Dressage WTF

[OrkneyGirl]

I have just been watching Olympic dressage...a poor horse moving its hooves in time to 'Another one bites the dust'...surely this is done for human entertainment only. The horse wouldn't do this naturally. Commentator saying the horse 'clearly loves moving to the beat'. What a load of crap. Years of making the horse move unnaturally. Probably with a stick or whip. AIBU that this sport is about privileged humans dominating a beautiful animal. Makes me so sad...and angry!

@Lacdulancelot everything you said

Only when they are drunk

i've had two cats in my family die in recent months.

One dropped dead in front of me with zero warning. The other i had to have put to sleep to avoid him doing the same thing.

I know which i preferred to have witnessed.

With respect you know nothing about horses or how to train horses.

Sometimes you just have to say what you see. Apologies for not having a couple of acres, an in-depth knowledge of an outdated Olympic sport and a horse before commenting. Jealous? Easy shot. Focus on how you teach a horse to leg-yield to Up Town Girl. What is the point? Honestly!

Not always - some people teach their horses to do them from the ground but there’s no competition for that

Not everything has to have a point.

If you can't communicate properly with your horse using natural aids, without spurs, whips, and excessive hardware, the problem lies with you, not with the horse.

Um you do know that used properly these artificial aids are to refine movement, not to hurt or punish the horse? It takes much less movement of a leg to touch - yes TOUCH - the horse with a blunt spur than to have the same impact as the entire lower leg coming on (sharpened spurs are banned I think in all competitions now). And getting a horses attention back onto e.g. the jump in front of you rather than that interesting thing in the crowd is quick and easy with a LIGHT TAP on the shoulder with a whip.

I have a bad leg due to an accident, so used to hold a whip in my left hand to reinforce that leg. I also used to wear spurs because I couldn't use my left leg strongly enough so by wearing them I could use both legs much lighter in a balanced way.

Which bit is used can be very dependant on the individual horse & what you are doing on that day, and using a double bridle (like is used in higher level competitive dressage) again is more about finessing the signals. On our first family horse we used 3 completely different types of bit depending on what we were doing, including a bitless bridle for some things. With another we could use only rubber covered bits - cost me a fortune as she would chew through them over time, but she would respond much better to them when I needed to put the brakes on!. With the third again I used 2 different bits depending on what I was doing.

I don't keep horses. I'm unsure about whether or not it's best for them to be ridden at all. Can't see why a horse could possibly want it.

I’m quite convinced now that Grand Prix or Olympic level dressage can’t be done without some sort of detriment to the horse. Blue tongues, too tight nose bands, bleeding mouths, almost every horse being behind the vertical at any given moments, horses falling out of their patterns, whatever went on with that horse that hopped on 3 legs, horses being strapped down with much tack as can be fitted on their face.

my eyes have certainly been properly opened - I thought oh rolkur has been banned. You wouldn’t have thought so to look at some of these horses.

You need to read more about how dogs came to be domesticated. They are symbiotic animals which wouldn't exist without humans. Cats too, though not to the same extent as dogs. Completely different from the way livestock were domesticated.

Yes,, a friend's horse went through me to have a go at another horse. I'd gone to catch her in. She trampled me, ripped off about half of my calf. 3 months off work and thank christ it wasn't my head, cos I reckon 700kg applied to my skull would have killed me immediately.

Many of them are kept entirely in stables for large parts of their working lives because they are too valuable to be allowed out in a field like a horse should be in case they hurt themselves. It doesn’t really matter how nice the cage is, that’s no life for a horse.

Up till this year, id have been defending dressage. Possibly thinking "you just don't understand".

But Charlotte dujardin whipping that poor horse has really opened my eyes to the cruelty that is inherent at every level of every horse sport. Even the crap you can see at the olympics - So, so many of the dressage tests which are scoring highly show the riders consistently having the horses behind the vertical - which means their head is bent at such an unnatural angle that it actually causes them physical pain and long lasting health problems. It's banned, but the judges are rewarding this awful cruelty with the highest scores. Plenty of horses being ridden in horrifically harsh tack, their mouths strapped shut with incredibly tight nosebands by riders with very heavy hands and overuse of spurs. Including our own team GB "heroes". Lame horses, bleeding horses, stressed horses.

