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Reflections on Riding

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Reflections on Riding

Category Archives: Language

The good, the bad and the educated (hands)

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Katie in Equitation, Language

≈ 2 Comments

Back before back-in-the-day, when I was a mere twig of a girl proud to be wearing jodphurs, I was full of aspirations.  Of course, I wanted to go to the Olympics (what serious young rider doesn’t?).  But there was something else I wanted even more.

I wanted good hands.  Because I knew that I wouldn’t be a good rider until I got them.

Good hands.  In those days, it was a phrase everyone knew and everyone used.  It was a universal truth that good riders had good hands. Riders were complimented on their good hands and criticized for their bad hands.  Educated hands were expected of advanced riders, and admired.

If there were an equine dictionary a la the OED, all those phrases — good hands and bad hands and educated hands — would now be listed as archaic.

This is what I want to do with my hands even though I know pulling is bad

This is what I want to do with my hands even though I know pulling is bad

When I hear about contact issues or a rider needing to improve his contact, and I see a horse being jabbed in the mouth or yanked with an outside rein in a misguided half-halt or being turned into a boat for a rider waterskiing on his mouth, it makes me want to pull my hair out.

But there is a glimmer of light in the corridor of equestrian darkness.  I recently heard that USDF judges are becoming more forthright in their assessment of rider’s hands.  One popular phrase to put in the test remarks now is “rider restricted.”  Okay, that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s almost as oblique as contact.

At this point, if you’ve stuck with me, you’re probably getting tired of hearing me complain.  So let me offer some practical solutions to riders and instructors, which I believe can help fix the problem.

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Words count

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Training

≈ 6 Comments

When you talk to your horse (and I expect that you do), do you think that your horse knows what you say?  Do you think that it’s simply the tone of your voice that matters?  Or do you think that your horse understands the words you use and their meaning?

786px-George_Morland_-_Winter_Landscape_-_Google_Art_Project

Winter Landscape by George Morland, 1790, Yale Center for British Art

For what it’s worth, I think my horses have quite large vocabularies.  And I’ve noticed that when I say something out loud, I seem to get through much more effectively than when I think something and expect my horse to read my mind.  (I’ve noticed the same thing with people, especially men).

Often, when I say something out loud, I think I’m talking to myself, but when my horse overhears, it’s clear that he knows whom I’m really talking to.  For example, some time ago, I kept wishing that one of my horses would relieve himself in the straw on the edges of his stall rather than in the middle of his stall, where he walked all over it and made a mess.

Night after night (because I pick stalls at night check), I would think to myself, “I wish…”  One night, for no reason in particular, I said it out loud.  I really thought I was talking to the air, but I did say, in a normal tone of voice, “I wish you would…”  The next morning, done!  All I had to do was say something.  Nicely, of course.

All this comes as no surprise, I’m sure, to Masaru Emoto.

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Only in a horsey family

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Katie in Language

≈ 2 Comments

Only in a horsey family would a conversation occur like the one I had with my sister last night.

I called to apologize for the delay in sending something to her.  I verbalized my pathetic excuse, “The day ran away with me.”

“Who ran away with you?!,” my sister yelled into the phone.  “Dini?”

Faithful readers of my blog will recognize the name of one of the horses I’ve had in training.  Now Dini has never run away with anyone, but I think my sister just began going down the list of potential runaways with a horse whose name began with a “d.”

“No,” I said.  “The day ran away with me.”

“Oh, thank God,” said my sister.

And I do, for many things, including not riding any runaways in recent memory.

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You can’t say this

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Training

≈ 6 Comments

Let it never be said that I don’t read Practical Horseman from cover to cover. That is, from front to back, just the opposite of the way we’re supposed to ride.

There it is, in tiny print, on the bottom left corner of the back cover of PH’s December 2012 issue.

images-1Heritage Gloves is the Official Riding Glove of The United States Equestrian Federation.

Say what?  

I’m sorry, you can’t say “gloves is glove.”  Official or otherwise.  Heritage or otherwise.  USEF or otherwise.

Why not say, “Heritage Gloves are the Official Riding Gloves of The United States Equestrian Federation?”

Or “Heritage is the Official Riding Glove of the United States Equestrian Federation?”

You just can’t say “Heritage Gloves is the Official Riding Glove of the United States Equestrian Federation.”  You can’t.  Unless you want to sound illiterate. And that are my final word on the subject.

Almost.  Because I want to give a thumbs up to Heritage for making the best winter work glove I’ve found.  It’s their Extreme Winter Glove, with a Thinsulate lining and advertised as waterproof.  They are (note: not “they is”) truly waterproof.

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Search

06 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by Katie in Language

≈ 4 Comments

It makes me happy that people look for answers on my blog, and I hope that they find what they’re looking for (and you do, too).

As my platform, WordPress tells me some of the search terms that people use to find me.  Some of those search terms surprise me.  Some gratify me. Some bewilder me.  And some make me laugh out loud.

Questioning horsemen on their laptops or desktops or phones or iPads, take the time to carefully choose their words and type them in the boxes in the search engines of their choice, in hopes of finding the answer they’e looking for somewhere on what used to be known as the World Wide Web.

