:48
individual, not just the disease.
47:50
Listen to the patient, a core philosophy advocating that attentive listening to the
47:55
patient's history leads to the diagnosis.
47:58
Lifelong learning, emphasizing that medicine is a rigorous science requiring
48:02
continuous study and observation, and equanimity, cultivating a calm demeanor,
48:07
imperturbability, in the face of a crisis.
48:11
Wow, and there's the McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine- at the
48:16
University of Texas Medical Branch.
48:17
Ooh, ooh.
48:18
I, this, this is wonderful.
48:20
And it's interesting because I, I have a lot of medicine in my family,
48:23
but I have never heard of this.
48:24
But it's interesting growing up in the UK- Yeah ... that idea of
48:28
learning on the wards, that is of course now the standard, isn't it?
48:32
That must have come from him.
48:33
Yeah.
48:33
Yeah.
48:34
Glenn Cochran: But we're not told these things.
48:35
And, and his book, the title of his book is Aequanimitas, spelled with the, the
48:40
Greek spelling, A-E for the first part.
48:43
Aequanimitas.
48:44
And that was the whole thing is, is just take, take all the, the hubbub out of it.
48:50
Just settle down and just go down to, you know, you got a person there
48:55
in front of you, learn that person.
48:58
Okay.
48:58
And that...
48:59
and, and the compassion is such a huge part of it.
49:02
You know, there's, there's...
49:03
it's not about, "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna go take out the, the
49:06
appendix in room three," you know?
49:08
No, it was, it was George Smith who happens to have a problem with his
49:14
appendix, and it looks like the only thing we can do is surgery and take
49:18
it out, so I'll go explain to George why he needs to be put asleep and
49:21
have the surgery, and I'll help him understa- you know, that kind of thing.
49:24
Mm-hmm.
49:24
And so, you know, it, it's, it's not that sterile hands-off kind of thing at all.
49:30
It's a very hands-on...
49:32
And in fact, my, the director of my residency, this is kind of an
49:35
aside, it's not really a bunny trail though the his name was David Bates.
49:40
He had been in family practice in Greeley for a long time, and he
49:44
became the director of our residency.
49:46
And he says, "When you go in to see a patient," he says,
49:49
"you have to touch them.
49:50
And not just on their shoulder or on their sleeve, you have to touch them on
49:54
bare skin with your bare skin, because that makes a connection that's real,
50:00
and you have to make that connection."
50:03
And he actually, to him it was almost like it was what, what they now refer
50:07
to as, as the aura, you know, the, the electromagnetic field around a human
50:13
being, which is pretty close to Reiki, actually, when you come right down to it.
50:17
Mm.
50:17
And so which then brings me to something in horses that I've found,
50:21
is Jim Masterson now uses basically Reiki to- Mm ... to calm horses.
50:27
You know, the, the bladder meridian.
50:29
And boy, I'm using- Mm ... the heck out of that these days.
50:31
You know, you...
50:32
in fact I've, I have not worked with him, but Kate, my friend,
50:35
is, is actually certified by him.
50:37
She actually took her finals with Jim Masterson himself.
50:41
But I've watched some of his videos and I've listened to what she
50:44
describes, and it's just amazing.
50:46
I mean, the s- the stuff that you see these horses do, you think,
50:50
you know, "Who in the world?
50:51
How could I ever have not known that if you put your hand up over this horse's
50:58
neck at a certain place and their, their eyes start to blink, and then you
51:02
just leave your hand there-" Then it might be a while, might be a couple of
51:06
minutes, and then their head drops to the ground, they blow out, they start
51:10
to yawn, and, and, and chew and lick and it's like, wow, what happened?
51:17
Well, their, their brain just finally calmed down and they
51:21
went into a parasympathetic state rather than the fight or flight.
51:26
And man, you know, you- if, if you think about you're dealing with an
51:30
animal that's 10 times as big as you are, 10 times as strong as you
51:33
are, and three times as quick as you are, you think you're gonna get that
51:37
done b- with your piddly strength?
51:40
You, you better be using that thing up under that hat.
51:45
'Cause the only thing about you that's bigger than that horse is your brain.
51:49
Rupert Isaacson: And the heart, what's under your shirt.
51:51
You know, w- it's really interesting what- Yes, right.
51:54
That's right ... you know, y- your, what you've talked about with your,
51:57
your, your resident in Greeley and him talking about the skin-to-skin touch.
52:03
So of course, as you know in my world when I'm working with autism and trauma
52:07
and all the other ways in which we use horses in, that's how I got into dressage
52:12
in the first place- Yeah ... what is to do with oxytocin and the creation
52:16
of oxytocin, and there is no better way to create oxytocin human-to-human
52:22
than direct touch of the skin because that's the baby on the mother's
52:26
breast, that's the, you know- Yeah
52:28
now, most of the time this is obviously for reasons that are too obvious,
52:32
you know, to go into not possible human-to-human most of the time.
52:37
So it's very, very interesting, apart from perhaps a handshake.
52:41
So it's, and that's perhaps why a handshake is so important- Yeah
52:45
... because you do feel the person, you create the connection because if it
52:49
goes well, you're creating oxytocin.
52:51
If the guy crushes your hand, you're creating cortisol, and you
52:54
know- ... to go the other way.
52:55
It's like, well, if you feel you've got to crush my hand, what else
52:58
are you gonna try and crush, right?
52:59
Yeah ... or, or, or you feel that there's, they're not making a connection
53:02
with you at all, the hand is so limp.
53:04
Yeah.
53:05
Feel that they're not- No, you,
53:06
Glenn Cochran: you go on about that all you want to, 'cause as far as I'm
53:09
concerned, that may be why we're here.
53:12
Yeah.
53:12
Whether it's people or horses or lizards, you know?
53:16
I, I think that's, that's at the root of why we're here is to make the connection.
53:20
And somebody said "Do you teach horses collection?"
53:23
I says, "Well, I suppose, but really what I'm trying to do
53:26
is teach them connection."
53:28
Mm.
53:28
I wanna, I want them to know me- And I wanna know them, you know?
53:34
Mm-hmm.
53:34
I want us to, to have a, a communication that's meaningful and, and it's not
53:39
just a, "Okay, he's a two-legged."
53:42
No, he's, he's a two-legged named Glen and he cares about me,
53:45
and he shows me that every day.
53:47
Mm-hmm.
53:47
And that's, that's where...
53:48
Whoops, knocked my phone down.
53:50
That's where the, the, the connection between medicine and horse training is,
53:55
is, you know, there is no difference.
53:57
You know, we're doing the same thing.
53:58
Well- And then when, when I'm working- Got it ... with students, you know,
54:01
it's like, you know, I, I got a student who's trying to learn how to ride.
54:04
They think all they're here for is learn how to, you know, equitation.
54:07
And, and I don't start there.
54:09
I start, "Okay, let's walk out here with this horse on a, on a lead line and s-
54:15
stand out here for a while and, and let's think about, you know, who that horse is.
54:19
How are they responding to you?
54:21
What are they doing?
54:21
What are they- Mm-hmm ... are they standing with their head up in the air and
54:24
their tail up in the air or is their head down low, are they licking and chewing?"
54:27
All that stuff that Ray Hunt came up with.
54:29
You know, it was all- Mm-hmm ... all about is that horse with
54:32
you, and are they relaxed?
54:34
And, and then you use that on people.
54:36
You know, you watch the student.
54:38
Is that student checked out?
54:40
Or, or, are they wanting to know the next thing I have to say, you know?
54:44
Mm-hmm.
54:45
That kind of stuff.
54:46
Rupert Isaacson: Or are they afraid of me?
54:47
And then- Yeah, or they're afraid- Yeah ... of something else.
54:49
Yeah.
54:49
Absolutely.
54:50
You know, it's, it's so interesting that since I started reading
54:53
all the old dead dudes i.e.
54:55
the old masters and particularly since teaming up with Richard Williams, you
54:59
know, who's the publisher at Xenophon- Yeah ... God bless him, because he's,
55:03
he's not gonna get rich doing that, and he's making these incredible
55:07
he's, he's like the walking Library of Alexandria for us, you know?
55:10
Yeah.
55:10
Yeah.
55:11
If that man goes- Yeah ... you know, say goodbye to, you know,
55:14
to 6,000 years of, you know- Yeah ... human-equestrian endeavor.
55:18
So, you know, we owe that man a lot.
55:20
But he, since I've really started studying those texts, the, the, the,
55:24
the thing which you notice is the, the skein, the line that runs through
55:27
all of these the, the, the people that felt that they were gonna write a book
55:31
about it through the centuries, is it's always connected to the humanities.
55:37
You, you look at Xenophon and of course the horsey people who know
55:42
Xenophon know him as a horseman.
55:44
But actually, the, if you go and study philosophy at university, you'll know
55:50
him as a philosopher because he, he was a student of Socrates and he was-
55:54
Yeah ... class, the same class as Plato.
55:57
And they were also all military men because they had to be, because when
56:01
you grew up in those warring you know, Greek city states, everyone
56:06
was drafted into the local militia.
56:07
So you were of- often fighting in the summer and no matter
56:10
what your profession was.
56:11
And so h- he's, he's a wealthy aristocrat so he's in the cavalry, but
56:16
he is unhorsed- at a particular battle with the northern neighbors thieves.
56:21
And it's, it's Socrates who carries him off the battlefield, you know?
56:24
Mm.
56:25
And, and then, you know, so we think about these guys as living in an ivory
56:27
tower, completely removed from everything.
56:30
Not at all.
56:31
And then he learns his horsemanship really working as a mercenary in Persia.
56:36
Yeah, yeah ... and then he has to get- He makes the long
56:37
Glenn Cochran: trip down through Turkey into, or Armenia or- He does,
56:40
' Rupert Isaacson: cause, 'cause he fights on the wrong side, and they end up losing
56:44
the battle at, near Baghdad, and they gotta get home from Iraq to Greece walking
56:50
with the Persian army on their heels.
56:52
So if you go to West Point or you go to Sandhurst Military Academy in the
56:55
UK, you're gonna learn him as the master of the tactical withdrawal.
56:58
Yeah.
56:58
But then he's writing all these other books, horsemanship, husbandry, how
57:02
to run your household, philosophy.
57:04
He, you know, how you've gotta actually be nice to your wife
57:08
because, of course, that wasn't a given.
57:10
And, and how you should actually listen to your kids.
57:12
That wasn't a given.
57:13
Back then.
57:14
It, and then also how you, the spiritual side.
57:17
So for him, he, he's, he's quite pious about always making the right sacrifices,
57:21
always honoring the gods, you know.
57:23
And if you think about the risks involved in his life the idea of
57:27
the relationship with the divine, it's, it's always in there.
57:31
Yeah.
57:31
And then, you know, you jump ahead to writers like Pluvinel, you know, in
57:37
the, when the Renaissance is giving way to the to the Baroque period, and he
57:42
has noticed down in these academies in Italy that the thing that you really
57:48
get out of learning to train a horse in this kind of three-dimensional complex
57:53
way is you have to learn to master your emotions, and that this is actually
57:58
perfect training for someone who's going to be a diplomat and a courtier- Yeah
58:03
not just a warrior.
58:05
And so then- Yeah, yeah ... all these, all these riding academies start where
58:08
people also learn mathematics, dancing, astronomy, fencing, languages, you know.
58:14
So what I notice, and you, you're, you're su- you're such a, a living
58:18
embodiment of this, is that the people- Thank you ... that really get
58:23
into this type of horse training have this kind of pan curiosity, but it
58:27
always comes down to the humanities.
58:29
It always comes down to really the relationship with your
58:32
fellow human, I think, you know.
58:34
And, and the horse can be a funnel for this.
58:36
And yes, we want to really connect with our horses and so on, but we're still
58:40
doing this as a human community, as a horse tribe, you know what I mean?
58:44
And it's-
58:44
Glenn Cochran: Yeah, yeah
58:45
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah ... but someone could look at you, you know, you wandering
58:47
your cowboy hat, kind of talking like that, and they'd say, "Oh, well, you
58:51
know, Glen's a cowboy from Texas."
58:54
You wouldn't necessarily introduce yourself as a doctor.
58:56
You wouldn't necessarily introduce yourself as a doctor of this
58:59
particular kind of medicine.
59:01
You wouldn't necessarily introduce yourself as a biologist.
59:04
You wouldn't necessarily introduce yourself as a student of, you
59:07
know, both the French, Portuguese classical tradition and the, you
59:12
know, other classical traditions, the, the Rejonero classical tradition.
59:16
You wouldn't, you wouldn't wear that on your sleeve, but if someone
59:19
was to spend a beer with you y- y- it would very soon become clear.
59:24
And, but what is also lovely is that you totally swim in all those worlds.
59:28
You're not then going up saying, "Well, I'm not gonna go hang up-
59:32
hang out with the cowboys in the Panhandle and do the calf roping and
59:36
the castrating, because that's redneck and I'm too highfalutin for that."
59:40
That- that's red and I'm blue or whatever.
59:43
What I love about the people that really get involved in this is that
59:47
they swim in all worlds, you know?
59:49
There- there's no snobbery, there's no disconnection.
