Oops! Mark Todd cruelty

[Bluey]

@Djones

@McGurk we’re on the same page.

The video captures poor horsemanship. We are seeing a snippet of one ride on one day.

We each fill in the rest of the story.

Mine is along the lines of MT patiently asking and coaching and asking and coaching and time and again the rider isn’t applying the teaching and instead is coasting along. Maybe MT gets frustrated at the lack of effort and in a bad moment moves to create some energy to get that horse FORWARD. I bet in the moment he was not happy with himself for doing that, maybe later he took the coach aside and had a word about their training. We don’t know.

I don’t “support” or “agree with” what happened. I understand it.

20 years or so ago I witnessed Ray Hunt repeatedly drill a horse (never laid a thing on him, this was flagging him only) until the gelding knocked his rider unconscious. She fell off on rock hard ground and separated her shoulder, IIRC. Scary scene, unnecessary, really bad. No one said anything…I think it was shock and awe in terms of what is even happening here? He saw a soured gelding and got it in his mind that he would cross the puddle by God…and he did…and he wanted more.

It’s not “right” what MT did. But humans are human and we all on occasion get ourselves in a pickle. If we’re lucky and smart we learn from it and work to do better. Some lessons come harder than others. Life is funny that way.

When Ray Hunt started, our local college equestrian director was a personal friend of his and organized a two day clinic in their indoor and asked everyone here to come support this new clinician trainer just hitting the road, his first year.

Several of us made time to go and sat thru his less than effective try for two hours to start a gentle halterbroke four year old under saddle, RH never could get colt to quit bucking once saddled.
After lunch RH started giving a mounted lesson to a handful of mixed riders, some on colts, some on horses with problems.
Things were rather hectic and disorganized.
Listening to RH answers about leads, we started thinking he didn’t even really know what those were, much less how to get a colt on the right one.

This one cowboy was on a three year old quiet filly with a big bosal hackamore and he said she would not back.
RH told him to take a firm hold ( on a hackamore no less) and ran at the filly, arms windmilling!
Filly sold out sideways.
Cowboy finally got her stopped in a corner, where she could not have backed up anyway, and here comes RH, again running at her and windmilling arms, filly didn’t even let him get close this time, bailed out of the corner.
After that she was so spooked RH could not get within half an arena from her.
RH then told the cowboy she was not ready yet to back off, ride her some more first???
Most of us left after that.

Back to here, it is still hard to believe that a trainer that never had any questions about his training would pull something like this, is puzzling, doesn’t make sense?

[endlessclimb]

@Jealoushe

I don’t understand why you’re coming after me…oh wait actually I do.

I’m not “going after you”. You’re simply put not that important to me. Again, stop preening. You’re not even reading what people are posting before declaring yourself superior.

[Mander]

@endlessclimb

What does it take to get people to be more educated on pressure and release? This is a problem both with the overly timid rider who will never apply pressure, and the overly aggressive rider who will never take the pressure off.

I think this is a twofold thing.

Firstly, in the same sense we require the best horses to have a “good brain”, we also need riders who have a “good brain”. Individuals who are easily discouraged, easily frustrated, or some combination of the two are probably not cut out to train horses (or any animal, for that matter). Just as I have found rearing to frequently be a response to frustration in horses, I find the human equivalent to be anger, and it is usually a very small step from anger to violence. Even smaller when you’re picking on someone who can’t/won’t fight back. Until we have certifications or some way to hold trainers accountable, I’m not sure what we can really do to combat this other than take our money elsewhere.

Secondly, I think it’s an education thing. People who know better try to do better, but sometimes we fail at showing people how and giving them a new framework to approach problems with. I know I grew up thinking the way to train a dog was with a choke chain and ecollar. That’s all I knew, and no one ever had shown me a different way. And even when I learned about training with treats, there was still some dissonance - “Ok Sally, you showed me that you can teach Fido to sit using treats, but how do you teach him to stop jumping on the counter? or distance work where I can’t immediately reward?” It took a lot of learning for me to realize that complex behaviors can be reliably trained using R+, and even more learning to get used to the new mindset of problem solving and applying it in a variety of new situations on my own. Without proof that it can be done and solidifying this new training framework, when riders/trainers run out of tools in their new “training bag of tricks” they’ll revert to old methods.

I think the second one is where the horse world is struggling. Although R+ training is starting to take hold, a lot of it is heavily associated with liberty work, not competitive disciplines. So again, it’s the Fido situation - “That’s nice that you can train your horse to canter a circle around you without any tack, but how in the hell am I supposed to apply that to running XC? or a show jumping course? or dressage? etc.” The skills and training methods ARE applicable, but it’s not immediately obvious to someone who only knows how to ask nicely, then firmly, then harder, then attempt to force the horse to do something.

And then, of course, many basic tools riders use (and in fact, competitions can require!) can be easily abused in a moment of frustration - bits, nosebands, crops, spurs, etc. One of the ways I helped break myself of reverting to aversive training with my dog was to work without a collar/leash. If I ever created too much pressure for him, he only had to walk away. Over time, I was able to get a much better sense of his mental state from his body language and could back down before it ever got to the point he felt like he needed to walk away. But it’s not as easy to give the horse an obvious way (obvious to the rider, that is) to “walk away” when you’re sitting on their back. These are some of the things the horse world is going to have to conquer in order to continue progressing towards better training methods.

