Dressage: The art of conflict?
Written by Hiddenhorse on 27/11/2009 – 11:54 am -Sorry for not posting anything recently I’ve been away, studying, – and this might surprise you, the world of dressage. For those of you that are natural horse-keeping enthusiasts you may think that dressage is about as far away doing things based on a natural model as it was possible to get, and you’d be right, certainly from a utility model and competition perspective; if you were to imagine a scale with natural horse-keeping and natural horsemanship principles at one end, where the horse is respected first and foremost as a horse then it would not be unreasonable to put dressage which is all too often about submission and compliance of the horse, as close to the opposite end of the scale as it was possible to get.
But, as my researches have shown me, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact it shouldn’t be that way but somehow, (especially when money becomes involved, and there is a lot of money involved), people stop basing their behavior on principles, such as the classical riding principles usually cited as one of the major roots of modern competitive dressage, and instead they base their behavior on achievement. This means that they abandon the need to understand how to achieve something and replace it with a simplified idea of what works and what doesn’t. In other words they adopt full-on utility model thinking.
During my studies I’ve been struck by the quiet desperation of most dressage riders, of course they want to do well in their discipline but it takes them years to achieve even minor success, -this is because their horses are trained coercively and one of the three reactions to coercion is compliance. Compliance is where the horse learns that in order to survive it can avoid the coercive stimulus by producing the minimal response, because it has no incentive to do anything else. Of course they also become familiar the other two reactions to coercion, that of flight and fight (compliance is really the mental version of flight). Naturally there are a whole range of physical tools to control this behavior, there are always stronger bits, more leather straps, chains, whips, spurs, ‘training aids’, and so on. In other words more coercion
One of the saddest questions I saw asked one of the dressage books was, ‘What should I do when my horse is willfully disobedient’? Well, first of all I would stop humanizing your horse by interpreting it’s behavior as a human vice. Always watch out for this type of nonsense, for example, my horse is greedy, a bully, spiteful, viscous, mare-ish, aggressive, and of course willfully disobedient. This is all anthropomorphism. If a horse was truly willfully disobedient, you would have to accept that horses were capable of many other human vices like plotting and planning revenge, they would have to understand concepts like getting their own back, they would have to also wait for the right moment to strike and defer their revenge until you weren’t looking, as I said absolute rubbish.
The reality of this behavior can only be explained from the natural perspective, and it is simple, the horse is a prey animal and it has been programmed through millions of years of evolution to do the opposite of what a predator wants. It does this to survive. Actually what the horse is showing the human is yet another of the side-effects of coercion, it is called counter-coercion and it is the result you will always get when you attempt to coerce others.
This is why so many dressage riders end up in a fight, a clash of wills or more accurately a clash of instincts, fundamental survival instincts. It is the nature of the prey animal to resist the wishes of the predator, it is the nature of the hunter to control the behavior of the prey animal. This is why dressage is frequently nothing more than the art of managed conflict.
Dressage need not be like this, there are ways that dressage riders can get the all the beauty and flowing majesty of what is the best in dressage and the horse will give that performance freely , – because it wants to. This is not new in fact it is very old thinking, you will find all the great riding masters of history knew this a thousand years ago. Perhaps because at that time they were closer to an understanding of wild horses. Dressage desperately needs a new model, it needs to discard all the training which is based on fear, intimidation and mechanical devices and it needs to start again, it needs people who are willing to discard all the arrogant suppression of the utility and anthropomorphic models and when you strip all that away you are left with something very special you are left with the essential truth that is the horse. This should be the starting point, this is where true and mutual respect comes from and this is where the seed of something quite miraculous will begin to grow. This is the point where natural dressage begins.
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