59:53
What you said, I want to teach my horse connection, it- that is connection.
59:57
It's also connection across the human tribes, too.
59:59
Yeah.
59:59
But through, through different horse tribes.
1:00:04
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
1:00:04
It's- It's it's one of those things that, that you, you sometimes don't
1:00:09
realize you're speaking the same language with somebody in, in the horse world.
1:00:15
And- and what I get a lot of times since I've, I've been kind of competing a
1:00:19
little bit and working the equitation is that, that the first thing they
1:00:23
see is the hat, and so then they, they make assumptions about that.
1:00:28
And so then- Well, it's a natural costume.
1:00:29
It's like a kilt, you know?
1:00:30
I mean, it's- Yeah.
1:00:31
Yeah, yeah.
1:00:31
Yeah.
1:00:32
Yeah.
1:00:32
And I've, I've been known to wear one of those, too- Yeah ... being a Cochrane.
1:00:35
Yeah.
1:00:36
But, but then it's like, well, why are you asking your horse
1:00:42
all that stuff with your reins?
1:00:43
And then he starts to chew and lick and bend his head around and all that.
1:00:47
I say, "Well," and- and then they start realizing, oh, even cowboys
1:00:51
can do Bushwackerist equitation.
1:00:56
Say, "Yeah, even cowboys."
1:00:59
And it, it's so interesting We- it's, it's like that one lady that, that told a joke.
1:01:03
She says, "You know, my, my daughter asked me one day," she
1:01:07
says "Mama are cowboys human?"
1:01:11
Do, do they eat grass?
1:01:13
Like, like cows do?
1:01:15
And she says, "No, no, they are human, but they don't eat grass."
1:01:19
Well, the, e-
1:01:19
Rupert Isaacson: except in the states where it's legal, yeah.
1:01:23
Glenn Cochran: Well, then they smoke it instead of eat it, yeah.
1:01:25
Rupert Isaacson: Well, there's edibles now,
1:01:26
Glenn Cochran: yeah, yeah.
1:01:27
Yeah, so c- do cowboys eat grass?
1:01:29
No, dear- Try ... they're part human.
1:01:32
Rupert Isaacson: Only part human, yeah.
1:01:34
Yeah.
1:01:34
That, you could argue that they drink grass, because what
1:01:37
is beer but fermented barley?
1:01:40
And what is- That's right ... barley but a grass?
1:01:42
Yeah, so yeah, I guess- And- Yeah ... and bread.
1:01:45
Glenn Cochran: Bread's- And some bread ... the same thing.
1:01:46
Exactly.
1:01:46
Especially sourdough bread.
1:01:48
Since I've gotten into the chuck wagon cooking stuff a little bit, you
1:01:51
know, I make sourdough bread a lot.
1:01:53
And and the, there's like this one old he was a rabbi actually, and
1:01:56
he said, "You know, beer is liquid bread, and bread is solid beer.
1:02:00
They're both fermented wheat."
1:02:02
And, and I say, you know, never quite thought of it that way.
1:02:07
If,
1:02:08
Rupert Isaacson: if only you could get quite the same buzz off bread, but yes.
1:02:12
Te- tell me about what, what, the chuck wagon cooking.
1:02:15
I didn't know that side of you.
1:02:16
What, what are you doing with that?
1:02:18
Glenn Cochran: Well, my, my son actually got me into it.
1:02:20
We were, there's a big antique show in I guess it's twice a year,
1:02:25
mostly it's in April, down in a place called Round Top, Texas.
1:02:28
Rupert Isaacson: I know the Round Top, Texas, Okay ... antique.
1:02:31
Fe- fe- it's bananas.
1:02:33
It's-
1:02:35
Glenn Cochran: Oh,
1:02:35
Rupert Isaacson: it's amazing ... thousands and
1:02:36
Glenn Cochran: thousands of people.
1:02:37
Yeah, yeah,
1:02:38
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
1:02:38
Yeah.
1:02:38
Glenn Cochran: So, of course my, my wife and her friends wanted to go
1:02:41
down there, so we went down there.
1:02:43
And, and my son at the time, I think, I can't remember how old he was, he
1:02:47
was late teenager I guess he's in his 50s now so it's a while back.
1:02:52
But we come to this place, this guy's got chuck wagons.
1:02:56
And and, and all the stuff, you know, the, the, the iron pots and everything.
1:03:00
Well, I, when I was in the Boy Scouts we had learned how to cook with a,
1:03:04
a Dutch oven, you know, so I knew a little bit of something about that.
1:03:07
And we always liked to camp a bunch, you know, that's, that's another
1:03:10
part of cowboy- And explain- Yeah
1:03:10
explain to
1:03:11
Rupert Isaacson: people who might not know what a Dutch
1:03:12
oven is, what a Dutch oven is.
1:03:14
Okay.
1:03:14
Glenn Cochran: Dutch oven is basically a, a large iron pot with feet on it,
1:03:19
and then it's got a lid that actually has a lip so that what you can do
1:03:22
is you can put the coals on the top of the oven when you put the lid on.
1:03:26
So you have heat coming from the top, and then you got the heat underneath
1:03:30
because you got these feet that it's standing up off the ground.
1:03:32
So you put coals top and bottom, and then you can put whatever
1:03:35
you're cooking in there.
1:03:36
You can either put it directly in the pot- And, and these things are heavy too.
1:03:40
I mean, they're thick thick walled iron.
1:03:43
And the...
1:03:44
Or you can put the, the food in there in, in a container, like a,
1:03:47
a pie pan or something and, and set it on some rocks where it's not
1:03:50
actually in contact with the bottom.
1:03:52
And but you, you regulate the heat of the thing by basically how many coals you
1:03:58
put on the top versus how many coals you put on the bottom, which is fine until
1:04:03
the wind's blowing 30 miles an hour.
1:04:06
Now, that does two things.
1:04:07
One, it carries the heat away from the, the oven, but at the same time it
1:04:11
fans the coals and makes them hotter.
1:04:13
So, so trying to m- to regulate the heat on a Dutch oven is a real art form.
1:04:19
But my son and my grandson now all think that's one of the neatest things in the
1:04:23
world, is cooking with a Dutch oven.
1:04:25
So we, we ended up, we ended up buying one of the wagons that was
1:04:29
down there at, at you know, Round Top, and it was just, it was just a wagon.
1:04:33
It had a box on it but they had rigged up a set of brakes
1:04:36
and a, and a tongue, so it...
1:04:39
When we, when we found the wagon, it was actually drivable.
1:04:42
And but the wheels are pretty ancient.
1:04:44
I mean, this thing was probably made in the 1840s or '50s,
1:04:48
somewhere along in there.
1:04:49
It was a grain wagon at first, and then it got converted to, to
1:04:53
being having a chuck box on it.
1:04:55
And so now we, we got the bows to put the wagon sheet on it, and we
1:04:59
bought all kinds of jew jaws and stuff to, to, you know, to add to it.
1:05:03
Saws and axes and, you know, plates and all that stuff, you know.
1:05:08
Flour cans and what have you.
1:05:09
So, we could actually probably go do chuck wagon competitions, but I just
1:05:13
don't have that much interest in that.
1:05:15
But what we use it- So where do you,
1:05:16
Rupert Isaacson: where do you do this chuck wagon cooking?
1:05:17
Like, do, do you take it to events and- Well, we, we
1:05:20
Glenn Cochran: when we round up cattle on our place, we, we'll pull
1:05:23
the chuck wagon out to wherever we're working the cattle and and set it up.
1:05:27
And I have driven horses in the past, so I've got a bunch
1:05:30
of harness I can hang on it.
1:05:32
I don't currently have any mules or horses that I can use to actually drive
1:05:36
the wagon, and I would probably have to rebuild the wheels before I did it.
1:05:40
Mm.
1:05:40
But it's just, it's a, it's kind of a backdrop, if you will.
1:05:44
Nice.
1:05:44
And then we'll, we will serve the, the noon meal out of the wagon.
1:05:49
We have our little dining flies and stuff, and so people come up, and we might, might
1:05:54
have cabrito or stew or green chili stew.
1:05:58
There's no telling, you know.
1:05:59
Something different every time.
1:06:01
And so we all like to cook, and so we'll get together and cook up a bunch of stuff,
1:06:05
and, and it's, it's pretty, pretty pretty Mexican type cooking for the most part.
1:06:10
Mm.
1:06:10
But then that fits in with West Texas, you know, which is, that's
1:06:13
Rupert Isaacson: where we are, you know, so Yeah.
1:06:15
Tell...
1:06:15
And tell me how, where does the sourdough come into that?
1:06:18
Glenn Cochran: Well, in order to, to have bread, there's several
1:06:21
different things you can have.
1:06:22
You can make cornbread- Mm-hmm ... you can make that in a Dutch oven, or you can make
1:06:26
tortillas- Mm ... or what they call pan de campo, which is like a, a real thick
1:06:31
tortilla, or you can make sourdough bread.
1:06:34
But the trick with sourdough bread is you have to have your starter,
1:06:37
you have to keep it going, and then, then you make the, the the bread
1:06:41
up, and you put the starter put, put the, the, the dough, once you get it
1:06:45
made up, you put it someplace to sit.
1:06:47
And it, it might be a few hours, it might be a couple of days.
1:06:51
You never know.
1:06:52
It's just, it takes its own time.
1:06:54
But that's one of the things that the chuck wagon competition stuff is
1:06:58
they, they want they wanna know can you handle a sourdough starter and
1:07:02
can you, can you make sourdough bread.
1:07:04
And so it's, it's a kind of, it's more of an art form than anything.
1:07:08
And but now what I mostly use it for is my, my family likes for me to
1:07:12
make them some sourdough bread fairly regularly, so at least once a week
1:07:17
if not more often, I'm, I'm in there making up another batch of sourdough.
1:07:22
And, and it's, you know, you talk about meditation and rituals, making
1:07:28
sourdough is a meditation and a ritual.
1:07:31
You know, you gotta kinda have your mind on what you're doing, and, and you're
1:07:34
just sort of, sort of going through a process, but you're feeling what's
1:07:38
happening with that dough the whole time.
1:07:40
And, and you can tell when it's working and when it's not, that kinda thing.
1:07:44
So it, it gives you some time out, 'cause you really can't do
1:07:47
anything else with all this flour on your hands, except make bread.
1:07:53
So, and then you have to wait for it, you know, say, "Are you ready yet?"
1:07:56
And then, "No."
1:07:57
So you wait another day, and then you bake it.
1:08:01
How do you know when it's ready?
1:08:03
The, the, the, the main measurement that most people use is if it's in
1:08:08
a, if it's in the the rising state, whatever vessel you've got it in, if
1:08:12
it's one and a half to two times more of it there than when you put it, and
1:08:16
I usually put it in a refrigerator to, to ferment so it goes slower,
1:08:21
'cause you get more flavor that way.
1:08:23
So if it's one and a half to two times and then you, you poke it, and if, if you poke
1:08:28
it in and it comes back out kind of, you know, fairly quickly, then you know that
1:08:32
there's carbon dioxide bubbles in there.
1:08:34
And you know when you put that in the oven at 450 degrees, that's gonna
1:08:39
give you oven spring, and you get a, a, a kind of a round loaf of bread.
1:08:45
Not all my experiments are perfect, and sometimes I get a doorstop and
1:08:51
sometimes I get a real nice light loaf of bread, but it, it all eats, so...
1:08:58
Rupert Isaacson: Fascinating.
1:08:59
And, and that's really chemistry, isn't it?
1:09:01
It's chemistry- Yeah ... and biology together.
1:09:03
Yeah ... and of course that's- Yeah, you make...
1:09:04
Glenn Cochran: Yeah, as a matter of fact, the, the, the
1:09:07
fermentation, it's just like wine.
1:09:09
You know, you, the fermentation makes alcohol and carbon dioxide.
1:09:12
If you make too much alcohol, that kills the, the, the
1:09:15
yeast, and so then you're done.
1:09:17
You know?
1:09:17
So you wanna make sure that, that it's, that the, the yeast is still somewhat
1:09:22
active and still making bubbles, and hasn't produced too much alcohol
1:09:26
just yet when you put it in the oven.
1:09:29
And then, then you get what's called oven spring, which is you get a sudden
1:09:32
spurt of activity of that yeast right before it dies, and kinda like a, a
1:09:37
little kid right before they go to sleep at night, you know, they'll...
1:09:42
Yeah.
1:09:43
Run in circles, screaming, shouting.
1:09:45
You know, they're asleep.
1:09:47
Rupert Isaacson: Fascinating.
1:09:48
All right.
1:09:48
I have another I've got two more rabbit holes I wanna go down with you.
1:09:53
All right.
1:09:53
I love rabbit holes ... one, one is, one is another horse one.
1:09:58
And it's funny, when you said e- equanim- e- was it equ- equanimith?
1:10:05
Easy for you to say.
1:10:06
The medicine is equan- Equanimitas.
1:10:10
Yeah ... equanimitas.
1:10:11
I, with you- But it's got
1:10:13
Glenn Cochran: equus in it, doesn't it?
1:10:14
You're right.
1:10:14
It's
1:10:14
Rupert Isaacson: like you could say you're doing equanimitas medicine.
