01/14/2023
Very good read!!
There are car mechanics for a reason. The average person relies on those who specialize in auto repair because they don’t know enough to fix most issues by themselves.
Back when I started competing, 69 years ago, most of the adults had lived in a time when horses were used instead of cars. My father, for example, had been born in 1905, my mother in 1907. But although so many of the horse advice-givers had lived, at least partly, in the horse and buggy age, most of them were not horse “mechanics” just as most modern people aren’t car mechanics.
So the advice they gave us kids tended to be bad advice. It was just the way it was. We all got lots of, “Don’t let him get away with that” messages. The big one that we heard so often was “You have to show him who’s boss.”
No classical training methods in Greenfield, Massachusetts in the early 1950s that I ever heard. If a horse was bad, smack him. If he didn’t go, whack him. If he was slow to stop, jerk him.
When you are 10-11-12 and adults tell you that stuff, it seems to be coming from an authority figure, and it is not surprising how many of us bought into it. We went to watch western movies, more of the same. It would be several decades before most of us even heard the word “dressage.” Let alone truly comprehend its concepts of gradual and empathetic schooling rather than making.
Today it’s a different story. That information is out there. Modern kids shouldn’t have to take years to unlearn wrong advice.
Especially with the internet. Get it right early from reliable sources at the start and avoid the “show that horse a thing or two” mentality altogether.
