Just curious if anyone follows MillyDressage on instagram? She is trying to syndicate a horse right now.
I follow her from when she was and still is a student of Mary Wanless.
Seems like a lovely young lady.
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Just checked her out, lovely
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I follow her.
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I really enjoy her riding style.
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I follow her, really appreciate how gentle she is. Beautiful rider!
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It’s interesting, I agree that I think she trains in an ethical way. I’m not sure I like all the “giving” like rapid movements she does with her hands - she also seems to perch a bit. I think biomechanically I have some questions about the training style, I think her training creates a very pretty, ethical looking “picture”/frame, but I think her horse Olaf shows a lot of low back tension and it shows up especially in the pirouettes, which do not look correct to me. I think the new horse is cool but not international level showing cool, and I think it’s bold to make claims like that when you yourself haven’t shown above PSG-level, and not much at that level. I also don’t really understand the syndicate model she is advertising - you can buy in at very small shares, and I’m not sure what benefits you get by being part of the syndicate. It doesn’t seem very transparent.
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It’s the extreme Wanless style. I have done a few clinics with her and finally had to stop. My horse was not responding well to it and my back was killing me.
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My mare wouldn’t cooperate with her either. At ALL
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I’ll take this any day over someone leaning back and using the horses mouth as a leverage device to stay in the saddle.
She will go through her iterations as a rider, but I think she puts the horse first and tries her best to train ethically.
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I do think she tries to train ethically as well. But her horses exhibit a majority of the same “stress behaviors” that people complain about dressage horses exhibiting - the recent video of Olaf, his mouth is incredibly busy anxiously biting the bit, his ears are back almost the entire time, he’s drenched in sweat, his tail is wringing, etc. He also exhibits very exaggerated passage type trot, that I don’t think she’s necessarily asking for. He’s working too hard. And this is the highlight reel.
I’m not positive that her training style is productive to producing upper level dressage show horses…the constant giving and “lightness” you (and others) praise can be counterproductive in that a horse that’s truly connected to the bit and your hands settles into the contact and gains reassurance from it. Constantly giving and fluffing means they don’t settle in that same way into the bridle, and into the riders aids. He is behind the bit and behind her leg, which looks flashy but also anxious and disjointed. You can see it especially in the tempis, which are cut short most likely to remove mistakes but you can still see how unsettled and anxious he gets in those movements.
I’m not saying she is abusive, I just think it’s interesting to see her horses in a show environment and I don’t know that her style of training produces a more happy, settled horse than traditional dressage trainers do.
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Honestly starting a thread about a very young trainer and then keeping it going gives a very unpleasant vibe.
I really enjoy watching her train. She seems very aware of the tension with Olaf and is quite open in the comments when people call out tension. They are living animals and I think the fact that she is navigating taking her techniques from the schooling ring to the show ring is evidence that there’s no single perfect technique that makes an animal a show machine.
It seems like she’s had a lot of success with releasing tension in horses with some trauma and is on her own journey with a few horses capable of the next level. I’ve loosely followed her riding for many years and wish her the best. In a world of high pressure showing I admire that she’s trying to figure out how to do things differently and is open about that non linear journey.
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