1:10:18
Yeah.
1:10:18
Yeah.
1:10:18
Okay.
1:10:19
So before you ended up exploring the Iberian horses you took a
1:10:26
line with the Peruvian horses.
1:10:28
Right.
1:10:29
And I presume you were still also always using quarter horses on
1:10:34
the ranch as well because you need a certain number of horses to...
1:10:38
You've got 500 acres there.
1:10:39
You're, you're, how many head of cattle is that?
1:10:42
Glenn Cochran: Well, we, we tend to run anywhere from 1 to 200 head on this place.
1:10:45
That's about what I thought.
1:10:46
That's a lot.
1:10:47
So you- Yeah.
1:10:47
Depends on the weather, you know.
1:10:48
Rupert Isaacson: And are you primarily doing that from horseback?
1:10:51
Yeah, yeah.
1:10:51
Right We do all
1:10:52
Glenn Cochran: our cattle work horse, man.
1:10:53
Yeah.
1:10:53
So you've
1:10:54
Rupert Isaacson: got to have, you know, a decent herd, right, to-
1:10:57
Yeah ... to, you know, 'cause you've gotta have spare horses, horses go lame,
1:11:00
horses throw shoes, whatever, right?
1:11:01
So you've gotta have enough horses.
1:11:02
Mm-hmm.
1:11:03
Yeah.
1:11:03
So y- you, you're having, I presume, to always work a certain variety of
1:11:08
breeds because i- it's tough to have the entire herd for that at this stage
1:11:14
all Iberian or all Peruvian or...
1:11:16
Right.
1:11:16
So you, you correct me if I'm wrong, but you're probably doing Quarter
1:11:19
Horses and Iberians, I should imagine.
1:11:22
Yeah.
1:11:22
Glenn Cochran: I'm, I'm using on our ranch work, I'm getting to where
1:11:26
I use mostly Iberians or Iberian crosses, like the Azteca- Okay,
1:11:30
Aztecas ... which is the half Quarter.
1:11:32
Yeah ... Azteca.
1:11:32
Right.
1:11:32
Yeah.
1:11:32
Rupert Isaacson: So you've sort of gravitated over into that.
1:11:35
Yeah.
1:11:36
More like, more like frankly the Charros, the Mexican cowboys would
1:11:39
be, would be doing- Yeah ... with that kind of horse, I guess.
1:11:42
Glenn Cochran: And they, they, they also use quite a few Quarter
1:11:44
Horses probably more than the Aztecas nowadays, but, but they do.
1:11:48
The Charros use both.
1:11:50
Right.
1:11:51
But and it's it, it, the, the Azteca's a really interesting horse because
1:11:55
the, you never know for sure what, what percentage you're gonna get
1:11:58
of Quarter Horse versus Iberian.
1:12:00
Absolutely ... so it's, it, you, you can kinda get fooled sometimes.
1:12:04
But they, they usually have a lot of cow sense.
1:12:07
Of course, you know, the, the, the Portuguese cross with the- Yeah
1:12:10
with the Quarter Horse.
1:12:11
You know, you're crossing a bull fighting horse with a cutting horse, that's g-
1:12:14
Yeah ... they got a lot of cow, you know.
1:12:15
Rupert Isaacson: No, they do.
1:12:16
They do, they do.
1:12:17
And, you know, it's so interesting that people have a perception of the
1:12:20
Iberian horse as in like a fancy horse.
1:12:23
It's like- Yeah ... if you go to the hills th- that we're very familiar with
1:12:27
in Andalusia and Portugal, well, it's open range cattle ranching, 'cause that's- Yeah
1:12:32
where it came from before it went on a ship to the Americas.
1:12:36
And guess what horse they're doing it on?
1:12:38
The local horse, which happens to be a PRE or a p- or a Lusitano, because
1:12:44
that's what's in the hills . So- Or,
1:12:45
Glenn Cochran: or sometimes what they call a Jaca, which is- Yes ... it's
1:12:49
basically it's what we call an Azteca, I guess, 'cause they're, they're a
1:12:52
cross between Iberian and it might be a Thoroughbred cross- Exactly
1:12:55
or maybe a little Arab cross, that kind of thing.
1:12:57
Sometimes Arab, sometimes
1:12:57
Rupert Isaacson: Hispanic Arab.
1:12:58
Yeah.
1:12:58
Exactly.
1:12:59
Or a Cruzado they call it.
1:13:01
But, but it's- Mm-hmm ... it's effectively an Iberian horse.
1:13:03
Yeah.
1:13:03
They are the original cowhorse, right?
1:13:05
Yeah.
1:13:05
So it's interesting that there's now this perception of the Quarter Horse being
1:13:09
the cowhorse, when of course it's not the original cowhorse, it's a later cowhorse.
1:13:13
Yeah.
1:13:14
But you had this, So I want, I want to go down a small h- horse rabbit hole, and
1:13:18
then I want to go down a cow rabbit hole.
1:13:20
Thinking about- Okay ... a big cow down a rabbit hole.
1:13:22
Your Peru- Your, your adventure with the Peruvian horses, you mentioned
1:13:27
doing stuff with a long stick.
1:13:28
I presume you meant the garrocha.
1:13:30
Is that right?
1:13:31
You, you- Well, actually the- And, and were you working
1:13:33
cows off the Peruvian horses?
1:13:35
The- Everyone's gonna think- Yeah ... what im- immediately what
1:13:38
I think, isn't that a gaited horse?
1:13:40
And then can...
1:13:41
how effective is working cows off a gaited horse?
1:13:45
Because don't you need that sprint, you know, to catch the cow and the spin?
1:13:49
So talk to us about that.
1:13:50
Glenn Cochran: Okay.
1:13:51
Well, the, the, the poll that I was referring to with the Peruvian horses
1:13:55
is basically the, the single pillar.
1:13:56
Ah.
1:13:57
'Cause they use the single pillar to work the horses around- Okay ... with
1:14:00
the rope wrapped around it.
1:14:00
Yeah ... in a manner, that's interesting.
1:14:03
Rupert Isaacson: That's the 17th century French- Yeah
1:14:05
and English method.
1:14:06
Goes, goes all the way back to the,
1:14:07
Glenn Cochran: the, the Duke of Newcastle, basically.
1:14:09
The Duke of Newcastle.
1:14:10
Well, oh- The single pillar, work on two tracks.
1:14:12
Yeah Yeah.
1:14:12
A modern treatise of horsemanship.
1:14:15
Indeed.
1:14:16
1625.
1:14:16
1625.
1:14:18
So, I get a big kick out of, out of use of that phrase and
1:14:21
thinking of- He was another man
1:14:22
Rupert Isaacson: who was very much into the humanities.
1:14:24
Yeah You know, he was also a playwright and a medic and a military man and,
1:14:29
and, and, you know, Duke of Newcastle- Yeah ... philosopher, patron of the arts.
1:14:31
You,
1:14:31
you,
1:14:32
Glenn Cochran: you nailed it.
1:14:32
Yeah,
1:14:33
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
1:14:33
Anyway, politician.
1:14:35
Glenn Cochran: So- And, and interestingly, Cavendish in his, in the, the book
1:14:39
that I have, he has pictures of what he calls the, the you called it the
1:14:44
head part, you know, the- Cavesson
1:14:46
cavesson.
1:14:47
Yeah.
1:14:48
So he calls it a cavesson or, or actually I think the book was originally written
1:14:52
in French, so he calls it cavesson.
1:14:53
That's right.
1:14:54
But the picture is, it's a hand-drawn picture of a serretÃ³n.
1:14:59
I mean, there is absolutely not one bit of difference between- Absolutely
1:15:02
... the cavesson in Newcastle's book and the, and the serretÃ³n that all
1:15:07
Spanish horse breakers- Absolutely
1:15:08
use to start colts.
1:15:09
It's just- Yeah ... it's amazing.
1:15:10
Nothing's changed in ever how many- No ... hundred years that is.
1:15:13
And the bosal
1:15:14
Rupert Isaacson: is a, is a, is a, is a riff on that as well and- That's right.
1:15:17
That's right.
1:15:17
Yeah.
1:15:17
The
1:15:17
Glenn Cochran: bosal, the Peruvian bosal is basically a
1:15:20
serretÃ³n made out of rawhide.
1:15:22
Yeah Braided rawhide.
1:15:24
And so, yeah, and we, you know, I was mainly trying to make side saddle horses,
1:15:28
but the side saddle horse has to be really solid 'cause they're gonna be having
1:15:33
dresses flapping around on 'em- Mm-hmm
1:15:35
they're gonna be in parades, they're going all kind of stuff going on.
1:15:37
They have to be absolutely tranquil.
1:15:40
Mm-hmm.
1:15:40
So we use them as cow horses 'cause then you're gonna carry ropes and
1:15:44
bullwhips and have dogs- Right, right ... running around their feet and stuff.
1:15:47
And so after they've worked on the ranch as a cow horse, well then you can put
1:15:52
them in a side saddle and put them in a parade and there's nothing to it.
1:15:54
You know, they got- Mm ... that figured out.
1:15:56
Then, And we, we found that some of them were, were pretty athletic.
1:16:00
You know, they actually had pretty good balance.
1:16:02
Some of them, the, the gait might not be quite as smooth as the more
1:16:06
smoother-gaited horse, but they can, they can get around and do things,
1:16:10
and they could have that spurt of speed that they needed to work a cow.
1:16:14
Then some of them we would say, "Yeah, that one has got a, got a gallop
1:16:18
kind of like a fat woman carrying two buckets of water," you know?
1:16:20
They, they're not gonna be able to squirt out too, too well and, and work cattle.
1:16:24
But they are smoother, you know, they're more laterally based and more into what
1:16:27
they call Huachano horses, you know?
1:16:29
So, and, and now I'm not training so much Peruvians, but I've kind of stayed
1:16:34
in touch with, with my, my friends who, who are Peruvian horse trainers.
1:16:38
And some of them, one of them in fact, is back in Peru.
1:16:42
He's, he's winning a bunch of stuff, and his grandfather was
1:16:45
kind of the, the Francois Robichon of Peruvian horse trainers, a guy
1:16:49
named Jose Al- Jose Alba Leon.
1:16:53
Alba would be his last name.
1:16:55
His mother's last name was Leon.
1:16:57
And Jose Alba wasn't a very big guy.
1:16:59
He kind of reminds you of Baucher though really in a way.
1:17:02
Lot of flexions.
1:17:04
Lot of flexions.
1:17:05
And this guy was, I guess he was probably like in the 1930s '40s maybe
1:17:10
a really big-name trainer in his day.
1:17:13
And his one of the things that I learned from, from his grandson was a, a system
1:17:20
of doubling or flexions that, that I use.
1:17:23
I use it on the Iberians, the Quarter Horses, everybody.
1:17:26
If I'm in a- Tell us about the system.
1:17:27
Okay.
1:17:28
It's a small pen, and you kind of look at the pen from the top like
1:17:32
you're looking at a clock face.
1:17:33
So you're gonna start out at 12 o'clock, and you're gonna walk to
1:17:39
1:00 and stop the horse, and you're gonna do a flexion to the right until
1:17:43
it's soft and a flexion to the left.
1:17:46
So it's one and one.
1:17:48
It's 1:00, one and one.
1:17:50
And then you let the horse walk forward to 2:00, and usually you
1:17:54
would, you could stop them a number of different ways, but you're not letting
1:17:57
them go very fast at this point.
1:17:58
Right.
1:17:59
At 2:00 you do one flexion on the right side, one flexion on the left
1:18:03
side, one second flexion on the right side, second flexion on the left side.
1:18:07
So it's one, one, two, two, and so forth.
1:18:11
3:00 you're gonna do three flexions.
1:18:12
When you get back around to 12, you're gonna actually be doing 12 flexions
1:18:17
on each side, and then I go one more.
1:18:20
I call it the 13 doubles.
1:18:22
That's my name for the exercise.
1:18:24
By the time you've done that, you've done about 180, minimum of 180
1:18:29
flexions within about 30 minutes.
1:18:31
And you talk about being soft as bubblegum.
1:18:34
I mean, they're just, you know.
1:18:36
And, and they, they accept the flexion.
1:18:40
They, they don't really have any great desire to run away or
1:18:43
buck or do anything like that.
1:18:44
They, they have really definitely been toned down considerably.
1:18:48
Sometimes I come back and I do it again.
1:18:50
Most of the time I don't really have to go through that whole routine 'cause
1:18:54
the next day that I ride him I'll do a bunch of in-hand work- Mm ... and I'll
1:18:57
do some flexions, and then I'll get on, I'll do some flexions, static flexions,
1:19:01
'cause that was Baucher's, one of his basic abiding principles was if you
1:19:05
can get the horse to get in a certain position standing still, he'll kind of
1:19:09
remember that with his central nervous system when you start moving forward.
1:19:12
Mm-hmm.
1:19:13
And so then, then the flexion's there.
1:19:14
Well, that, that was all with Peruvian horses, and so then I started learning
1:19:19
the, the Baucher technique and, and then the Iberian horses, and it's, well,
1:19:23
damn, there's no difference, you know?
1:19:24
You're just you're doing the same thing.
