This essay may lose me a few friends in the dressage world, but I feel the topic is important enough that it needs to be discussed and debated.
First, please read the short article in the link at the bottom. Then come back to read what I have to say. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
https://bit.ly/2CbJRV9
Photo: Dana Carvey from Wayne’s World acting the part of a dumb blonde.
Many years ago dumb blonde jokes were all the rage. They were always terrible and always stupid. One of the worse went something like, “A young blonde girl was walking down the street with her headphones on. She bumped into a friend who wanted to know what she was listening to. The blonde lent her friend the headphone. The friend heard through the headphones “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.”
I told you it was stupid. But the article from Dressage Today reminded me very much of that joke. It assumes horses are dumb blondes that need to be micro-manage in their every footfall.
As a young working pupil for a dressage trainer I was told early on about the importance of timing the aids to direct a horse’s feet. It’s up there as one of the doctrines of dressage along with inside leg to outside rein and always keep the reins even. It wasn’t until I start to develop independent thought that I began to question this centuries-old dogma.
As I watch my horses being horses in their 20ha paddock, I notice that they do pretty well at taking the correct lead when they canter. I even notice them sometimes executing beautiful flying lead changes while cavorting around. How can this be if I’m not there to ensure the correct timing of the aids? The answer is obvious.
They can do it because it is their idea and nothing or nobody is hindering the execution of their idea.
A fundamental principle of good horsemanship is to let your idea becomes the horse’s idea and then get out of the way and let it happen.
If I ask my horse to walk and it becomes his idea, he walks. I don’t have to treat as if he is a dumb blonde and tell him, “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot” for the entire trip. His thought to walk arranges everything in place to make it happen.
In the article, the author writes about the leg yield, “…. apply your inside leg not as a constant force but in rhythm every time the horse’s inside hind leg is in the air”. She says it is to ensure he engages his inside hind leg. But I would argue that if you need to do that then you failed to direct the horse to think in terms of a to the leg yield and are simply making it happen mechanically. If you don’t get a change of thought, a horse has learned nothing from the exercise. (BTW, I would also argue that if you wait until the inside hind is in the air, you are too late to influence where that foot will land because the horse has already decided the amount of reach of the leg.)
In another example, the author proposes that it is often poor timing of the canter aids that cause horses to strike the wrong lead. But again, she is treating the horse like a machine with no brain of its own. If the rider has balanced the horse correctly and the rider’s signals to canter are clear enough to create the thought to canter, a horse will take the correct lead even if the rider has imprecise timing. The horse will choose the correct lead because it is his idea and not because the rider applied the inside leg at exactly the right moment. If it does require the rider to apply the leg aid at exactly the right time, then the horse is being trained to be no more than a dumb blonde.
Even in horsemanship I see people using aids to direct each foot instead of letting the horse having an idea. Only a couple of years I audited a clinic by a world-renowned horsemanship clinician and he instructed his students to ask their horse to back up by applying and releasing the reins in time with each foot movement. I asked about why and was told it was the only way to control the horse’s feet. I stayed quiet even though I had a lot of thoughts about the explanation. He obviously had not come across a horse that had the thought to back up.
There are times when the timing of the aids can be important. Often, this is when we are asking for particular control that is outside a horse’s natural choice. By that I mean a horse wants to naturally execute a movement one way, but we want him to do a different way. For example, if I want to teach my horse to spin or do forehand yields or a pirouette and I want the outside foreleg to cross over and in front of the inside foreleg, I would probably try to time my aid to yield the outside fore when the horse had more weight on the inside fore. This would help the horse get to the idea to pick up the outside leg before picking up the inside leg when executing the turn.
However, you’ll often see rider’s constantly nag a horse with their leg (and often times rein) pressure in an attempt to control every movement even when the horse has the idea. Watch a dressage rider apply their legs to a horse during piaffe or passage. The horse knows it is being asked for the piaffe, yet the rider almost always nags with the spur “I want left leg, now the right leg, now left again, right leg next…”. Some will argue that the rider does this to maintain impulsion, but if the horse its losing impulsion it is because it has lost the thought to piaffe and now the rider has to impose it. I believe it indicates a failure of training.
Horses are super smart at picking up nuisances and patterns. They just need clarity about what is being asked and then for a rider to do nothing that hinders them from carrying out their idea. They are not dumb blondes, so don’t treat them like they are.
That article got me so riled up I have to remind myself to “breathe in, breathe out.”