Buck Brannaman

Life is all about experiencing the things happening around us. In the meantime, it makes us learn a lot of new aspects and concepts. Even books may not teach us as many things as we learn by ourselves. The same thing happened with Buck Brannaman. He inspired directors to make his life into a movie. He became one of the best motivational speakers in the world. His life is unique in itself. Nevertheless, he led a miserable childhood, but eventually he grew up successful.

Dan M. Buck Brannaman, famously known to the people as Buck Brannaman, was born on 29 January, 1962, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. From his childhood, his father forced him to learn rope tricking. As he was not excelling in that field, his father used to threaten him, and even abused and beat him. Buck Brannaman's football coach saw the marks of his dad whippings and sent them to foster care centers. But he tried roping tricks at the age of six for some television commercials. While Buck Brannaman, along with his brother, were staying in a foster care center, they faced many life threats from his father through letters.

As time passes by, Buck Brannaman went into horsemanship. He tamed the horse by himself. He said, at first, the horse used to kick him and tried to escape from him. Soon, he realized the very secret in taming a horse was that one can't achieve it by any physical means, and he had to work on it differently to get the horse under his control. He even stated the reason behind it. As horses are preys for a longer time, they fear of being killed. If we can make it comfortable with us, they will never retract at us. This way, he tamed the horse and became a horseman.

All the situations he faced from his childhood turned out to be the motivational stories in the later years. He opines that an abused horse is as similar as an abused child. It always fears of being ill-treated. He is also a trained trick roper. He has two Guinness Book Records in that field. He works as a consultant to many films for horse riding aspects. He is a tyrant follower of Ray Hunt, the one who is crucial in Natural Horsemanship movement. He has a wife, Mary and a daughter Reata.

In the book, The Horse Whisperer, the author said that he got inspiration for the character of Tom Booker from Buck Brannaman. His life is made into a documentary by Cindy Meehl by the title, ‘Buck’. At the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, Buck won the Audience Award in the US Documentary Competition.