[Beaker]

Well I do know one thing, when horses don't want to do something, they'll tell you right away. :-) Unfortunately we can't read their minds, but if you know your horse, you know when they're comfortable doing something or not comfortable with it, and that's what you have to go by, I guess. Towards the end with my first horse, I knew that he just didn't want to do ring work anymore, and got very ring sour, and was much happier out on the trail, so that's what we did most of the time. He'd go for a couple of hours riding on the trail before he got tired, but you couldn't get him in the ring for 20 minutes.

And like I said before in a different post, I think that Oliver likes to work for me, even my trainer knows the difference, so I guess it also depends on the horse/rider team.

[PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain]

Well I do know one thing, when horses don't want to do something, they'll tell you right away. :-)

I agree, I think tail swishing is the horse telling us something.

In very high levels of competition, were a lot of money is concerned, some handlers may not care as you did tho, about what the horse likes and dislikes, they will MAKE them do it by whatever means it takes. Human nature.

I'm truly not trying to offend anyone here. It's not just in dressage horse that I wonder about this at times.

I was telling Mack just now about this discussion. My points are more about commentators saying things like "the horse likes"...they are pulling that out their butts. They don't know, it romanticizes, and I dislike romanticizing anything about horses. It's very misleading.

Becky