So I just got back from Equine Extravaganza in Raleigh, NC, where I totally scored pink schooling tights, met awesome eventing dude Steuart Pittman, and
visited some fellow volunteers at the USERL booth. But I also saw probably the worst example of horsemanship I have ever seen in my life--and it was in a
clinic that was supposed to exemplify professional horsemanship.
EE holds a trainer challenge every year, kind of the like the Road to the Horse thing, where three trainers are each given an unbroken colt that they are supposed to start under saddle within three daily one-our sessions. So my friend and I go into the arena this morning to watch today's session, which is their second. The trainers are Brock Griffith, Gilbert Gonzales, and Phil Rogers. Each has a gangly drafty-looking young horse in a round pen. Gilbert and Phil are actually doing pretty well--I mean yes, they're up to their eyeballs in unnecessary yacht rope, but Phil is working on effective ways to teach forward movement and Gilbert is properly long-lining his colt.
And then there's Brock. He's been assigned a colt that looks like a Clydesdale/TB cross and has a wide white blaze. Julie Goodnight, who is doing the commentary, notes that "horses with lots of white on their face tend to be slow learners." My respect for her automatically plummets. Anyway, Brock starts out trying to longe the colt. Except every time the colt starts going nicely, trotting in a balanced circle, Brock totally spazzes out, popping the end of the longe line on the colt's butt and jerking on his face (thus leaving the poor horse absolutely no chance to successfully figure out the difference between "run like hell!" and "whoa, damnit!") Julie hands brock the microphone at one point and he explains that this horse is very nervous and spooky, and he's trying to desensitize it. Um, dude, the horse is not nervous. He's trotting like a good boy and wondering what the fuck is going on. Meanwhile, you're doing your damnedest to MAKE him nervous and spooky, effectively showing him that, as far as training is concerned, there is no safe place.
Things progress and the saint of a Clyde colt puts up with Brock's saddling antics, which consist largely of forcefully flinging a 30-pound stock saddle onto the horse and then slinging it back off again. Now, I understand that young horses should be taught to stand politely no matter what's going on in the saddling process. But that process is tremendously helped along by a few soft, slow, quiet first saddling experiences--there is no need to throttle the colt with the saddle the first time out. Then Brock proceeds with the Being Mounted Is Painful And Annoying lesson, going straight to standing in one stirrup and bouncing vigorously up and down--no gradual easing of weight, no balancing of weight, etc. Before the session ends, he manages to ruin what would've been a quiet first ride by jerking and spurring (freaking ROWELS on the unbroke colt) the horse into a corner.
Miraculously, roughly 1/3 of the audience voted for him. My guess is that he planned it that way, by provoking an otherwise stable colt into hysterics and then appearing, to Joe Public's eye, to tough it out like a "real good trainer," even though he was the only cause of the hysterics to begin with. And of course, after the clinic, his booth was swarmed with people wanting to buy ropes and sticks and DVDs and shit. I feel sorry for all of their horses.
EE holds a trainer challenge every year, kind of the like the Road to the Horse thing, where three trainers are each given an unbroken colt that they are supposed to start under saddle within three daily one-our sessions. So my friend and I go into the arena this morning to watch today's session, which is their second. The trainers are Brock Griffith, Gilbert Gonzales, and Phil Rogers. Each has a gangly drafty-looking young horse in a round pen. Gilbert and Phil are actually doing pretty well--I mean yes, they're up to their eyeballs in unnecessary yacht rope, but Phil is working on effective ways to teach forward movement and Gilbert is properly long-lining his colt.
And then there's Brock. He's been assigned a colt that looks like a Clydesdale/TB cross and has a wide white blaze. Julie Goodnight, who is doing the commentary, notes that "horses with lots of white on their face tend to be slow learners." My respect for her automatically plummets. Anyway, Brock starts out trying to longe the colt. Except every time the colt starts going nicely, trotting in a balanced circle, Brock totally spazzes out, popping the end of the longe line on the colt's butt and jerking on his face (thus leaving the poor horse absolutely no chance to successfully figure out the difference between "run like hell!" and "whoa, damnit!") Julie hands brock the microphone at one point and he explains that this horse is very nervous and spooky, and he's trying to desensitize it. Um, dude, the horse is not nervous. He's trotting like a good boy and wondering what the fuck is going on. Meanwhile, you're doing your damnedest to MAKE him nervous and spooky, effectively showing him that, as far as training is concerned, there is no safe place.
Things progress and the saint of a Clyde colt puts up with Brock's saddling antics, which consist largely of forcefully flinging a 30-pound stock saddle onto the horse and then slinging it back off again. Now, I understand that young horses should be taught to stand politely no matter what's going on in the saddling process. But that process is tremendously helped along by a few soft, slow, quiet first saddling experiences--there is no need to throttle the colt with the saddle the first time out. Then Brock proceeds with the Being Mounted Is Painful And Annoying lesson, going straight to standing in one stirrup and bouncing vigorously up and down--no gradual easing of weight, no balancing of weight, etc. Before the session ends, he manages to ruin what would've been a quiet first ride by jerking and spurring (freaking ROWELS on the unbroke colt) the horse into a corner.
Miraculously, roughly 1/3 of the audience voted for him. My guess is that he planned it that way, by provoking an otherwise stable colt into hysterics and then appearing, to Joe Public's eye, to tough it out like a "real good trainer," even though he was the only cause of the hysterics to begin with. And of course, after the clinic, his booth was swarmed with people wanting to buy ropes and sticks and DVDs and shit. I feel sorry for all of their horses.
