I agree that tying is important, and I’m guilty of enforcing this skill as much as I should’ve with some of the horses that I raised. They all tied and cross-tied, but were never really made to do so for long periods of time (probably the longest was 30-45 minutes). As a result, tying them at one-day shows was never great. They were fine if there was a hay bag in front of them, but would lose patience once the hay was gone.
My current gelding cross-ties very well and seems to love being in the cross-ties of the little shedrow barn where we board. In the summer there’s a ceiling fan above him, in the winter he has the sun shining on his hips at certain times of the day. He’d stand there for hours I’m pretty sure.
As for western pleasure, I swear that class is just a showcase for who can make their horse look the most intimidated and absurd. It’s especially apparent now that there is the working western rail class with horses that actually look like normal horses going around the ring at natural gaits.
My gelding is bred to do western pleasure and he absolutely DOES prefer to jog and lope. I don’t have to do anything horrendous to him to get him to jog nice and easy in a natural two-beat rhythm. He can slow it down pretty seriously and maintain his rhythm too. His lope is like a rocking horse, even when he was running in the pasture this morning before breakfast and bucking and farting, he just moves like a western pleasure horse…flat, sweepy, and “slow-legged”. I tried and tried to turn him into a lower-level dressage horse, but he hates the contact. Getting him in front of my leg and into my hands was a trial, one that ended up with me exhausted, him annoyed, and neither of us having a good time. He will literally drag his nose in the dirt at the walk and jog if I let him, and with zero contact at all, his head and neck float down to level with his withers when loping. Ears up, horse happy, rider happy.
So we do “at home western pleasure” which is literally a pleasure for both of us. Because there is nothing pleasurable about that mess in the show pen. And if you have to inject your horse’s neck with botox to keep it in the preferred frame, I’d say it’s time to do some serious soul-searching.
For the record…we also tried to play “at home cutting horse” the other day with the large flock of Canadian geese in the field. The two geese we’d “cut” from the flock took off flying which brought about an unplanned game of “at home bronc riding” for me. LOL! Still more fun than watching those ridiculous western pleasure horses.
