The rider's hand the primary aid?

I have previously written about the rider's hand as the primary aid in classical riding. Here I have quoted the master horseman de la Guérinière .

But is the hand the primary aid? Is not my mind the primary aid to communicate with my horse? Riding and handling horses works so much better when I'm present in the moment and use visualisation to present myself to my horse. Body language, and my seat when I'm sitting on my horse, are also very useful tools.

But there are two prerequisites needed for the horse to be able to respond to light and subtle aids from my seat when I ride.

1) I need the horse's attention.
2) The horse needs to be in self-carriage

I have time and again witnessed riders who claim they don't ride with the hand. They say they use their seat to communicate with the horse instead. Interestingly enough, these riders very often also use either cranked nose bands pulled tight so the horse cannot open its mouth when the rider pulls, or they use sharp curb bits. If the hand is not the primary aid, why do they use a bridle at all?

There are of course some who ride their horses without anything on their heads, for instance Pignon from France. I saw him in a performance in Sweden a few years ago. Very impressive.

What I find really interesting is that he trains all his horses with bridle and saddle. But always with the goal of removing them. According to Pignon, the most difficult piece of equipment to remove is the bridle.

So what is so special about the bit, bridle and the horse's mouth and head?

First of all, the horse's head is attached to its neck. Obviously. But think about this for a minute. The horse's neck is like a rudder, or a balancing pole. By influencing the horse’s neck I can control the horse even when I don't have its attention. This is why western riders use what they call a “one-rein-stop”, or if I elevate the neck I cause the horse to stop.

This is my first argument for why the hand is the primary aid.

That the hand is the primary aid does not mean that the horse or the rider should hang on to or pull on the other. The contact between the rider's hand and the horse's mouth should be only the weight of the rein, that is approximately 400 g.

My other argument for why the hand is the primary aid is that the bit placed in the horse's mouth will give the educated rider a very effective tool to influence the horse's posture. I don't think this can be replaced with either body language or visualisation.

According to Philippe Karl the hand is a very important part of classical riding:

”Anthropologists accept that during his evolution, man had developed his brain in synergy with the morphological evolution of his hand (all of this related to standing upright). Without this intelligent hand he would not have invented, written, drawn, painted, sculpted, produced music... or developed equestrian art. Any training approach that only gives the hand a subordinate role will be forced to use coercive and vulgar solutions. It becomes sidetracked and leads to cultural regression.” (Twisted Truths of Modern Dressage, 2008, page 73)

What do you think?

Thanks to Mark Stanton of Natural Horsemanship Magazine for proof reading!