1:19:27
Well,
1:19:28
Rupert Isaacson: As you may know, if you've been following my work,
1:19:30
we are also horsey folk here.
1:19:33
And we have been training horses for many, many years in the manner of
1:19:37
the old classical dressage masters.
1:19:41
This is something which is often very confusing for people.
1:19:44
We shine a light on that murky, difficult stuff and make it crystal clear.
1:19:49
If you'd like to learn to train your horse in the manner of the old masters and
1:19:54
really have fun and joy for you and your equine, go to our website, heliosharmony.
1:20:00
com Sign up as a premium member.
1:20:03
and begin to take the Helios Harmony course, which will take you from zero
1:20:07
to the Piaf, where the horse is dancing on the spot in hand on the ground.
1:20:13
And then from there, you can develop out to anywhere you want to.
1:20:18
Heliosharmony.
1:20:19
com to unlock the secrets of the old masters.
1:20:23
what's really interesting is I'm going to hit pause and go
1:20:27
grab a particular book- Okay
1:20:30
which makes a really interesting...
1:20:32
So just please don't run away.
1:20:34
It, it's gonna take me- I'll be right here . All right, I'm back.
1:20:37
So- All right ... nothing new under the sun, right?
1:20:40
Right ... my favorite book, again, it's another Xenophon
1:20:43
Press book is this one Dressage in the French Tradition by Don- Ah
1:20:47
Diogo de Braganza.
1:20:48
Yeah.
1:20:48
Because he, for those who don't know, he was one of the lifelong local students
1:20:54
of Nuno Oliveira, and but synthesizes Nuno's approach and work in this
1:21:00
rather slim volume really, really well because Nuno himself can sometimes be
1:21:04
a bit difficult to understand unless it's his letters to his students
1:21:09
telling them exactly what to do.
1:21:11
Those are great.
1:21:11
Also published by Xenophon.
1:21:13
But the Baucher flexions, the things that are, Oh, and by the way, another
1:21:18
lovely thing about this book is he also goes into the, the rejoneo and, and
1:21:22
how the bull fighting work and the cow work must exist hand-in-hand with with
1:21:29
the Doma Classica, the, the, the, the formalized balletic dressage, et cetera.
1:21:33
But the exercise that you just described was taught to me in a different way
1:21:38
where you count down in straight lines.
1:21:41
So you're doing it a round- you could do it in a round pen too, but you, you count
1:21:44
from 10 and you stop, and then you flex each way, and then you count to eight and
1:21:49
stop, flex each way, six, four, two, one.
1:21:53
And then with each stop, the horse's hind legs also come a little more under
1:21:57
the body just because- Yeah ... of the nature of the beast, really.
1:22:02
And then you can then add after that, after the flexions, a backup.
1:22:07
So you'd always go two steps back or four steps back and then forward
1:22:11
to the next countdown and flexion.
1:22:14
And then you can add a very s- gentle jog trot to that, and the
1:22:20
same thing, stop, flex, back up.
1:22:22
You can even add a canter transition to that- One, two,
1:22:26
three, four, stop, flex, back up.
1:22:29
And then by the time you've been doing that, you find your horse is in piaffe.
1:22:31
Yeah.
1:22:32
And that's in this book.
1:22:33
But also the Baucher flexions and this is what is so interesting, is it turns
1:22:39
out, and you may know this, that what seemed to be so revolutionary with Baucher
1:22:46
in his second manner of working in this latter half of the 19th century, in fact
1:22:53
exists in a 17th century German book.
1:22:57
Ah,
1:22:58
ah.
1:22:58
Did not know that.
1:22:59
All of the static
1:23:00
flexions.
1:23:01
So there's the, now this, this debate is, well, did he get it from that and
1:23:08
just kind of, you know, because it's a very obscure text, or did he just by
1:23:15
chance stumble into the same approach?
1:23:19
But then there's this one about a h- in the 17th century, and there's another
1:23:25
one who comes in in the 19th century just a little bit before Baucher himself.
1:23:33
So it seems that Baucher might have himself gotten this from older
1:23:38
masters who were working on a slightly branched out tradition of the kind of
1:23:49
Yeah.
1:23:49
Which is just fascinating, isn't it?
1:23:51
Because it, it shows that the, all roads lead back to the same
1:23:53
thing, and the fact that- That's it
1:23:54
you've got the Peruvian guys using the single pillar like
1:23:57
the Duke of Cavendish and
1:23:59
Glenn Cochran: Like with, with Gutenberg allegedly inventing the
1:24:02
printing press, but the Chinese claim they invented the printing press.
1:24:05
And it's like if you go back to Charles V when when he handed over to Felipe
1:24:13
Segundo the, the his part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was Spain and Italy.
1:24:22
Okay?
1:24:23
And so where did Baucher go as a teenager?
1:24:25
He went to work with his uncle in Italy.
1:24:29
And so if you think that maybe some of this horsemanship came out of
1:24:32
the Reconquista for, you know, what, 800 years of, of Islamic warriors
1:24:38
fighting with Frankish warriors- Maybe the stuff was already there.
1:24:43
You know, maybe the Italians were just d- continuing to do something
1:24:47
that had been going on for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands.
1:24:51
And, and so when Baucher works, I mean, this is all just a fabrication in my mind.
1:24:55
If I was gonna write a novel and yeah.
1:24:57
And, and so, so he comes back from Italy having worked with his
1:25:01
uncle, and we got the flexions.
1:25:04
And I'm thinking, you know, did...
1:25:05
We don't know much about what he did with his uncle, but it's possible
1:25:08
that he may, may have learned flexions there too, and so then- Right
1:25:12
I mean, all this stuff is going on at the same time, you know?
1:25:15
Rupert Isaacson: And then of course, I've got this great friend, Philip
1:25:18
Wirtz in Germany, who is a fellow horseman, and he's a pr- ex-professor
1:25:25
of Islamic studies at School of Oriental and African Studies in London, London
1:25:29
University, and he's made a study of all the l- all the lost texts of classical
1:25:35
writing from the Middle Ages- Wow, okay
1:25:37
'cause they don't, they're, they're not really in Europe at that point.
1:25:40
There's Edward, there's one book from Edward Duarte the King of Portugal,
1:25:44
who says, "Actually, we learned a lot of this stuff from the Moors."
1:25:49
Most of the books on fine equitation in the Middle Ages are Islamic,
1:25:55
and they're published- Ah, okay
1:25:56
yeah, they're published either in the Ottoman Empire or they're published
1:26:00
in in North Africa and, and in Spain.
1:26:03
But they're not in English.
1:26:04
And, and of course since we, we don't read the language.
1:26:06
And he's read them.
1:26:06
We don't read them, we don't read them.
1:26:07
Yeah.
1:26:08
But okay, so this, this, here's about Baucher, so this is really interesting.
1:26:11
Here it goes.
1:26:12
"I will nevertheless bring up the words of Gerhardt, student of the first method
1:26:16
on the subject of the German old school.
1:26:18
Gerhardt wrote, in 1869, that a man called Christoph Jakob Liebons published
1:26:28
a Reitbuch, a riding book, in Leipzig in 1665 that contained the same principles
1:26:36
as Baucherism, and that another German, Louis Hunersdorff, master rider to
1:26:43
the Prince of Hesse," it's just by Kassel, it's published in Kassel, "in
1:26:48
1791," and that's very close to Mr.
1:26:51
Baucher's, you know, youth, "a work in which is found the techniques that
1:26:56
allow one to think that Hunersdorff was also a precursor to Baucher.
1:27:02
And then the sixth edition of the work was translated into French by
1:27:05
the Belgian Captain de Broschowski and published in Brussels in 1843,"
1:27:14
so right about the time that Baucher's looking for a second manor- Yeah
1:27:23
facile," the, the most easy method, "et la plus nouvelle," and the newest to train,
1:27:30
put together the horse, the, of, of the, the, the officer and, and the amateur.
1:27:36
German horsemanship, the easiest and most natural method of training the
1:27:40
horse for the officer and the amateur.
1:27:42
The fact that these two German works appeared, one of them 170 years
1:27:47
before, and the other 50 years before The Second Manner, which was first
1:27:53
published in 1844, contained the concepts and techniques claimed by Baucher.
1:27:59
Does this mean that the latter w- that Baucher was a plagiarist?
1:28:04
In fact, Gerhardt writes that despite appearances, no, it seems
1:28:08
that he hadn't copied anything.
1:28:09
He simply discovered a collection of truths that without his knowledge
1:28:14
was contained in the German old school, and he considerably perfected
1:28:19
it by his practical application.
1:28:21
Yeah.
1:28:21
But I don't know, maybe he was clever and maybe he did actually, I don't know
1:28:25
if plagiarize is the right word, but take something and put his name on it.
1:28:29
But isn't it, it just is so interesting that
1:28:31
clearly- Yeah
1:28:32
... all of these old concepts have just gone round and round and round and round,
1:28:36
presumably since guys like Kikkuli who was keeping the royal stables for the
1:28:41
Hittite kings in 1375 BC, and wrote his manual on clay tablets, and we've got
1:28:47
some fragments of those, and there's exercises in there for the flying change.
1:28:52
And presumably these guys were getting it from the guys up on the steppes, you know,
1:28:57
or from the- Oh, okay ... Iberia Celts,
1:28:59
Glenn Cochran: or from the- The Scythians,
1:29:00
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
1:29:01
All of it, you know.
1:29:02
And, and- Yeah ... then of course you've got the Greeks going up and down
1:29:04
from the Black Sea where Scythia is in Ukraine, all the way out to Hispania-
1:29:08
Yeah
1:29:09
where the, the, the, the Iberian horses and those Iberia Celtic tribes.
1:29:13
And I slightly suspect that nothing has changed.
1:29:17
Yeah.
1:29:18
Glenn Cochran: Well, it's, it's- ... kind of like, what is it?
1:29:20
Podhajsky says, "My, my professors are my horses."
1:29:25
Yeah.
1:29:25
You know, it's like maybe they all learned it from some happy accident that they
1:29:30
just happened to start bending a horse around for some reason, and it worked.
1:29:35
Say- Well- ... "Okay, well let's do this some more."
1:29:38
Well, but
1:29:39
Rupert Isaacson: okay, this, and this is where I want to go down your cow rabbit
1:29:40
hole, and this is why I think that the, it, it, again, one of these strange
1:29:45
disconnects that people make, like that there is a difference between western
1:29:50
riding and doma vaquera, which is now what people call working equitation,
1:29:56
and dressage, which of course is just
1:30:03
illogical because the origins of the equitation that we know in the West is
1:30:12
sort of Indo Europe and North Amer- and the Americas, arises out of cowboying.
1:30:19
Because the economy of those people on the steppes, I've spent time
1:30:22
in Mongolia- What do they do?
1:30:25
They cowboy for a living.
1:30:26
That's what they do.
1:30:27
They also horse boy, and they sheep boy, and they goat boy, and they're
1:30:30
doing the whole thing on horseback.
1:30:31
Large herds, completely open tracts of land, and the principal
1:30:38
economy is livestock and doing it from the back of a horse.
1:30:42
So what do you need?
1:30:43
You need a handy horse that can stop, start, spin because the
1:30:46
cow's gonna stop, start, and spin.
1:30:47
And then, of course, I noticed that my friend Glen has some rather nice
1:30:50
looking cows over there, so I thought, "Oh, maybe I'm gonna go get l- I'm
1:30:53
gonna go rustle some of those."
1:30:55
So I do that, and then Glen comes back from his weekend away cowboying
1:30:58
for someone, notices that some calves have gone, but sees the tracks
1:31:01
coming over the hills, and pretty soon Glen's coming after me, so we
1:31:04
have a running fight on our horses.
1:31:06
So now we've got to use the same principles in combat, and then a little
1:31:12
bit later at the great fair of the steppes where we decide we're friends
1:31:17
again and we're getting drunk, then we're going to have little competitions
1:31:21
of the livestock work, and we're gonna have competitions in the horsemanship.
1:31:24
Yeah.
1:31:24
And we're gonna have competitions in the, in the martial arts as
1:31:28
well because that's what we do when we get together and celebrate.
1:31:31
And the same horse is going to do all of these things.
1:31:33
Yeah.
1:31:34
That is the horse.
1:31:35
That is the collected horse.
1:31:36
So nowadays when people sort of say, "Well, no, no, this is a dressage horse,
1:31:40
but this is a western horse, but this..."
1:31:42
No, no, no, it's the same horse, guys.
1:31:44
It's the same horse.
1:31:45
Yeah.
1:31:45
And the horse doesn't care.
1:31:46
The horse doesn't say, "I'm sorry, I, I'm not, you know," "I, I'm, I'm
1:31:51
a, I'm a dressage horse.
1:31:53
I'm not going to go cow..."
1:31:54
The horse has no concept of that.
1:31:56
That's just a completely monkey idea.
1:31:58
Yeah.
1:31:58
Yeah.
1:31:59
So of course, livestock work is absolutely at the center of it, and
1:32:05
down in Spain and Portugal, open range cattle ranching, that was then exported
1:32:11
to the Americas, and it still goes on.
