The University of Montana Western offers the only natural horsemanship bachelor's degree in the country. It is a combination of classroom and hands on experience.

This week, students were busy preparing for the draft horse competition, which is part of the program.

Boe Adler, Jen Leyden and Megan Miller are all seniors in the natural horsemanship program.  Alydia LaRowe is a freshman. They're learning horse handling skills that date back more than 2,300 years to the ancient Greeks.

"It's really nice to bring back this older style of horsemanship," Adler said.

That style was just a way of life 120 ago. Now, it's just cool.

"There's a lot of people out there that are using these horses as advertising, and as business, carriage rides, hay rides, even people who use them for logging and some things of that nature too," Adler said.

"We have a confirmation slash judging class, and the last one we judged the confirmation of the horse, what their legs look like, how they're put together," Leyden said.

The ranch where the students prepared for the event is located in Glenn and owned by instructor Russ Hebel.

"Trim the sidewalls down.  This is just like trimming your fingernail or toenail," Hebel explained.

Maybe it's just a little tougher than that. There is also all the gear, which the professionals call tack, to haul, some really enormous horses to move around and control, loads of work, and on top of it all, classes to attend.

"Oh, it's intense.  It's intense, it really is. I have to take my morning class and have my natural horsemanship class in the evenings Tuesdays, Thursdays and this once a week for several hours during the evening and you do have to juggle. You have to be able to budget your time, know when and where you have to be," LaRowe said.

According to the University of Montana Western's Web site, "the term ‘natural horsemanship' was coined by one of the art's more recent practitioners to put a name to methods of training horses based on a thorough knowledge and appreciation of equine behavior; thus, cooperative communication and understanding in the development of unity and harmony with the horse is the goal, rather than dominance or force.  The art is not new:  the Greek general and horseman, Xenophon, penned the basic tenets of what we now call natural horsemanship in his treatise The Art of Horsemanship, written in 360 B.C.  Since then, there have been many "schools" of horsemanship based on forming a partnership with a horse that include horse-friendly and horse-considerate methods."

Click here to learn more about the University of Montana Western equine programs.

 - John Sherer reporting for Z7 in Bozeman