A system is alright as long as it is all right...

Sitting in the car on our way home my travel companion and I tried to sum up all we'd experienced during the ISES conference.

The theme for this years conference was safety and horse welfare. It was quite obvious that hyperflexion (including LDR), cranked nosebands, swishing tail and other signs of detrimental riding upset the majority of attendees.

On Sunday we were all exposed to the official system of horse and rider training in Sweden and being swede in the audience that day made me wanna seek asylum in what ever country that had accepted my application. There were sounds of astonished disbelief on more than one occasion.

My intent is not to accuse the teacher/trainer, rider or horse - they were all well educated according to our present system. It is the system that fails.

In our system we seem to have inherited procedures that we upon a straight question really don't know why we do as we do.

Why do lungeing of the young horse require two persons, one holding the horse one the whip. The answer started with - I think it's because we have a tradition if showing our horses with the help of a separate whip carrier. Her answer remindes me of the story of a woman copping off both ends of the christmas steak and at one time her mother saw what she did and asked her why she did it. -Well, you used to do it, the daughter answered. -But that was because my pot often was too small.

One question was regarding the saddle used on the present horse, it was noticeably bad fitting. The answer stated "It's a tradition to use bad saddles". I do think that she ment that we usually use old, cheap saddles not bad in the sence ill fitting - but at that time the audience was prone to take her answer literally.

The education process of the rider showed discrepancies between the wordings and the action on several occasions, and what was said was more in line with good riding than the actual riding.

On a straight question of why the horse seemed to resist the work by opening its mouth and swish its tail it was explained to us that this was how this horse behaved when he was ridden.

Only the day before Andrew McLean urged us not to put any blame on the horse as an individual if it showed signs of conflict behaviour, the behaviour was a result of the training and not its personality...

So, what do I feel is necessary for thing to improve?
Well, first of all I wish them a good horsemanship trainer to teach them how to walk their feet forwards when lunging, so that they stop dragging the horse towards them as they want him to trail outwards. I want them to stop the use of a separate whip carrier. The pair we saw were not syncronised at all, as the whip carrier tried to engage the horse the one in front janked on the horses head.

In riding it is essential to introduce them to the concept of neck extension and to stop the use of draw-reins. Then I'd go for some lessons in non-doing because lightness is not something you get by doing, it is given to you by allowing.