1:32:13
And of course, you need a horse that not only works the cows, and the cow you want
1:32:17
to bring to you, or the calf or the steer, but there's the bull you want to keep away
1:32:21
from you- Yeah ... and dance around it.
1:32:23
So you've got to use a lance, the garrocha, and perhaps you may go
1:32:26
into the bullring and dance around it with a rejon, a bandolero.
1:32:30
All right, so you are actually doing this.
1:32:34
Do you have the same passion for cattle that you have for horses?
1:32:39
Because cattle, I've not worked a lot with cattle, but my grandfather was a cattle
1:32:44
rancher, and I grew up around a certain amount of cattle on the farms growing
1:32:48
up in Leicestershire in England, and I know just enough about them to know what
1:32:52
an absolute pain in the ass they are.
1:32:54
They are ornery and dangerous, and, All sorts of things, and not
1:33:00
easy to work with at all, and you have to have a real feel for them.
1:33:02
But the people that have that feel for them really have the feel for them.
1:33:06
Yeah.
1:33:06
Tell me about your relationship with cows.
1:33:08
Tell me about your relationship with livestock, and then let's bring
1:33:10
it back to your horses and your medicine, because we haven't really...
1:33:13
the concept of the cowboy, we tend to think of cowboys as quite brutal,
1:33:17
and that's partly cowboys' own fault because they like to project that image.
1:33:21
I was 20 years in Texas, and I'm sorry, but your average cowboy swaggers
1:33:25
around like an asshole, and, ... you know, behaves in such a way and talks
1:33:29
in such a way that even when you get to know him, you realize that under
1:33:32
that gruff exterior is of course a very, very sweet and very nice man.
1:33:35
But they have to project this macho image a lot of the time, which, you know,
1:33:40
let's say doesn't endear people perhaps.
1:33:43
But nonetheless, you can't just be all brutality if you're going to work with
1:33:48
animals that are considerably larger than you and can be quite aggressive.
1:33:51
So talk us through your whole relationship with the humanities and
1:33:57
cattle and medicine and horses and so on and, and, and the ranching life.
1:34:03
Glenn Cochran: Well, it, of course, when I was working with Buck
1:34:05
Kidwell as a, as a teenager, 14, 15 years of age the whole thing that,
1:34:10
that we were doing was cowboying.
1:34:12
You know what I mean?
1:34:12
That, that's all we knew then.
1:34:14
Nobody ever saw an English saddle in those days.
1:34:16
Nobody had any idea about that stuff around this part of the country.
1:34:20
And so it was all about, you know, you're making a cow horse, and after a
1:34:24
couple of years of, of work, you know, you should have a pretty fine cow horse.
1:34:28
But some of the early work with, with cows with, with a horse you know, you
1:34:32
had to get the horse over being scared of the cows and all that kind of thing.
1:34:35
And then of course then we would, we, the idea of, of roping was to immobilize
1:34:40
the cow so you could doctor on it, you know, vaccination or something like that.
1:34:45
So, so there it's, it's management, and you, you sure don't wanna hurt
1:34:49
them because that's your product.
1:34:50
So- Mm ... in those days we weren't, we weren't seeing $5 a pound c-
1:34:55
calves like we're seeing right now.
1:34:56
This is, this is totally unheard of.
1:34:58
But then, you know, 35 cents a pound was, was a big price for
1:35:02
a cow, but that's all you had.
1:35:04
You know, there was, we were in a big drought back in those days and, and the
1:35:07
w- people in the ranching business really weren't making a lot of money of any kind.
1:35:13
So, and some of them would start, you know, breaking horses and stuff
1:35:16
like that just to kind of have a little income in addition to what
1:35:19
little bits you get out of the cows.
1:35:21
We didn't have sheep so much in this part of the country.
1:35:23
That's we're, the parasite load is just too much for sheep here.
1:35:27
It's too humid.
1:35:29
So West Texas was where you, you would see the, the sheep and goats.
1:35:32
But what I learned is that that cows have their own ideas about things.
1:35:38
And one day I was in that pen that we broke colts in, and there was
1:35:41
a cow in there with a baby calf.
1:35:43
Buck had put her in there, I guess she'd just had the calf, and, and he was kinda
1:35:47
watching her to make sure she was okay.
1:35:49
And at that point I didn't really know, you know, all that much about
1:35:53
the, the cow part of cowboying.
1:35:55
So I was due to learn.
1:35:57
When I went in the pen and she was there, and she kind of rung her tail
1:36:00
at me a little bit and pawed the ground once, and I thought, "That's pretty
1:36:03
cute," so I pawed the ground with my foot, you know, pawed the ground.
1:36:06
And, and she dropped her head, and she had some pretty good sized horns on her.
1:36:11
She came after me.
1:36:12
And I mean, she launched at me.
1:36:14
And, and I...
1:36:15
The, the pen had sides that were made out of rough-cut oak boards that
1:36:19
were probably about eight feet tall, but I cleared that son of a bitch.
1:36:27
At just about the time she hit it with those horns.
1:36:30
And so I, I learned a real important lesson there, was these, these little
1:36:35
women are very serious about their babies.
1:36:38
They take them real serious, and you don't mess with them.
1:36:41
And so, now we don't...
1:36:43
Well, in fact, people are starting to worry about screw-worm flies again now,
1:36:46
but we don't, we're not seeing them yet.
1:36:48
But in those days, first thing that'd happen is the damn flies would blow
1:36:53
a calf's umbilical cord, and you'd get a screw-worm larva infestation,
1:36:58
and you could lose the calf.
1:36:59
So we had to really watch them close, and then it was a l- most of that
1:37:02
was a little before my time, but I remember putting stuff called Pink
1:37:05
Lady on there to keep the flies off.
1:37:07
And before that, the Smear, Smear 62 was the, the sticky, really foul-smelling
1:37:13
stuff that you would put in any wound that had been, what they call
1:37:16
blowed, or had larva already in it.
1:37:18
And it would kill the larva, and it would stick to the, that gooey,
1:37:23
rotten stuff enough that no, no more new flies would come in.
1:37:28
And so, well- Almost like a type of tar, maybe ... yeah.
1:37:31
Well, what this means is you're gonna have to rope a calf to doctor it
1:37:36
whose mother really wants to kill you.
1:37:41
She really wants to kill you.
1:37:43
And so sometimes it would be, you know, you'd have two cowboys working together-
1:37:48
And you, you'd get the calf caught, and then one of the cowboy's job was to, to,
1:37:52
with a lariat rope, you know, kind of swatting at the cow to keep her off of
1:37:56
you until you could get your job done.
1:37:57
And you work as fast as you can to get that over with, 'cause you wanna
1:38:00
turn that calf back to that cow.
1:38:02
Some, some wise guy told me one time, says, "Well, if you just
1:38:05
hold the calf between you and the cow, she won't bother you."
1:38:08
You know, I got run over trying that trick.
1:38:10
So y- that, that doesn't work too good either.
1:38:12
So, so to try to cowboy all by yourself ... I saw a, a video one time,
1:38:18
it was somewhere in South America.
1:38:19
This guy had a mule, and I don't know how he trained this mule to do this, but he
1:38:23
was working on the calf, I think he was putting an ear tag in it or something,
1:38:27
and that mule was, was facing him and the calf with, with her rear end, her
1:38:32
very lethal pair of boxing gloves in back aimed at the cow, and, and she
1:38:39
was keeping that cow off of that guy.
1:38:40
And I thought, "Boy, I want one of those.
1:38:42
I really want that mule bad."
1:38:45
But so that was kind of the, some of the initial stuff.
1:38:47
And then penning cattle.
1:38:49
Sally went with us one time, first time she ever penned cattle.
1:38:52
Of course, I'd been doing it for several years by that time,
1:38:54
so I was the expert, you know?
1:38:56
So we go out in the brush.
1:38:57
Brush here, our forests, most of the trees are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 feet.
1:39:02
Down in the creek bottoms they might be 30 or 40 feet, but we
1:39:05
don't have big, tall trees, but we got a lot of brush in between them.
1:39:08
Yaupon, and wait-a-minute vines, and greenbrier, so the, the, the
1:39:13
It's dry, but, but tangly, brushy stuff, you know?
1:39:17
Mm-hmm.
1:39:17
It's really hard to get through.
1:39:19
A, a, a snake has trouble getting through this stuff.
1:39:22
And so we're back there and we're rounding up about 300 head of cattle,
1:39:26
and there's five or six cowboys and, I don't know, four or five dogs.
1:39:30
W- we call them leopard dogs, some people call them Catahoula dogs.
1:39:33
Mm.
1:39:33
But they're cow dogs, and they go out there ... They're, they're
1:39:36
hunters, basically, and they go out there and hunt the cows.
1:39:39
And the only thing is that, that they're, they're not allowed to
1:39:41
bite the cows, but they can, they can bay them and, and push them.
1:39:45
And Sally said, "Until we broke out ... for about two hours, until
1:39:50
we broke out in the open right before we got to the corrals, I
1:39:52
heard dogs, I heard cowboys, 'Whoop!'
1:39:55
you know, making their sound.
1:39:57
I, I heard cows, 'Mraah!'"
1:39:59
And, and these are Braham cross cows, they're, "Grr."
1:40:03
This horrible sound, you think it's a di- it's a dinosaur gonna eat you.
1:40:06
And then, and then the calves.
1:40:08
And y- she heard all that, but she said, "Never saw a dadgum cow
1:40:11
until they broke out in the open," 'cause you're in that brush, thick.
1:40:14
Yeah.
1:40:14
And the reason the cowboy's making noise is 'cause you wanna know that you're level
1:40:19
with the other guys on either side of you.
1:40:21
So they, they call it the song of the brush, and it's like- You're,
1:40:25
you're making just enough noise, or you may be whistling or humming or
1:40:28
doing something so they can tell where you are, 'cause they can't see you.
1:40:32
And- Yeah ... and so we're all coming together, and so you know
1:40:35
all 300 cows are in front of you.
1:40:37
And then we get them into the pens, and then we start the sorting
1:40:40
process, which one of the most elegant ballets I've ever seen.
1:40:44
But usually Buck would be doing it.
1:40:45
He would stand in the gate and we'd have a bunch of cattle in a
1:40:48
pen, and I'm back there pushing, pushing the cattle towards him.
1:40:52
And of course you got cows and calves and you're trying to sort them,
1:40:55
and he'd be, he'd be there with his stallion and a bullwhip in this
1:40:58
probably about a 10 or 12-foot gate.
1:41:01
He and the horse are the gate at this point.
1:41:03
And if a cow tried to come by, he'd pull back, let the cow go by.
1:41:07
If a ca- if a calf tried to get out, he'd jump forward, maybe
1:41:10
crack that bullwhip, do something to get that calf to run back in.
1:41:13
And in about 30 minutes, we had 300 calves and no cows in that
1:41:18
pen, and it was just amazing.
1:41:20
Even today I, I find that's the, that's one of the jobs of a cutting
1:41:24
horse is a, a gate horse like that.
1:41:27
So then we'd start, you know, catching the calves and working them, and
1:41:30
that's when you find out that little calves can kick pretty hard if
1:41:33
you're in the wrong place and, and sometimes they can fight pretty hard.
1:41:36
What's funny is the cattle that we're raising right now,
1:41:39
we call them Corriente cattle.
1:41:40
They're northern Mexican cattle.
1:41:42
It's the ones that they use for roping in rodeos and stuff.
1:41:45
And we've- Why are you raising those?
1:41:46
Well, we've evolved into that because we starved out in 2011.
1:41:50
We got such a bad drought, we sold all the cattle on the place.
1:41:53
Rupert Isaacson: I remember that drought.
1:41:54
That's- Yeah ... that was the year of the big fires.
1:41:56
Yeah.
1:41:56
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
1:41:57
So, we thought, "Well, what can we put back on the place that'll survive
1:42:01
these, this desertification that we're starting to go through here?"
1:42:04
And a friend of mine said, "Well, why don't you raise Corrientes?"
1:42:07
And so I started buying them, and next thing I know, I've got a h- a
1:42:10
herd of 150 of them and, and I've got a guy that, that likes to buy
1:42:14
our calves from us that he's he's involved with the team roping business.
1:42:17
So yeah, we actually make a little bit off of them.
1:42:19
They're nothing like beef cattle for price, but you know, we
1:42:21
make something off of them.
1:42:23
And the good thing about it is I get rid of the calves before they're three
1:42:26
or four months old, so they don't...
1:42:27
you don't have to worry about the, the cow getting dragged
1:42:30
down too bad by the calves.
1:42:32
But back I guess it was in the '70s- We were raising Simmental cattle.
1:42:38
That's the s- the, Oh, the big German ones.
1:42:40
Yeah ... Swiss, yeah, Swiss and German cow.
1:42:42
And these suckers would be fif- easy 1,500 pound cows, and they'd- we'd wean
1:42:48
calves off at between 500 and 600 pounds at, at five and six months of age.
1:42:53
I mean, they were just ... And they were, they were wonderful cows to deal with.
1:42:56
They're very tame, very sweet for the most part, until they have a calf,
1:43:00
and then the tameness goes away for a little while, and, and you have
1:43:03
to kind of watch out for them too.
1:43:04
And they were horned cattle too.
