It’s winter. Cold mornings, strong winds, rain storms. We all know and dread (at least a little) that extra edge the horses will display on a frosty morning, as on occasion, that will get us launched into space.
I’ve been told I was brave for riding all of my horses in a snaffle, no matter what they usually get ridden in. I’m not particularly brave, but I believe in correct training. And I’ve never felt unsafe on a horse because it’s going in a snaffle with a properly adjusted noseband (2 fingers will fit under the bone!). Only a horse who can relax in the jaw can relax in the back as well, and only a horse that can work in relaxation (remember the training scale?) can proceed in its training. I want the horses reaching for the bit, not backing off it. If there are contact problems, they are almost always guaranteed to start in the back end (unless it’s the rare horse that has a tooth or other mouth related issue, but either way, that doesn’t get solved by tight nosebands either).
I have, however, felt unsafe on horses who have not been able to fulfill their natural need for free movement (and therefore have so much pent-up energy that one might as well sit on a powder keg). In addition, if these horses are green or retraining projects and do not understand or respond to basic aids, it’s a perfect storm for a dangerous situation.
A horse in prey animal mode will flee with its back down and head up. The training for our riding horses includes that they must carry us with their backs up to avoid injury, but also to be able to work in relaxation and therefore learn and progress. A horse with a tight and dropped back is a tense prey animal, not a reliable riding partner.
So even if the horse gets a good gallop around but does not work over the back, it will with extremely high likelihood still come out tense the next day. It’s important to point out here that “head down” does not equal “back up”, a pulled down head may prevent a bolt, but it does nothing to make the horse more rideable in the long term. The progressive training in relaxation makes horses more reliable as it increases the vocabulary of the exchange that happens between horse and rider, including in scary situations.
Laura Graves (who at the time was ranked the number 1 dressage rider in the world) said during a local clinic that her WEG mount Verdades is likely the spookiest horse on the circuit (having seen them at the 5* in Aachen I’m inclined to believe that), and that if his training hadn’t continued, she probably still couldn’t fly spray him. She also was very insistent that throughness (a combination of relaxation and straightness) was a prerequisite for any of the “tricks”. She said several times that she wasn’t impressed by riders being able to perform a movement by pulling hard on one rein or the other, but that the horse needed to be honestly on the seat.
Horses who are trained to work over their backs, straighten, and reliably respond to the aids, become trustworthy partners, given that they are also kept in a way that’s fair to them. I know an FEI trainer in Germany who will categorically not accept clients whose horses do not get daily turnout. Denying horses regular free movement is neither fair nor conducive to having a mentally and physically sound partner. Of course, any horse can have “a moment” at any time, and leap around or otherwise get us in trouble. But it’s in our own best interest to train our horse properly, and not primarily via the hands and head control, to get through winter and other dicey times unscathed.
Training according to classical principles is a very straight forward way of creating a good experience for both horse and rider. I’ve had the good fortune to study with Andrew J Murphy who, by insisting that the horse is the one who needs to put his head into the right spot himself, opened the door for me to continue training my body to do the majority of the “wrangling”, not the hands. It’s a door that leads to actual progress. I remember when I was much less skilled and riding a young, rather opinionated mare that I often felt I “won” an argument at the end of a particular ride, just to be reminded during the next ride that she could easily one-up it, which left me with a pretty unsatisfactory feeling. It wasn’t until I learned to use my body to maneuver her body through the lateral work (starting with reverse turns) that there was no more icky feeling at the end of the ride, but a clear path of progressive training.