Just yesterday, people came here wanting to know more about:

cavaletti spacing

how far up should a bit be in a horse’s mouth

pulling shoes for winter thoroughbred

bruising to bars in horse’s mouth

All great things to be thinking about.  All things that have interested me and which I’ve sought out reasons and solutions for, and which I’ve had a chance to share here on the blog.  All things that great horsemen who preceded me taught me, as did the horses I’ve been privileged to know.

I’ve learned through the last twelve months (the first anniversary of my blog is less than a week away) that lots of people want to know what Buck Brannaman has to say (245 people came here to find out)…that people want to know more about the artist Franz Marc and his extraordinary paintings of horses (“Franz Marc” is the eighth most common search term leading to my blog)…and that there’s a great interest in horse skulls.  In fact, there’s a deep and abiding interest in horse skulls, as evidenced by the following search terms and their frequency:

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Soak

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Training

≈ 4 Comments

The problem with living in the present is that it’s easy to forget what we promised to do in the past.  On October 16, 2011, for example.  That’s the date on which I told you in this post that I thought it was important for people and horses to let things soak, and that I’d expand on the topic later.

Seven months certainly qualifies as later…and I want to apologize for having taken so long.  If you’re one of my faithful readers, you know that I’ve had other things on my mind…

This week, the new horse and a hose reminded me to revisit the concept of “soaking.” Lest you misunderstand, the water involved has nothing at all to do with the concept of soaking.  That’s just a coincidence.

I first came across the word “soak” in Roger and Joanna Day’s book The Fearless Horse, and when I did, I stopped saying things like, “Let it sink in” or “Give her a minute or two.”  It was interesting to hear Buck Brannaman use the same word and employ the same concept.

Rather than speak of it in the abstract, let me share with you how soaking helped me bathe the new horse.  As I’ve mentioned before, he’s one of the bravest horses I’ve ever met, but he’s afraid of being sprayed with water. My guess is that at some point in the past, the water was too cold, he was scolded or punished in the process, or he didn’t have time to figure out what was happening and became overwhelmed.

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Please don’t call it horse ballet

09 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by Katie in Language

≈ 18 Comments

Ever since Ned Martel first described dressage as “a rarefied, ritualized sport often referred to as ‘horse ballet'” in a profile of Ann Romney, the unfortunate analogy has spread.  Contrary to Mr. Martel’s assertion, dressage is not often referred to as horse ballet.  At least until recently.

Now it doesn’t just refer to upper level dressage or freestyles or Cavalia, it refers to any rider asking any horse to do anything under saddle.

Let’s stop.  Everyone.  Please.  Spare me from ever again reading a line like this about a novice rider and her horse: “She uses pressure from her legs, hips and minimal movements of the reins…making him trot and prance and step exactly where she tells him to.”  Prance?  See where this is leading?

Call it riding.  Call it flatwork.  Call it dressage if you must.  But don’t call it horse ballet.  When a horse leg yields under a novice rider it has absolutely no relationship to this:

Nikolai Fadeyechev of the Bolshoi Ballet, Swan Lake, January 1, 1956

It would be nice if it were otherwise — not just for journalists like Ned, but also for everyone who ever sits on a horse.  Unfortunately, it’s not otherwise. Dressage is not horse ballet, any more than your two-year-old running around the kitchen is “toddler steeplechasing.”

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The three bears of tempo

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Training

≈ 2 Comments

Remember Goldilocks and the three bears?

Porridge wasn’t the only issue.  There was also the chairs.  And the beds.  It was hard to get it right.  Too hot, too cold.  Too big, too small.  Too hard, too soft.  Burn your mouth or bruise your behind or strain your back until you find the one that’s just right.

Kind of like tempo.

Tempo is tricky.  It’s not that it’s a particularly complicated concept to understand, but it’s a word that’s often misused.  Transport it over the ocean, and the waters get even more muddied.

The USDF defines tempo as the “rate of repetition of the rhythm, the strides or of the emphasized beats — beats per minute, as may be measured by a metronome.”   Okay, that sounds relatively simple now, doesn’t it?  However…

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Learning and knowing

17 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I’ve been working on the accounting for my horse businesses this week, while my search for a new saddle continues, which makes me think of the Lyle Lovett song, “Which Way Does That Old Pony Run?”

It’s hard to understand what he and John Hiatt are talking about before they start strumming, but that’s okay by me (and I hope, by you too).

It’s also hard to be sure what story Lyle Lovett is singing, and about whom.  I think it’s not our narrator, it’s someone else, who’s still learning, who’s asking about the pony and the saddle and the gun.  And Lyle’s answer, who has gone beyond learning to knowing, is “What’s riches to you, just ain’t riches to me.” Let me know if you agree…or if you hear something different.  Lyle’s not talking.  He told Bob Edwards on public radio in 2001 that in this song, “the main focus was usage…was really just the language.”  Which makes me wonder who asked him which way that old pony went…or whether it’s just poetry.

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Liked any good Facebook posts lately?

16 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Katie in Language, Training, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

The question used to be, “Read any good books lately?”

To my mind, it was a far better question.

While educators now acknowledge that reading isn’t everything, and it’s universally acknowledged that people learn in different ways (visually, verbally and through experimentation), employing youtube or Facebook as a font of knowledge is an unfortunate trend in today’s equestrian world.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) said, “The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”

I wish we could say the same about youtube or Facebook.  But videoclips and micro-thoughts posted on microblogs simply don’t do it.  Nor can they.  Nor are they expected to….one would think.

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