1:43:06
So, but after a while, the, the price and, and the desire for
1:43:10
Simmentals kind of dropped off, and we ended up getting out of that.
1:43:14
We started cross-breeding them at first with, with Brangus and-
1:43:18
Mm-hmm ... and Beefmaster and stuff.
1:43:19
But then we finally realized what was selling was the, the Brahman
1:43:24
Hereford cross, Braford cattle- Oh ... or tiger stripes as a
1:43:28
lot of people call them, or F1.
1:43:30
That, that crossed with an Angus bull would give you something that
1:43:33
would go to the, to the feed lot.
1:43:35
Everybody loves them, you know, the white Black Baldy kind of thing.
1:43:39
And so we started raising Brafords and and we did pretty well with
1:43:44
those until about 2011, and that's when we sold all those out.
1:43:47
But we were, we were raising a herd of, of Braford heifers and selling
1:43:51
them at a special sale and, and making pretty good money off of them
1:43:54
'cause people really wanted them.
1:43:56
You know, that's, that's the brush, the ... That's the queen of the brush, you know?
1:43:59
She's the one that takes care of her calf and comes up with a calf every year
1:44:02
without fail, all that kind of thing.
1:44:04
And they, they are different.
1:44:06
You know, the, the Bos indicus we, we were using Brahman bulls
1:44:10
on Hereford cows to do it.
1:44:11
Some people do it the other direction.
1:44:13
But you're, you're still working with either Brahman or part Brahman, and
1:44:17
those cattle are extremely personal.
1:44:19
They either love you or they hate you.
1:44:21
There's no in between.
1:44:23
Hmm.
1:44:23
And if they, if they know you, they'll do anything for you.
1:44:26
But I, I'd be like by springtime after feeding these heifers through
1:44:30
winter, I could walk out in the middle of a field and they'd come crowd
1:44:33
around me like, "Hey, it's Glen.
1:44:34
Let's go see what Glen's up to."
1:44:36
You know, where somebody th- that they didn't know walks in that field,
1:44:41
you know, it's like they're gone.
1:44:42
Where'd they go?
1:44:44
They just disappeared.
1:44:44
Hmm.
1:44:45
So they knew who I was, and they knew that whoever that is is not him.
1:44:49
It's ... There's Glen and then there's not Glen.
1:44:51
There's two categories of human being, you know?
1:44:53
And so, so that the, the Brahman influence ... One guy joked, he says, it, the, the,
1:44:59
"When the Brahman influence came into Texas, it changed all the corrals."
1:45:04
Either you built for 'em or you rebuilt after they flattened the whole place.
1:45:10
'Cause, 'cause they just, they're that way.
1:45:11
They, they get skitzy, you know, and, and if they start running, well,
1:45:14
they just, they'll just run into and flatten out anything in their way.
1:45:17
So wooden corrals some parts of which may have been made out of
1:45:21
old bed springs, that's a good joke around here- Yeah ... they're gone.
1:45:25
You know, everything's welded pipe now 'cause that's the only thing that'll
1:45:28
hold these, these cross-bred cattle.
1:45:30
But, and, and they can be nice and tame when, if you work with
1:45:35
them and you feed 'em by hand.
1:45:36
A lot of people will pen 'em without using a horse.
1:45:38
You know, they'll go out there with a sack of range cubes and they'll
1:45:41
bring 'em in the pens and all this.
1:45:43
But then you get in that pen ... Have you ever wondered why a bull will
1:45:49
fight when he's in a bull ring, when out in the pasture he doesn't?
1:45:54
Claustrophobia.
1:45:55
You put that sucker in a small area and he don't have no place to go to get
1:45:59
away from you, he's got another choice.
1:46:02
If I can't run from you, I'm gonna run through you.
1:46:05
Mm.
1:46:06
And that's where bull fighting, you know, you have to have the right size pen.
1:46:09
You gotta have some possibility that you know he's gonna make a run at
1:46:14
you that's gonna last about so long.
1:46:16
That's where I'm thinking Pablo Hermoso he knows, he learns about a bull pretty quick
1:46:21
how long that bull's- sortie is gonna be.
1:46:25
And so he knows, okay, if, if he's gonna make a 14 or 20-foot sortie, I
1:46:29
know th- I gotta be out there at the end of that so I don't get run over.
1:46:34
And then of course they got the, the, the the quiebro and the sancada, all
1:46:38
the different things that the horse does to dodge the bull and all that.
1:46:41
But he probably, that, that bull may not do anything to you if you're out in the
1:46:44
middle of a 500 acre pasture, you know?
1:46:47
He just says, "Okay, there's a horse.
1:46:48
I don't like him.
1:46:49
I'm gonna walk over here."
1:46:50
But, but you put him in a small area.
1:46:52
Well, that's what happened with Brahman cross cattle when you put 'em in a pen.
1:46:58
They, it's the same phenomenon, and you learn how to get the heck
1:47:02
out of their way pretty dang quick.
1:47:04
When, when one of 'em looks at you, it's like, "Oh, shit," you
1:47:07
know, and you get out of the way.
1:47:09
And if you're working 'em horseback, you're pretty much okay, 'cause they,
1:47:12
they don't usually take on a horse.
1:47:14
Although I have had some wrecks with that too.
1:47:16
I've had some, Somebody asked me one time, he says, "Well, you
1:47:19
talk about bullfighting so much.
1:47:20
Have you ever done it?"
1:47:21
I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I have," but it wasn't
1:47:24
exactly the formal type.
1:47:26
I was usually either in, in a, in a brush thicket trying to, to catch a, a
1:47:30
Brangus bull and get him out of there, and he was more interested in killing
1:47:34
me than he was getting out of there.
1:47:35
And I've been hit.
1:47:36
I've had horses w- knocked almost out from under me all kind of stuff.
1:47:41
You know, when, when they take a notion to get after you, they go, they're quick.
1:47:44
They can move.
1:47:45
Mm.
1:47:45
This, you know, this animal that looks too big to move that fast
1:47:48
is like lightning all of a sudden.
1:47:50
Yeah.
1:47:50
Yeah, they are.
1:47:50
And so I've, yes, I've been hit, I've been knocked down, I've been run over,
1:47:54
I've been kicked, I've been every...
1:47:56
Well, in fact, I had one that pinned me up against the fence with her horns.
1:47:59
It was a cow, and, and my brother was on the other side of the fence.
1:48:03
I say he's my brother.
1:48:04
We, he's an adopted brother, but anyway he, he climbed up the fence,
1:48:08
got up above me, grabbed my arms and pulled me up out from this pair of
1:48:13
horns that had me nailed to the fence.
1:48:16
Wow.
1:48:16
So, so those are some of the wonderful, fun things that you get into.
1:48:21
And of course you're doing it under ideal circumstances.
1:48:24
Temperatures ranging sometimes close to 15 degrees Fahrenheit wind
1:48:30
out of the north blowing sleet.
1:48:32
You're trying to calve out a cow.
1:48:34
You're she's laying down and you're laying down in, in icy wet grass.
1:48:37
Your horse, hope to God he's staying with you over here standing off to the
1:48:41
side, and you're trying to get a leg out so you can pull this calf, you know?
1:48:45
Right.
1:48:45
That, that's some of the other fun things that you get into.
1:48:47
And then of course she shows her appreciation when she stands up and
1:48:50
runs you back to your horse, you know?
1:48:54
Or, or milk fever.
1:48:55
You know, she's, she hadn't hadn't had the calf yet, but her the calcium level
1:48:59
in your, in your pasture's a little bit too low, she gets hypocalcemic 'cause
1:49:03
she's putting it all in the milk.
1:49:04
And so she goes down and she gets all eh, like that.
1:49:08
And so you go out there with your veterinarian and you run a IV in
1:49:11
her and you squirt some calcium in her, and she comes up and she tries
1:49:15
to run you both into your truck.
1:49:16
You know?
1:49:17
Th- that just, they, they have some interesting ways of behaving.
1:49:21
They can be real friendly and real sweet.
1:49:23
You can hand them a range cube and they'll take it out of your
1:49:25
hand, or they'll try to kill you.
1:49:27
And it, and it can happen within a half a second, you know?
1:49:30
So you learn that personality trait.
1:49:33
And then with, when you're working with them horseback, you learn that the,
1:49:37
that they'll go so far and then they'll stop and turn around, and that horse
1:49:40
has gotta be able to stop, back up and turn around in order to stay with
1:49:44
them, otherwise they, they got you.
1:49:45
They're, they've just outwitted you.
1:49:47
So that's where the horse part comes in.
1:49:50
You learn to watch a cow.
1:49:52
If she looks there, she's going there.
1:49:54
If her ear twitches, she's gonna do something.
1:49:56
If her tail rings up over the back of her neck, get the hell out
1:49:59
of the way, she's coming to you.
1:50:00
You know, it's just all kind of stuff that you learn about
1:50:03
how to read a cow's intention.
1:50:06
But they are smart and they can be pretty damned athletic sometimes.
1:50:10
They, they may not look like it too much when they're just walking along through
1:50:13
a field, but that can change in a second.
1:50:16
And, and,
1:50:16
Rupert Isaacson: Oh, I, I remember being at my, a, a cattle sale at my grandad's in
1:50:20
Zimbabwe with Brahman bulls, and just the bull jumping out of the auctioneer's ring.
1:50:30
Yeah.
1:50:30
Came out of the auctioneer, hey everybody.
1:50:32
I'd say the fence was approaching seven feet high, and the thing just walked
1:50:36
up to it and jumped into the crowd.
1:50:39
Yeah.
1:50:39
Yeah, yeah.
1:50:40
I'd never seen people move so fast.
1:50:42
Not, not like
1:50:42
Glenn Cochran: you had to have a running start or anything.
1:50:44
No, no.
1:50:44
You just sort of like a high
1:50:45
Rupert Isaacson: jumper.
1:50:46
Glenn Cochran: Here we go.
1:50:47
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, straight over.
1:50:48
And how do you even do it?
1:50:49
But this is what I mean.
1:50:50
I mean, all the reasons that you've just elucidated, they make great stories,
1:50:55
but when you're actually doing it, it's massively hard work and often
1:50:59
very painful, and sometimes lethal.
1:51:02
Yeah.
1:51:02
So you've got to have a real love for it.
1:51:04
Why do you love cows?
1:51:06
Like, 'cause you could just be doing horses, Glen.
1:51:08
You could've just been a colt starter and a, you know, and, and all of that.
1:51:13
W- With, And you're also running a medical practice on top of that.
1:51:17
A ranch is kind of full time, and you're, you're, you're not like a, a gentleman I
1:51:22
mean, you are a gentleman, but y- you're not i- you're not doing a, a weekend Well,
1:51:26
that could be debated, but All right.
1:51:28
I haven't talked to your wife yet, Glen.
1:51:30
But y- you know, 500 acres in Central Texas, I know that's actually a very,
1:51:35
that's a, a very viable economic unit.
1:51:38
So, that's kind of a full-time- gig- Yeah ... and a very demanding full-time
1:51:43
gig on top of your full, demanding full-time gig of being a doctor,
1:51:46
on top of your demanding full-time gig of, of being a horse trainer.
1:51:49
So why?
1:51:50
Why do it?
1:51:51
Why the cows?
1:51:52
Why that extra work?
1:51:54
Glenn Cochran: Well, it's, somebody asked me one time, "Do you raise, do you
1:51:57
raise horses to work your cattle, or do you raise cattle to work your horses?"
1:52:02
And I said, "You know, it's kind of confusing.
1:52:03
I'm not sure I know the answer to that 'cause- Mm-hmm ... it's
1:52:05
kind of a little bit of both."
1:52:07
But I remember as a little kid, I guess I was probably about 10 or 11 we lived
1:52:14
next door to a dairy, and this was a bunch of Jersey cows out there, and
1:52:17
they were kept in, in their pasture with a single strand electric fence.
1:52:21
Which by the way, you know, you can either learn about them by reading
1:52:25
about it in a book, or you can learn about it by paying on the fence.
1:52:29
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
1:52:30
Mm-hmm.
1:52:30
Glenn Cochran: One, one, one lesson will really stick with
1:52:32
you better than the other.
1:52:33
Anyway so I would go crawl under that fence and go out
1:52:37
there and mess with the cows.
1:52:37
I was just fascinated with them- Yeah ... just like I was about horses.
1:52:40
And so- Okay, so the, so
1:52:41
Rupert Isaacson: the cows themselves did and still do have a fascination for you.
1:52:44
Yeah.
1:52:44
Yeah.
1:52:44
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
1:52:45
I have, in fact, my, my first riding experience was a cow.
1:52:48
It was a little Jersey cow.
1:52:49
I'd go out there every day after school, and I'd start petting on her, and next
1:52:52
thing I know I'd lean over, and before I knew it, I was sitting on her and
1:52:55
she was walking around the pasture.
1:52:57
She didn't try to buck me off or anything.
1:52:58
She's real tame.
1:52:59
And I thought, "Boy, if it's this much fun with a cow, what
1:53:02
would it be like with a horse?"
1:53:04
You know?
1:53:06
So yeah, I don't know, I just like cows.
1:53:08
I like the smell of them.
1:53:09
I like the- Mm ... watching them.
