Replies

I haven't been on the thread because it's been busy here at work. I wasn't offended/irritated at all. Just contributing and discussing. :-) I don't like anthropomorphizing horses to the extent that commentator did. You just can't do it, because horses aren't people and vice versa. I do believe, though, that depending on the partnership and once you've built up a level of trust, a horse will want to work for you. Oliver, for example has finally trusted me, and he goes quite well. You can tell these things because he's relaxed through his back, he plays with his bit, he yields to my hands and takes contact on his own. We just kind of click.

But I do believe that horses can grow to like(heh there's that word again) people, and yes they do look for you when you've been gone. One of the appy's at the barn always knows when her person has arrived. Oliver always come up to meet me at the gate.

And of course it's naive to think that trainers won't use harsh measures to get what they want, regardless of the discipline, and of course some do, that goes without saying. One could say that rolkur is harsh. But others say that it's a valuable training tool in the right hands, and if done in short periods it can't hurt, but it's abused and misused. However, not every dressage rider uses it, and lots are against it. I personally don't like it, and I think that it goes against every principle in dressage.

I do believe as Beaker said, there are probably horses out there who can be trained to do this sort of thing without harsh measures. But I feel certain there are horse that can’t do it, but are pushed till as she said, their brains are fried.

Dressage isn't just training the horse to do fancy moves. These horses start from the ground up, and the point of dressage is to teach the horse and rider to move in balance with one another. You'd be surprised what you can do to throw your horse off balance, and how easy it is to do. Dressage training benefits every horse and rider team, regardless of their discipline.

And yes there are horses who can't do dressage at certain levels, and if they can't, you won't see them performing at that level, that's my point. It's like asking a horse who can only jump 2 feet to jump a 4 foot grand prix course, or your average backyard trail horse to do competitive trail riding. The point of dressage is not to fry a horse's brain and teach it to dance around the ring. :-) And people that are out there to do it that way, shouldn't be doing it at all.

Again, I don't want you to think that I'm being agressive-agressive or even passive aggressive, (grin) I just want you to understand what dressage is all about, and that just because you see a grand prix dressage horse doesn't mean that harsh methods were used to get him there.