Review of "Pony Training: 5 Case Studies"

 

Pony Training: Five Case Studies on Pony Play - A Book Review
Reviewed by cpony on
The book I'm reviewing today, "Pony Training: Five Case Studies on Pony Play, Ownership and Kinky Submission", was written by Garth Mundinger-Klow and published by Olympia Press on June 10, 2010. The book is 150 pages and is available as a softcover paperback or in electronic form.

Reviewing this book was a bit like a roller coaster ride. At Amazon's suggestion, I bought this book along with my copy of The Human Pony (which I reviewed here). Actually, I was impressed that another book on pony play was even available, and after reading part of the blurb, I was even excited to review it:

"The five case studies herein, taken from three years of precise sociological research, reveals the inner makings of human to pony"

From that excerpt, I was expecting something akin to Wilcox's "Human Pony", but perhaps focused on the mental aspects of play: an informational text that directly discussed pony headspace through several case studies.

So I was quite surprised when it turned out to be a set of five dirty little erotic novellas slapped between a couple pages of boilerplate "pony play is the erotic transformation..." and "those who engage in this bestial play...".

Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed. It's not that I don't like pony play stories (believe me, I read them regularly), rather I felt completely mislead by the book's description. Admittedly though, if I had looked into the book beyond its blurb, I probably could have guessed its content from its author's other publications (e.g. "Return to the Anal Altar").

Honestly, after my initial flip through, I seriously contemplated not even bothering with the review. However, after spending the money to buy it, I figured why not? Well, as I mentioned above, the "case studies" are ponygirl or ponyboy stories, but what's worse is the stories appear to be someone else's pony play stories.

Basically, the book has 5 chapters. Each chapter starts with a little intro (somewhere between 1-2 lines) that makes it sound like the author is introducing the next "interview" subject. After the brief intro, the chapter is a story that, from what I can tell, was taken straight off the internet (typically from Sir Jeffs or BDSM story sites) with no credit to the original author.

I can't believe I actually paid for this. I'm not sure if the authors gave their permission to have their stories used in this book (I doubt it), but either way the stories are available online for free, so I'm not sure why you would ever want to pay for this.

Here are each of the book's chapters (keep in mind the book was published in 2010) and corresponding original story (with original author) that was used to make it:

  1. Case Study #1: Tigerpet: The Making of a Ponygirl - This chapter looks to be very similar to the 2003 story by Alex Bragi entitled Ponygirl Tigerpet on Sir Jeff's website (also called The Ponygirl on BDSM library).
  2. Case Study #2: Training Linda - This chapter looks to be very similar to the 2002 story The Bar None Stables "written by Kilogram for use on SirJeffs Ponygirls" (it can also be found on BDSM Library under the same name).
  3. Case Study #3: Joe Trains a Ponygirl - This chapter is very similar to the 2007 A Ponygirl Story by John Brand (also can be found on Sir Jeffs under the same name).
  4. Case Study #4: Zach Becomes Big Boy - This chapter is very similar to the 2005 story Big Boy by "PR squared".
  5. Case Study #5: The Making of Bijoux - This chapter is very similar to the 2006 story Bijoux the Pony Girl Maid by Missy Crystal (it can also be found on BDSM Library as Bijoux, the Pony Girl).

The title and the little blurb describing the book were misleading, which irked me. The book is actually a book of erotic stories that involve pony play. Moreover, the stories themselves appear to have been taken completely from the Internet without crediting the original author.

My rating is 0* out of 5 stars. Don't waste your money on this book. Aside from the stories being freely available online, I'm not even sure the actual authors of the stories themselves are making any money from it (they are certainly not credited).

*This rating is not a reflection of the quality of the individual stories (which were all well written). The rating is for the compilation, whose author seemingly pulled free stories from Internet, passed them off as his own "interviews" (i.e. used the stories without crediting their actual authors) and misleadingly labelled the final product as a set of "case studies".