1:53:11
I like, like seeing the babies come and, and working with them,
1:53:15
you know, the work with the lariat rope and all that kind of stuff.
1:53:17
And, you know, it's an art, you know?
1:53:20
It is.
1:53:20
It's, it's, it's fun.
1:53:21
I've, in fact, I'm an honorary charro, or as my wife says, an ornery charro.
1:53:27
I've, I've learned a little bit about some of the rope spinning stuff and, and
1:53:31
how to work with the cattle, but their, their big orientation, the charro is,
1:53:35
his whole thing is you wanna work with cattle in such a way that you don't cause
1:53:39
damage to them or them do damage to you.
1:53:42
So you, you gotta, you know, it's a, a way of working with animals.
1:53:46
And we actually prefer to work them with the ropes and, and by hand rather
1:53:51
than putting them through chutes, although I do have a chute and for
1:53:54
some things it's, it's preferable.
1:53:56
But, you know, they, banging up against pipes and stuff like that- Mm
1:53:59
uh, we, I'd just rather not do that if we don't have to.
1:54:03
So, anyway, it's, it's, and some of it's a matter of opinion.
1:54:06
There's some people think that, you know, what we do is terrible, and I
1:54:09
say, "Well, do you eat hamburgers?"
1:54:11
And they say, "Yeah."
1:54:11
"Okay.
1:54:12
Well, then you're eating a dead animal, and somebody had to kill that animal,
1:54:15
so just think about that a little bit."
1:54:17
Sure.
1:54:17
And
1:54:17
Rupert Isaacson: No, I mean, that, that, those discussions, I mean- ... in
1:54:21
my mind, they're almost not worth having because yeah, for all of
1:54:23
the arguments- Yeah ... already.
1:54:24
You're not gonna win
1:54:25
that one.
1:54:25
If, if- It's anyway, that's-
1:54:27
But anyway, and it's interesting, all, in my, in my, All my autism work, I've
1:54:31
been early mentored, and then I continue to be mentored from time to time by Dr.
1:54:37
Temple Grandin.
1:54:37
Ah.
1:54:38
Oh, yeah ... who of course is, is autistic and has devoted her life to making the
1:54:42
the slaughterhouses less stressful- Yeah.
1:54:46
Yeah ... for the animals that go through them.
1:54:47
And she has this whole thing with cows.
1:54:49
And of course, for that she gets, you know, death threats from the animal rights
1:54:53
people for, for trying to make it less stressful for the animals going through.
1:54:57
So I mean, you know, what can you do?
1:54:59
But it, it's very interesting to...
1:55:00
You brought up the word charro.
1:55:02
So for the, again, listeners and viewers who don't know what a charro
1:55:06
is I do 'cause I lived in Texas.
1:55:09
Can you explain what is a charro?
1:55:13
How does that relate- He- ... to a cowboy, and how does that, how
1:55:16
does the charro kind of make the connection between that classical
1:55:22
world and that white Western world?
1:55:25
Glenn Cochran: Okay.
1:55:25
The, there, there are I think nine events in a charrerÃa, and they, most
1:55:30
of them have to do with either riding rough stock or, or roping stuff.
1:55:34
And in one of the events is the escaramuza charra, which is the girls, the eight
1:55:38
girls in a, in a drill team who do death-defying enredado, you know, with
1:55:44
their, with their horses at a gallop.
1:55:45
And it's beau- with their flowing dresses, and they're all
1:55:48
side-saddle, and it's wonderful.
1:55:50
That was my, my wife's passion with the charrerÃa was, was with
1:55:54
the do- the So a charro is a
1:55:56
Rupert Isaacson: Mexican cowboy,
1:55:57
Glenn Cochran: right?
1:55:57
Yeah.
1:55:57
And basically there, there are two types of Mexican cowboys.
1:56:00
There's the vaquero.
1:56:01
Mm-hmm.
1:56:02
And he's just literally a country cowboy.
1:56:04
That's, yeah.
1:56:05
And he handles the rope, and he handles cattle, but it's, it's it's
1:56:08
pretty, pretty much, you know, what needs to get done, that sort of thing.
1:56:11
The charro is a gentleman who, who practices the art of elegant
1:56:17
cowboying, and it's the, the charrerÃa.
1:56:20
Y- you'll see, like, well, in, in Amer- North American rodeo you got
1:56:24
eight seconds to get the calf tied.
1:56:27
In charrerÃa, you've got eight minutes to do rope tricks before
1:56:30
you finally put the rope on the cow.
1:56:32
That's, that's kinda gives you an idea of the difference, you know?
1:56:35
They- Yeah ... were looking for the, the floreo it's called, you know,
1:56:38
making the flowers with the rope.
1:56:40
You know, taking it over, jumping through it, and all that kinda stuff.
1:56:43
And then finally it goes out the remate.
1:56:45
The, the rope goes out, and the, and the, the cow or horse or whatever it
1:56:49
is gets, gets their feet in the rope.
1:56:51
You pull the slack, and you maybe put it around yourself.
1:56:54
All kinda interesting stuff.
1:56:56
And it's a, it's a big show.
1:56:58
Of course, the big, you know, the big hat that's, that's worn and all that.
1:57:01
The, the costumery and everything.
1:57:04
It's, it's just a whole, culture of, of the, the best of Mexican horse and
1:57:10
cattle work- Mm ... with the music, the mariachi music and all that sort of thing.
1:57:15
So it's, it's just a beautiful fiesta.
1:57:18
And, and I became addicted to it I guess back in, I don't
1:57:21
know, quite a few years ago.
1:57:23
So I was always showing up and always, you know, participating.
1:57:26
We were doing what I guess you'd call a halftime show with with the
1:57:30
sidesaddle horses at the charreada down at in San Antonio during the
1:57:34
f- the Battle of the Flowers Parade during the San Antonio fiesta.
1:57:39
And I got to know a bunch of the charros and, and in fact, my...
1:57:42
Now, one of my neighbors is, is a former charro who comes from a
1:57:47
family in Jalisco that that really big into, into the charreria.
1:57:51
So we've been down there and we visited with them a lot, and I actually learned
1:57:55
I, I tried to learn, shall we say, how to do the cola a caballo, the, the the,
1:58:00
where you take a hold of the bull by the tail and, and flip the bull, you know?
1:58:05
And- Yeah, yeah.
1:58:06
It's an amazing event- I- ... that one ... yeah.
1:58:07
I got pieces of it figured out, but I never really got good at
1:58:10
it, but it's, it's quite a deal.
1:58:13
And so they were, they were real helpful.
1:58:15
They, they coached me, you know?
1:58:17
Coached the gringo.
1:58:21
Yeah.
1:58:22
And but it's, it's a, it's just a neat culture.
1:58:25
I just love being around it and, and I love what they do.
1:58:27
Some of the stuff they do is pretty artificial but, but
1:58:30
it's beautiful, you know?
1:58:32
It's- Yeah ... it's a wonderful thing to do, and it, and it, it,
1:58:34
the, particularly the rope work.
1:58:36
You know, tho- those kids down there, they're three years old and they
1:58:39
can do way more with a rope than, than I ever will be able to do.
1:58:42
It's just amazing what they can do.
1:58:43
Mm.
1:58:44
So it's just, it becomes a part of their, their life, you know?
1:58:46
Extension of your hand is your reata, you know?
1:58:49
And, and they, they don't use...
1:58:50
They use the rawhide reata to an extent down there for certain things, but
1:58:54
the charreria is always with the, the maguey, you know, the ixtle fiber, the,
1:58:59
the stuff that comes from the cactus.
1:59:01
Okay.
1:59:01
And it's a lightweight rope.
1:59:03
There's two or three different diameters of it.
1:59:05
And and they, y- they can get that thing going and, and it just fascinates me.
1:59:09
I can sit there and watch it by the hour, you know?
1:59:11
It's just- No, I,
1:59:12
Rupert Isaacson: I so agree.
1:59:13
I, I discovered it when I lived in Texas, and what...
1:59:15
It always surprised me, though.
1:59:16
You know, we lived in Elgin, Texas.
1:59:18
Yeah.
1:59:18
And the Elgin rodeo ground the, you know, the charra- the charreria would happen
1:59:24
at the s- at the same rodeo ground as, as the regular white rodeo would happen.
1:59:28
Yeah.
1:59:28
But never the two would meet.
1:59:31
So it was really interesting.
1:59:32
We, we lived, Riding distance from that rodeo ground Ah
1:59:36
and a short trailer distance.
1:59:38
So we, on occasion, would show up with our Lusitano horses and just sort
1:59:44
of ride around and piaffe around and enjoy 'cause, 'cause there's a lot
1:59:47
of really beautiful dressage riding going on, classical riding as well.
1:59:50
As you know, at the end there's often a classical event where people
1:59:54
are piaffing and passaging and doing all these wonderful things,
1:59:56
and the winner is the one who gets the best reaction from the crowd.
1:59:59
So they've all got, like, the people in the crowd, you know, chucking
2:00:03
panties at them, you know, to- Yeah.
2:00:05
... to, to be the one that wins.
2:00:07
And I loved it, but what was so interesting to me is the western riders
2:00:10
I knew in Elgin knew nothing about it.
2:00:12
Yeah And certainly, like, they lived in the same town, and they were
2:00:15
completely unaware that this whole other thing was going on that had
2:00:20
been going on since Texas was Mexico.
2:00:24
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:00:24
Rupert Isaacson: And yet, and they would go and eat at the Mexican restaurants
2:00:28
and they'd- and they would participate in the rodeo, and they might even cowboy,
2:00:32
but they wouldn't have any crossover to the Mexican cowboys, which I always
2:00:36
found that that would just floor me.
2:00:39
Yeah.
2:00:40
Because like, you only live down the road.
2:00:41
But again, that's where you're so different, Glen, you know?
2:00:44
That you, you will always explore every culture that's available to you.
2:00:49
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:00:49
It's...
2:00:49
And, and Texas is so rich with it.
2:00:51
We have a, a huge negro horsemanship culture- Absolutely ... in this state.
2:00:56
Yeah, yeah, the Black Cowboys- That it's, it's...
2:00:58
Yeah.
2:00:59
It's even more- And the singlefooters
2:01:00
hidden than, yeah, it's even more hidden than the Mexican culture, but I've-
2:01:03
Absolutely ... I've been with them.
2:01:05
There'd be 300 people on a trail ride- Absolutely ... and, and it just, you
2:01:10
know, and, and you watch these people work with these horses and you think, "You
2:01:13
know, these guys know what they're doing.
2:01:15
They know what that horse is fixing to do next.
2:01:18
They are good.
2:01:19
They know what, what's, what you can do and what you can't do."
2:01:22
And it's- they're, they're amazing.
2:01:24
You, you're right.
2:01:24
Rupert Isaacson: The, the, the tradition is so rich there.
2:01:27
And again, for viewers and listeners who don't know what the singlefooting
2:01:30
culture- Yeah, yeah, that's
2:01:32
Glenn Cochran: it
2:01:32
those black
2:01:32
Rupert Isaacson: people too.
2:01:32
Yeah.
2:01:32
You, you could take a trotting horse- And whatever they got
2:01:34
a trotting horse as well.
2:01:35
Glenn Cochran: You- What's that?
2:01:36
Take a trotting horse, where like one old boy said, he says, "I goes out
2:01:38
on a moonlit night and I takes that horse," and he says that I rides out
2:01:42
till he good and tired, out on this sandy road, out in the Brazos Bottom."
2:01:46
Yeah.
2:01:46
"I turn him around, I head him back towards the house, and then
2:01:48
I jerk and snatch until I make that sucker do a four beat gait.
2:01:52
By the time we get back to the house, he be gaiting, he be saddling."
2:01:55
They, they refer to it as saddling, you know?
2:01:57
He's- Yeah ... he's in a four beat gait.
2:01:59
And it might not even have any fox trotter or Tennessee walker or anything, it
2:02:03
might just be a pure quarter horse, but he be saddling by the time we gets home.
2:02:09
It's, In fact, when we started working with the Peruvian horses, the first people
2:02:13
I went to were some of the Black people in my community that were my patients.
2:02:17
And one of them, a guy named Buck Newton, was he was in for pneumonia one day
2:02:22
and, and I went in to him, I said, "Mr.
2:02:23
Buck, can you help me figure out what to do with these Peruvian horses?
2:02:27
They supposed to be saddling horses and I don't know nothing about that."
2:02:30
He says, "Sit down right here on this bed, young man.
2:02:34
I'll teach you everything you need to know about that."
2:02:36
And so he did, he started teaching me about it.
2:02:38
And then they, they realized, okay, this white guy wants to learn this
2:02:43
stuff, so we'll help him, you know?
2:02:45
And, and they would see us riding the Peruvian and they'd, they'd come
2:02:48
up to us and say, "He a stallion?"
2:02:50
"Mm-hmm, yeah."
2:02:51
"Can you breed my mare?"
2:02:53
You know?
2:02:53
I'd say, "Well, hell yeah.
2:02:54
No problem.
2:02:55
I think you'll like what comes out of this," you know?
2:02:59
Yeah.
2:02:59
So, it's just, you know, the, the, that's the world of horsemen.