I love horses, which means that i strongly feel the Olympics should take equestrianism out of it going forward. The FEI and british dressage are not fit for purpose.

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the majority of the dressage haters on here are that way because they think to compete in equestrian sports at a half decent level you need to be loaded, and they are showing serious jealousy.

We weren't, we just spent in different ways. My father was a purchasing office for an engineering firm, my mother didn't work though she did get a small amount from investments. My cousin was national level show jumper, her parents ran a small farm and she worked on that as well as doing her own horses every day. My friend who was international level dressage was second generation in horses, but her mother worked her way up from nothing. Someone I used to compete against years ago had a father who was a car dealer - her daughters are now national level junior riders. Harvey Smith, one of Britain's best showjumpers, came from a family of builders in Yorkshire.

Except a stick or a lunge whip...

Also it’s possible to clicker train horses like you can with dogs. I follow several women on social media who ride their horses out with no tack and seem to really care about their horses well-being. They even allow the horse to tell them when they’ve had enough and don’t want to be ridden anymore.

that approach is really very rare. They’d be derided as pony patters in most horsey circles - they are very skilled horsewomen in my opinion but their skills aren’t valued by the majority of horse riders because the idea of your horse enjoying and willingly participating in your activities to that extent - it’s just not how things are done.

People talking about what great lives these horses have are looking at it through a human lens. The majority are never allowed out into a field in case they hurt themselves. People won't allow their investment to devalue itself. They don't give a shit about what the horse actually needs to be mentally happy.

I would imagine the horse would be perfectly happy living their life in a herd, grazing, as nature intended. They don't actually need fancy supplements, heated stables, horse walkers, high end feed. They're all human inventions to justify treating horses terribly.

@OrkneyGirl You clearly don't realise that leg yield is just about the first lateral move a rider and horse learn and a world a way from the piaff and passage you see in the olympics. Most riding school horses can leg yield.
I think if you don't agree with dressage that's OK, but honestly your sneering attitude, your fixation with the music and your assumption that all horse people are rich idiots puts me off listening to anything you might say.

Yes we all said that In our house too. Should be banned. It's cruel.

One of the riders was banned in the week at the olympics as she was caught hitting the horse with a stick to make it lift its feet and dance like this. You clearly know nothing not us.

Surely, unless you have a magic time machine, we are all speculating about how these animals were domesticated? All we can say is that they were potentially useful to humans (and if they stuck around, there must have been some advantage to them. Free meals, protection from predators for example.)

Symbiotic is not the same thing as selectively bred. There are many communities of feral ‘domestic’ animals that are not dependent on humans. Although often persecuted by them.

If you watch footage of dressage from previous generations, you will see a vast difference to what is considered high level performance today. It's a shame that the sport has changed so much. Watch clips from 25+ years ago. If dressage is to survive, riders need to take a step back and learn something from those riders. Someone on the Tack Room recently posted some videos of Reiner Klimke. Comparing his riding to contemporary dressage is like night and day.

I have never been a top competitive rider (to say the least) but I began riding as a pony-mad 10-year-old. I've never used spurs, whips, or anything like that. Never have, never will. No one will ever convince me that aversive methods are appropriate. Force-free, positive training techniques are the only ones I will ever use.

Judges need to stop awarding the highest points to riders who train like that. You don’t get sponsors if you don’t win - to win you have to ride like that. If it’s your whole career maybe you’ll lose sight of horse welfare which is the most important thing in all this, but so has everyone else involved in top level dressage so nobody notices it or they just excuse it

Just like I see my neighbour's Standardbred race horse pacing (the gait used by Standardbred's only during racing) entirely of his own choice when he's put out into his field in the morning! He does it several times a day.