Back to the drawing board

So after months of anticipation Kelsall Hill horse trials has been and gone, fabulous for friends, not so good for me. Back to the drawing board for me and Caltastic.

My friends had a wonderful weekend, Carrie won her section, perfect prep for Badminton Grass Roots championships next week, David Llewellyn, a local trainer won, there were lots of other local placings, big smiles, happy days, glorious weather, fabulous course.

My gorgeous Cal by contrast felt flat and underpowered and we got eliminated in the showjumping. 

The sad fact of being barefoot is that everyone automatically looks at his feet and blames the lack of shoes for every dip in performance. I can honestly say his feet felt fine, the ground was perfect, he is thrush free, sound on everything except sharp stones and didn’t slip once in the dressage, despite morning frost and dew, and was also not slipping in the showjumping warm up. 

He did feel a bit flat practising at Carrie’s house and had a couple of stops there, always at oxers.

The same thing happened last year and I blamed myself. I thought I had Oxer Fear. I spent a couple of months getting extra lessons, getting my butt kicked to be braver and more positive. We did much better until one day he really couldn’t breathe during a jumping lesson. Bronchoscopy showed his lungs to be really inflamed with grade 4 inflammation and mucous. 

Poor boy is quite stoic really and does generally try his little heart out for me. 

So he’s being bronchoscoped next week by the lovely Georgie of Brownmoss Equine.

Trimmer John of Barely Roadworthy has been for his routine appointment- Cal’s feet are looking good. He is shedding a load of false sole. Hopefully there will be a more concave foot underneath. 

There is still some bruising growing out from the fun ride over Rivington Pike at Christmas but he doesn’t seem to be too sore. There are discs and plaques of shedding sole with discolouration underneath suggesting old abscess and or thrush but a few week of applying the Westgate Labs toxic looking green frog oil seems to have worked nicely.

Talking of Westgate Labs I cannot speak highly enough of their services. Friendly efficient and reasonably priced- all 4 horses have negative Faecal Egg Counts and Equisal tapeworm saliva tests so no wormers at all required this spring. We will egg count all summer and then test for tapeworm again in Autumn- if all testing negative they will only need one worming dose  for encysted red worm in winter 2016/2017.

There is work going on to develop an ELISA test for encysted red worm too. Once that is in the public domain we may be able to reserve chemical wormers only for those horses with proven infestations- and no a moment too soon with the resistance developing globally to chemical wormers.

So back to Cal and our back to the drawing board strategy-  If his lungs are clear we will invest in some kick ass jumping lessons and do more show jumping over summer, aiming to do some events later on when the showjumping bogey has been firmly eliminated.

If his lungs are all clogged up again he will need treating obviously and sympathetic working. 

So frustrating that a horse that loves to jump and eats up big cross country courses presents so many challenges in the husbandry stakes. 

If his lungs are  clogged up though,  at least we will know it’s not his blooming feet slowing him down! ?

 

Training, not Taming

Training, not taming, the horse to be ridden. A recent post on social media showed a photo of a beautifully marked wild mustang stallion posturing. The caption asked “is this the self-carriage that we seek?” And one of the replies was “I’m not sure I’d like to be riding my horse if he was in that mode…”

And this got me wondering. Looking at the photo, the horse’s back is beautifully lifted, and at maximum length from tail to poll, the overall balance is uphill, the suspension and ground cover breath-taking, the throat latch is open but the poll is absolutely the highest point. In short, if one added a rider to the photo, it would be the most beautifully correct passage, and the rider would be invisible because the horse would steal the show.

So for me, yes, absolutely, this self-carriage is a good example of what I would seek. As Charles de Kunffy says, the purpose of dressage training, in keeping with the Renaissance ideals, is to transform a random act of Nature into an edifice of Art. Training, not taming.

The purpose of training, for me, is to strive towards a quality of symbiosis that makes me and the horse feel like a Centaur, one body, one mind, working together effortlessly and invisibly. I love eventing so ideally for me that would be true on the cross country course, show jumping and also in the dressage arena. I want my horse to be a willing partner, thinking for himself, our brains attuned to each other but working in harmony. I certainly wouldn’t want to canter towards a big solid cross-country fence with a horse that isn’t looking after himself and, by extension, me as well. Training, not taming.

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Now please don’t get me wrong, I am not boasting here: if you saw me ride, you would see that I am a long, long way away from that ideal. But it is important to know what we strive for, for how else might we take steps to achieve it?

Achieving a classical seat is an incremental process
Achieving a classical seat is an incremental process

So would we like to ride a horse with the amount of energy and pizzazz of the posturing stallion?

Who wouldn’t?

Surely the whole point of riding a horse is to have two bodies and minds working together to achieve more than either can separately? The human becomes more majestic, more imposing, more powerful, on board a horse, leaping huge fences and traveling at tremendous speed. The whole point of riding is to harness the power of the horse and use it for our purpose; be that enjoyment, labour, display or battle. Why would you get on a horse and ask it to diminish itself?

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Many horses are “energy efficient”. Many horses have no idea how powerful they can be! My own gorgeous, sleepy, gentle Cal, scares himself silly when both hind legs work equally and he realises how much power there is behind him. When he hits that point, we have had Pesade and Capriole, when all that was required was two hind legs, equal, underneath you, lifting please! The baby Rocky is right hand crooked: when asked to lift his bum with his left hind, we have had kicks and twists and inside outs just to avoid a bit of new weight bearing. When they find the feeling though, and play around with the new body you have just introduced them to, that is truly an amazing moment.

One of my most treasured memories is when the black horse, Paddy, old, arthritic, stiff and resistant, spontaneously offered the most beautiful canter in a lesson where we spent a bit of time doing walk pirouettes and helped him to unlock his back. The canter was a really cool reaction- “ooooooh that feels soooo goooood”

The novice horse loses the new balance again two strides later of course! But if you can show them that place, again and again, the balance becomes better and stronger and then they choose the new muscle usage because it feels good, and then they offer the correct posture because it feels good. And then they blossom and grow in confidence and stature.

This can’t be forced. For the horse to choose, it has to feel physically better. And good training, that sticks, where the horse is a willing partner, has to be based on offers not coercion. The best training is where we set up a question or exercise where the only logical physical answer employs the new muscle usage that we seek. The horse experiments, tries a few things, works out the required offer and then is rewarded for the try. The exercise is repeated, the try gets quicker, more confident, stronger. Eventually the horse learns that this exercise creates that feeling, and the aids become invisible and the try becomes an immediate response. And that is training, not taming.

There is no “control” required because there is no resistance and no fear. The horse is on the aids, working on suggestions and signals. The horse is not diminished mentally because his mind is respected and employed to his advantage during the training. The horse is not diminished physically because the training is built up slowly, layer upon layer of incrementally tougher demands on a body that has been gradually prepared for the higher demands of collection.

This takes timing, and tact, and humour, and skill. And it takes lots of time. Podhjasky says 4 years to prepare a horse for the high school movements. Four years after they first start school work, which the SRS horses do at 6. Years 4-6 are spent hacking out, in straight lines, developing bones and tendon and bodies, seeing the world and learning about life, not in the arena.

But when you have an advanced well horse trained in this manner, that will spontaneously offer every ounce of half a tonne of muscle, to make the pair of you majestic, why would you not want a piece of that? And why would you not want it to last for ever?

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That’s what I’m striving towards. And if it takes me a whole lifetime of learning and training to achieve it with one horse for even one minute, it will have been worth the journey.