04/12/2024
I’ve been thinking recently about the horse world. Thinking mostly about all the riders and horses I know that are struggling.
Horses that are BROKEN at 12 years, 10 years, hell 8 years old. I'll say that again, YOUNG horses that are BROKEN...... Mentally broken, physically broken, emotionally broken. Horses that have been campaigned nonstop since their import at a young age that are just DONE...... What happened to the days where horses were developed slower and given entire winters off to just be a horse growing up in a big field again? Young horses being given the time to mentally and physically mature before being challenged at non-stop AAA rated shows. What happened to going home for a few weeks after a long show series and giving the horse a few days or an entire week off before resuming your training? What happened to turning a horse out in a pasture 8-12 hours EVERY day WITH a few friends and letting them eat grass and just be a horse? What happened to taking your show horse on a trail ride one or 2 days a week so he can have a change of scenery? What happened to those days? Whatever happened, in my opinion those days were so much better for our horses.
I see riders who are always stressed out in the saddle. Riders who are scared in the saddle. Riders who feel they have something to prove because they paid soooo much money for their horse. Young riders whos parents are going into MAJOR debt for them to finish their last Junior show year with a bang. Riders who are showing over bigger fences when they can’t find a safe distance for their horse even to a cross rail. Riders just getting around by the skin of their teeth who are one mistake from a crash that could get them or their horse hurt. When did our desire to win $5 ribbons and have an IG account with the most followers override everything else? Why are we only chasing horse show goals instead of becoming better horsemen?
One of my favorite statements is-
Just because you CAN does NOT mean you SHOULD.
Just because you can show 45 weeks of the year, does not mean you should.
Just because your 4 year old horse can jump 3'6" does not mean you should ask it to.
Just because your lesson student that only rides once per week thinks she can jump bigger does not mean she should.
Just because your horse can bridge the gap in your education as a rider doesn’t mean you should ask him to, over and over again.
I could carry on, and on, and on.... but you get the gist.
The post that inspired my soap box this morning:
I hear a lot of people complaining that the shows start at low level these days … that in “their day” you didn’t even start showing until the 3’6. I appreciate that there’s been a dumbing down of the sport, but many people can’t afford a 3’6 horse these days but want to enjoy a bit of showing, we’ve also brought in so many non-horse people that now want to be horse people but have neither the years and years of experience nor the family history of animal husbandry and care… and don’t even get me started on Google and IG and FB and the damage those platforms are causing to the overall well being of the horses as well as those in the sport…. That’s another day. We have also bred these amazing athletes that are incredibly powerful and more naturally careful and therefore more opinionated about the distances they jump from, as well as how hard they jump to accommodate the miss, which beginners will do and often are not strong enough to handle the consequences… and the courses are incredibly technical. This is not 3’6 brush fences and natural jumps in a giant grass field or single jumps relatively unrelated in an arena. These days courses are very intricate long stretches of gymnastics where your eye and accuracy matters, the horses have to be hyper careful not to roll the feather light rails off and galloping distances are set in smaller often indoor rings for the hunters. This changes things for me, for all of us really…. So, my riders jump low, they have to be accurate at least a large portion of the time to earn the right to move up. They often have one horse or pony and we cannot trash that horse with a million “trainer rides” to create a machine that can carry the rider for 8-16 fences and make them look good. Any time I’ve strayed from this position of slow and low I’ve scared the horses, the riders or both. I see it all the time, horses meeting the jumps poorly time and time again and then they don’t show for 9-12 months cuz they are not sound- correlation and causation. Horses being lunged to exhaustion to tolerate mistakes and jumped at height multiple days a week with little to no down time between showing and training at home now that we can show 50 weeks a year if we so choose. We have to do better, teach the riders more, make them work through some adversity absolutely, but make them do it low and safely for all… when they can make instinctively correct decisions 90% of the time, be strong and still in the tack and understand why things don’t work out and show they can fix them- THEN they move up. I’ve done it before and I may slip up and do it again unknowingly and take advantage of the horse, but my goal is not to do that. My goal is to have some harmony, have horses sound and functional for years and years and create an environment where the horses are never “bad” for the position we put them in for OUR competition…. They didn’t choose to be here, they will generously tolerate so much and fill in so many gaps, but why make them? Why not offer them more, offer them the best possible deal and then help them when they struggle instead of medicating them, lunging them down (I’m not opposed to correct and productive lunging BTW we do it all the time) and why not let them have room for error and give them some grace when we make their lives much more complicated than they would ever choose them to be. I also realize humans have expectations because they paid X dollars and want their moneys worth… that’s not how any of this works, at the end of the day if you want a brave, confident, capable, quiet, kind and athletic horse… be those things for the horse… but no one wants to work for that many years in the heat and the cold and the rain and the humidity, no one wants to just spend the time, but why? What’s the rush, where are we all going that we need to hurry the horses to cover for our short comings?
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Written by Brittany Massey