2:03:03
You know, the, the real world- Yeah ... of horsemen, people who don't
2:03:06
see color, they don't see difference in culture, the, any of that stuff.
2:03:09
It's all fascinating to them 'cause you do it with a horse.
2:03:12
Exactly.
2:03:12
That's all I need to know, you know?
2:03:14
No,
2:03:14
Rupert Isaacson: absolutely.
2:03:15
It's such, I mean, the, the true horse people are, as you say, it's, it's
2:03:22
like the horse is the ambassador.
2:03:24
Yeah.
2:03:25
Yeah.
2:03:25
And we might be all these different nations and then we all meet in the
2:03:29
common ground of the horse if we are the right kind of horse person.
2:03:34
If we are not, then we factionalize out- Yeah ... and we hold our little
2:03:38
territory over here and say, "No, I'm, you know, a German dressage rider.
2:03:42
No, I'm only a western pleasure rider.
2:03:45
No, I'm only a whatever."
2:03:47
Yeah.
2:03:47
And I, you know, and I just talk poo about the people over there.
2:03:52
It's- ... back to that thing about all the old dead dudes, all of the old masters
2:03:57
were always these guys who had their feet in many, many different cultures- Yeah
2:04:05
... were curious about everything, interested in everything, spoke many languages and
2:04:10
wanted to understand, whether it was within horses or within music or within
2:04:16
philosophy or all of the above, because these guys were all-rounders, To have the
2:04:20
richest experience they possibly could.
2:04:23
And it, it never ceases to amaze me how the horse wor- people in the horse world
2:04:27
can shrivel themselves into these little bitter joyless little kind of silos.
2:04:35
Yeah.
2:04:35
When all of us got into horses for one reason and one reason only, to...
2:04:41
Because we loved it.
2:04:43
Because it, because it, it spoke to us with passion.
2:04:46
Because it made us feel better, basically.
2:04:49
Yeah.
2:04:49
Yeah.
2:04:50
And then s- there are those people who then follow that forever, and then
2:04:56
there are those people who somehow end up creating a cage for themselves.
2:05:00
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:05:00
Yeah.
2:05:00
You know?
2:05:01
That's always been a puzzle to me, too.
2:05:02
Yeah.
2:05:03
It's like, where, where did your curiosity go, and why, why
2:05:06
isn't this interesting to you?
2:05:08
Oh, this is, they're different from me.
2:05:09
Well, w- but different doesn't necessarily mean bad.
2:05:12
It can be kind of a neat thing.
2:05:13
Rupert Isaacson: Well, and also, if you really are a horseman, if you really
2:05:16
are a musician, or you really are a diesel mechanic, I mean, anything that
2:05:21
is a complex art, you know that you need to constantly expand your repertoire.
2:05:29
That's it.
2:05:29
That's it.
2:05:30
You, you just, you know, and, to, to, to master.
2:05:34
And you also know you'll never master, but you always wanna be on
2:05:36
that road, because that's also where the joy is if you love what you do.
2:05:40
Yeah.
2:05:41
Yeah.
2:05:41
So- Yeah ... y- there are things I may never get round to learning.
2:05:44
I, I may never learn to rope, but maybe my friend Glen will teach me one day.
2:05:48
You know?
2:05:48
I may never learn to, to really drive horses well, but
2:05:52
maybe someone will teach me.
2:05:53
But I would be absolutely there for it if somebody shows up.
2:05:57
Yeah.
2:05:58
Because I'm a horseman.
2:05:59
I wanna know.
2:05:59
Yeah.
2:06:00
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:06:00
Well, that was pretty obvious to me the first time I met you,
2:06:04
that, that this guy is eat up with horses, so We, w- we've always...
2:06:10
our, our relationship was solidified within minutes
2:06:13
of the first time I saw you.
2:06:15
Indeed.
2:06:15
Rupert Isaacson: Indeed, indeed.
2:06:17
Well, I hope to continue it.
2:06:18
I hope to see you you know, this is now March 2026, and I'll
2:06:24
be back out in Texas in April.
2:06:26
So I hope- Okay ... I, I hope we'll be crossing paths there.
2:06:30
Glenn Cochran: Yeah ... we- Shoot me a text or a message or something,
2:06:32
let me know what's going on and, and we'll see if we can't cross paths.
2:06:35
I will
2:06:35
Rupert Isaacson: do that.
2:06:36
And, and that's kind of where I want to bring it to now, Glen.
2:06:38
So people who are listening to this, some of them will be saying,
2:06:41
"You know, I might, I might like to go and learn something from that,
2:06:44
from that classical roping chariota single-footing garrocha-using cowboy
2:06:51
doctor in, in College Station, Texas."
2:06:57
And by the way, anyone who's wa- who's watching this in College
2:07:00
Station, Texas, it's very beautiful.
2:07:02
If you don't know Texas, Texas has all these different zones of climate and
2:07:07
vegetation 'cause it's vast, and that area of Central Texas, and I used to
2:07:11
live there, it's exquisitely beautiful.
2:07:13
There are parts of it that look like English park.
2:07:16
It sort of goes- Yeah ... between looking like English parkland and Botswana,
2:07:20
depending upon how much rain has fallen.
2:07:22
Yeah, yeah.
2:07:24
But the sweet spot is, like, November and March, those- Yeah,
2:07:30
Glenn Cochran: you...
2:07:31
We've got, we- Yeah ... like somebody said, we have three seasons in Texas.
2:07:35
We have, we have fall/winter and winter/spring.
2:07:39
Winter- the fall/winter is called the wet season, and that, the, the wet
2:07:44
refers to drizzling rain, cloudy days.
2:07:47
It goes from, like, December the 15th up until, like, the first part of March.
2:07:51
And then, then we have the rainy season, which usually starts in March.
2:07:55
We're not having much of one this year, but just start
2:07:57
March, April, maybe up into May.
2:08:00
And, and somebody said, "Well, how do you tell the wet
2:08:02
season from the rainy season?"
2:08:03
I said, "You just wait."
2:08:05
'Cause it goes from drizzle to, like, torrential downpours.
2:08:09
Biblical
2:08:09
Rupert Isaacson: rains, yeah.
2:08:10
Glenn Cochran: Six inches of rain in an hour.
2:08:12
I mean, you know- Yeah ... you ain't...
2:08:13
And, and then the, the real season, the, the six to nine months, the rest
2:08:19
of the year is called the dry season.
2:08:21
It's like- Hot.
2:08:21
... they, they turn the tap off the 1st of July, and you ain't gonna see
2:08:25
another drop of rain until December.
2:08:27
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
2:08:28
That's right.
2:08:28
That's right.
2:08:29
But I would really encourage people...
2:08:31
So if, if, if people have not...
2:08:34
If you're listening to this, and you might want to go and learn some
2:08:37
classical stuff, some Western stuff some cowboy stuff with you, can
2:08:41
people come to you and learn, Glenn?
2:08:43
And is- Sure ... is there a way that...
2:08:44
How, how do they...
2:08:45
Do you have a website?
2:08:46
How do they, how do they contact you?
2:08:48
Glenn Cochran: Well, I used to have a website.
2:08:49
I don't know what happened to it, but but probably just look for me on Facebook.
2:08:53
I'm on there.
2:08:54
Okay.
2:08:54
And and just Facebook Messenger or something like that.
2:08:57
So Glenn Cochran,
2:08:59
Rupert Isaacson: As in- Yeah
2:09:00
the Scottish way, C-O-C-H-R-A-N-E.
2:09:02
That's it.
2:09:03
But we- No E.
2:09:03
No E with the- We end with the N,
2:09:05
Glenn Cochran: yeah.
2:09:06
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
2:09:06
Sorry, no E.
2:09:07
But we're gonna put that- We're- ... put that link there.
2:09:09
We're, we're Scottish, not British.
2:09:12
Aye, well, you know, on my f- on my father's side.
2:09:15
In my father's day, we never dreamt of voiding the bowel.
2:09:21
We simply kept it in.
2:09:26
Tales from a Scottish fitting room.
2:09:28
I've a couple.
2:09:30
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:09:31
Oh.
2:09:31
A whole nother culture.
2:09:32
Yes, indeed.
2:09:32
A whole other culture.
2:09:34
Rupert Isaacson: So listen we will put that there because
2:09:36
I think if peop- people...
2:09:37
I think people would love to come out to your ranch and learn.
2:09:41
with you.
2:09:42
And that's often a bit of a closed world for people because, you know, Texas, it's
2:09:47
so kind of the land is all private and you sort of have to know people and- Yeah
2:09:52
it's not like the fur- where you go further west and it's a lot
2:09:55
of big open BLM land and national forest and that sort of thing.
2:09:58
Mm-hmm.
2:09:58
So you kind of actually do need to know an individual who will take you in, and my
2:10:05
friends, that individual is sitting here.
2:10:07
It's, it's, it's Dr.
2:10:08
Glenn.
2:10:09
So I think I want to come visit as well, Glenn.
2:10:12
Can I do that?
2:10:12
Glenn Cochran: Well, you, you just plan on it.
2:10:15
Rupert Isaacson: All right.
2:10:16
You plan on it.
2:10:16
But Ileana's gonna kill me if I do it by myself, so I'm gonna have to do that
2:10:20
one- ... when I, when I bring her along.
2:10:22
She's, she's
2:10:22
Glenn Cochran: gotta come too.
2:10:23
Yeah, yeah.
2:10:23
I gotta have somebody pretty and somebody ugly.
2:10:26
I'm not gonna tell you.
2:10:27
Rupert Isaacson: Well, you know, you know-
2:10:28
I know I can hold it up.
2:10:31
Gotta have that balance, yeah.
2:10:33
Glenn Cochran: All right.
2:10:34
Well, yeah- All right, my friend ... we've got an event in
2:10:36
Caldwell on May the 2nd, which will be- Mm-hmm ... basically a work and
2:10:40
equitation based think like a cow clinic.
2:10:43
I'll be taking some cows up there.
2:10:45
We have a covered arena at Caldwell, the Saddle Club Arena,
2:10:48
and we're- Like a cow clinic
2:10:49
we've been doing this for about two years, so- So many jokes you can make-
2:10:52
... people can come ... with that, but hey.
2:10:53
Yeah.
2:10:54
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
2:10:54
So, so May, when is that?
2:10:55
May?
2:10:56
May the 2nd.
2:10:57
May 2nd.
2:10:58
And are you
2:10:59
Glenn Cochran: doing that, is that an annual thing?
2:11:01
Yeah, we've, we've done it for about two years now.
2:11:03
We tried to get something going spring and fall, so we-
2:11:06
we'll eventually get our- Okay
2:11:08
get things together.
2:11:09
But we're, for sure we're gonna do it May the 2nd.
2:11:12
We've got the arena scheduled and everything.
2:11:14
So, Good ... if somebody wants to work with, with some cows and particularly
2:11:17
work with one of the best cutting horse trainers in Texas not me- the, he
2:11:23
Cletus Hulling will be there, and- Right
2:11:25
and we're gonna, we're gonna start you with, you know, this is how you,
2:11:29
how you l- teach your horse to work with cows, so then you can do the
2:11:32
work and equitation team penning thing that, that they need to do.
2:11:35
So.
2:11:36
Fantastic.
2:11:37
Rupert Isaacson: All right.
2:11:37
Yeah.
2:11:38
Well, we- we'll put the...
2:11:39
We'll, we'll get all the, the links in there and let people know.
2:11:43
And in the meantime, Glenn thank you so much for coming on.
2:11:47
It's been a fabulous conversation.
2:11:49
Well, I've, I've really enjoyed it.
2:11:51
It's lovely being
2:11:51
Glenn Cochran: here.
2:11:51
Rupert, MuchÃsimas gracias.
2:11:54
Ah.
2:11:54
Y venga para visitar con nosotros.
2:11:56
Okay.
2:11:57
Rupert Isaacson: Avec plaisir, mon ami.
2:11:59
So yes, we will, we will, we will do this.
2:12:03
Okay ... and then I hope I'll see you, yeah, this coming month.
2:12:08
Yeah, you just let me know.
2:12:09
I will.
2:12:09
I'll work out
2:12:10
Glenn Cochran: some way to get there.
2:12:11
Rupert Isaacson: And we're gonna be look- just breaking the PF
2:12:13
down into a thousand pieces- Yeah.
2:12:15
... and looking at 10 different ways in.
2:12:17
Okay.
2:12:17
And perhaps some beer might be involved
2:12:20
Glenn Cochran: Yes, it
2:12:20
Rupert Isaacson: can definitely
2:12:21
Glenn Cochran: be
2:12:22
Rupert Isaacson: That would be, that would be a mercy
2:12:24
Glenn Cochran: Beer and perhaps a little wine.
2:12:26
Rupert Isaacson: You know, I have- Perhaps a little wine.
2:12:27
Perhaps even tequila
2:12:28
Glenn Cochran: Yeah.
2:12:28
Yeah, tequila.
2:12:29
Yeah.
2:12:30
We got you covered all the way around
2:12:32
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
2:12:32
All right.
2:12:33
Well then I, I, I, I know I'll be heading for the watering hole.
2:12:36
There you go Okay, Glenn, then thank you.
2:12:40
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2:12:44
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