Post by Calaminty Jane on Aug 12, 2013 6:55:08 GMT -5
Good Horsemanship - Ross Jacobs
As I do more teaching something has become more and more clear to me about some people’s attitude towards riding and horsemanship. It seems that many people don’t have very high expectations of either themselves or their horses.
When I was a teenager I held a working position for a while with a very famous show jumping trainer from Europe. He was the Australian Olympic coach and knew more about jumping than the Pope knew about the bible. But he was a horrible man and ran his training establishment like a concentration camp. It was not beyond him to humiliate students in front of their peers, competitors or parents. I remember one occasion when I was asked to ride a 16.1hh WB mare that was imported from Holland by one of his clients. The mare was fairly green and I was having trouble keeping her straight in front of the jump. You could always tell when the boss was upset because he would slap his riding crop against his long boot when he spoke. Eventually he couldn’t take my incompetence anymore and yelled at me at the top of his lungs and in front of about 20 people, “What makes you think you have the right to call yourself a rider?” I was then ordered off the horse and told to clean stables. For a teenager it was a horrible experience.
But one of the most significant lessons I learned from him was the importance of being disciplined in my riding. When I ask something of a horse, it’s not ‘good enough’ until it is ‘good enough’. That does not mean the result has to be perfect. But the outcome should be close to what the horse is capable of giving at that particular time. On a horse learning something new, good enough might be quite a small improvement. But on a horse where something is more established, good enough has to be better that it would on a green horse UNLESS there is a good reason to accept less (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).
I remember a lesson with a good friend riding her mare. When she rode the mare around the arena, she often cut the corners. It seemed to me the mare wanted to cut the corners and the rider was saying, “That’s good enough.” But when I instructed her to ride the mare deep into the corners, she discovered that ‘good enough’ was not perhaps so good. She allowed the mare to find reward and in half-hearted efforts and then learned that the horse was not available for anything better.
In another lesson a rider was asking for a walk or a trot and accepting the rhythm of the walk and trot that the horse gave her. The horse was not a particularly forward moving animal, so just any trot seemed a win to the rider. I tried to urge her not to allow the horse to determine the rhythm. It’s not ‘good enough’ to just accept any old walk or trot the horse offers you. She found it a lot harder to get a change in the rhythm of the gaits because the horse was not use to the rider demanding anything more than it gave. This explained why the horse became sour when asked for more effort.
It’s the same with everything we do with a horse. A rider should be quite disciplined with everything that is asked. It is important to know what to expect from your horse and work at getting as close to that as possible. If you don’t become disciplined in your riding, your horse will learn that you’ll accept any half-hearted attempt as ‘good enough’. In the end when you need more from your horse, it won’t be available because your horse will have lost his ‘try’.
I don’t think enough people realize that letting themselves off lightly is also having a negative effect on their relationship with their horse. It’s hard to have discipline – especially if you are riding just for pleasure or you are learning something new and you don’t have confidence in your judgment at knowing how far to push your horse.. But success cannot come from taking short cuts or making half-hearted efforts. It takes work and most times that means working on yourself.
To paraphrase other people, “I can teach you something, but I can’t make you learn it.”
So if you ever seem me at a clinic wearing long boots and tapping a whip against the side, you had better be afraid – very afraid.