(“Cease this madness immediately.”)

Back in the day we had boarders—lots of them. But when we built our farm, we said, “No mas!” Only enough room for our own horses and a few in training. With our home on the premises, I was damned if I was going to look out the window of my own house and see things going on that annoyed me. Control freak? Yes! Service oriented? Not on your life!

So when the following question came up, you can probably guess whose side I was on. It’s a “brother’s keeper” kind of issue made complicated by how an instructor with a fiduciary link should react (or interfere) with a student’s riding when it’s observed outside a lesson setting. As described:

She was riding in the field by herself. Her horse was “kinda forward but not really round.” As I passed her I asked how he was (because i thought he was not round and his under neck was sticking out quite a bit. She went on about how good he was and no, his poll was probably too low but she wasn’t working on that today.

The question: Is it ok to let a horse not be round when you ride him as you are not working on ‘that’ today? My thought is not to let them practice things wrong. Ride them up and round. Ride long and low—but round. Don’t ride them wrong.

I am fundamentally in agreement with this philosophy. On some level I suppose you can say as long as you don’t harm the horse, why does it really matter how he’s ridden? At the recent Regionals down at Wellington I watched a group of adult amateurs having the flat part of their H/J lesson in a field out behind our warm ups. It did not make me want to change disciplines. Robotic, uninspired, all in all a waste of time and energy (to the extent that any was being expended). But despite that, I felt no compulsion to run into their midst waving my arms and shouting, “Cease this madness immediately.” If they want to ride like that, what the hey?

But what we’re talking about here is a student sowing the seeds of impenetrable resistance which the instructor will have to deal with later on. Whether I interrupt at that moment or save my remarks for a later lesson, I am sure to try to redirect the rider’s thinking.

In fact, there are times when a horse need not be round. A leisurely hack through the fields—leave them alone. Or at times a horse is sufficiently behind the leg or backed away from even a passive contact that the priorities are forward and to the hand, and everything else just has to wait.

How you choose to ride your horse also depends on how impressionable he is at his stage of training. Riding a confirmed Grand Prix horse, you can afford to make a casual (even sloppy) canter to walk transition if you need to answer your cell phone. It’s not going to untrain him. On the other hand, if your horse is just beginning to make canter departs without inverting, every single one you make should be as correct as possible to reinforce the desired behavior. You reap what you sow.