Tim Hughes seems to be a very nice person. I bet he would be a good teacher of natural horsemanship.
But writing just is not his thing! There are perhaps 25 pages of really useful information in this 247 page book. It's extremely repetitious. And his long-winded stories of children, convicts, and veterans whose autism, anti-social tendencies, or PTSD is cured by exposure to a horse are encouraging, but have a flat, predictable narrative arc. A more data-driven approach would have been more persuasive.
There are some good insights, such as the observation that a horse in his natural environment spends the day grazing, walking, occasionally running, and being in physical contact with the other horses in the herd. If you've seen pairs of horses in a pasture, swishing tails in each others' faces, you've seen horses au natural.
Given that, how happy can a horse be if he spends most of his days barely able to move because he is tied in a stall? Or in solitary confinement in a barren corral?
Hayes correctly points out that many of the "vices" horses are said to have (such as gnawing at fences) arise from having their natural behaviors frustrated. I wish he had taken the next step and asked why horses must be confined in environments that frustrate their nature.
I think one reason he doesn't go there, is that, in the end, he and I have very different attitudes towards horses. Although he is an advocate of natural horsemanship, his attitude is the common one: that horses are there to do what we want them to do.
He knows that the horse is unhappy in that barren corral, he knows that horses don't like bits in their mouths and saddles around their bellies and people on their backs. They can be trained to accept all these things, because horses, like most herd animals, like most prey animals, adjust rather than fight. But it's not the life they want to live.
And then you have me. It's been decades since I was a horse-riding 12 year old, mad to be flying over fences. Horses still make me happy. But now I am happy when I see them grazing in pastures. I am happy when I know that they are happy.