[Bluey]

@Posting_Trot

Horses (most horses, anyway) are very stoic. When I looked at the longer video, what I saw was a gray horse that was trying really hard to do what was being asked of him, even though it obviously scared him at least a little bit. And he kept trying hard even as he was thrashed repeatedly with the branch by MT. The fact that the horse doesn’t just nail MT or buck his rider off in that moment is evidence of both his stoicism and his essentially good temper, both of which MT was taking advantage of.

Two other horses in the background of the video clearly react to the prolonged thrashing–they were alarmed.

I do understand the rider’s timidity in the moment, and I think the comments about Sociology 101 and 102 are spot on.

ETA: I just looked at the video again with the sound on. Two things jumped out at me. One is that the horse in question is a mare; mares don’t forget this kind of treatment, and I suspect the rider has been dealing with the longer term fallout for the past couple of years every time she gets on the horse.
The second is that, just before MT closes on the horse to administer the thrashing, he says “Hold her there.” I know that he’s saying don’t let the horse turn away from the bank, but he’s also effectively commanding the rider to be complicit.
The whole thing is really just a sorry example of pseudo-horsemanship.

Right, the whole doesn’t make sense, much less in a clinic?

[endlessclimb]

I love your post, thanks.

So then, maybe instead of going up to someone in a brash manner when they’re beating their horse off a bank (no matter how much you want to!), a softer approach may be needed.

“Hey, I see you’re struggling. Do you mind if I give you some pointers?”

This becomes WAY more complicated if there is a trainer present that is condoning the behavior, or the person spanking the horse is a “trainer” themselves.

If the soft approach doesn’t work, you could try and flatly say “well, you don’t need to beat that horse and I’m not sure why you want to”. Boy, that’s a toughie though.

[endlessclimb]

For the record, I was not imagining it:

@Jealoushe

I wouldn’t say he was beating the horse. It was too much whip for sure but beating? I have to watch the video again but I don’t remember it being a beating.

People can grow and change though. I believe no horse would carry this man around so many events in top class form if they didn’t like the guy.

@Jealoushe

I follow his insta, he absolutely loves and cares for his horses. He is in the barn all the time just cuddling and loving on the horses.

He apologized for the whip incident and said he would do better. I think his aggressive XC riding can be seen as over competitiveness but his horses perform at the top over and over. That doesn’t happen if you don’t have good horsemanship.

I used to be his biggest hater but then I actually met him and learned a few things and my opinion completely changed.

[Mander]

I definitely think a softer approach will have more benefit (again, this behavior is frequently the result of frustration/charged emotions), but you’re right that it can be complicated by trainers present who condone the approach (and very likely taught the rider to train that way in the first place!).

It’s definitely important to diffuse the frustration first though. “Oh man, we’ve all been there. I’m sorry you’re having a rough go with this thing right now.” Now you’re on the rider’s side, and they’ll be more open to what you have to say. Following up with a related experience you had (because we really ALL have been there!), and use that to transition into “I could show you how we worked to get through it”. Now you’ve got a great opportunity to add in some more training tidbits and keep things lighthearted and patient.

Of course, you may run into someone who effectively tells you to go fork yourself. Ultimately you’ve got to respect that, but you can still say “Okay, that’s fine that you don’t want any help, but this is not an appropriate way to train your horse.” Hopefully you have some way to try and enforce that (going to officials or something). Or, if you run into unfortunate situations where officials are not on your side, I guess you could always pull out your phone to video it, which at least temporarily tends to force people to be more cognizant of their behavior.

[sportyspicepony]

@Mander

One of the ways I helped break myself of reverting to aversive training with my dog was to work without a collar/leash. If I ever created too much pressure for him, he only had to walk away. Over time, I was able to get a much better sense of his mental state from his body language and could back down before it ever got to the point he felt like he needed to walk away. But it’s not as easy to give the horse an obvious way (obvious to the rider, that is) to “walk away” when you’re sitting on their back. These are some of the things the horse world is going to have to conquer in order to continue progressing towards better training methods.

This!! It’s crazy how different it is when you get more into dog training, then go back to the horse training world and how insanely different they are. I’m thinking specifically of agility training - there’s just so much less opportunity to force the dog to do anything it doesn’t want to do because you’re not riding it. The focus is much more on making it fun for them, building drive and motivation, and NEVER telling them “no”. I wonder how much happier of equine partners we could have if we approached horse training in a way that’s focused on making it fun for them rather than punishing them for giving the wrong answer to a question they don’t even understand yet.

If more people understood, like REALLY understood, that behavior like this is so deeply ineffective and is not going to get you the results you want, that would probably help.

[Mander]

Yea definitely. Even I have difficulty sometimes transitioning the things I learned training my dog to the horse world. Prey drive, for example, is something that many R+ trainers rely on heavily and use to their advantage, but horses don’t have prey drive - you can’t exactly toss a toy over a fence and use the horse’s natural excitement to get them to jump it

There’s also the added complication that excited horses having fun have a tendency to buck and get up to all sorts of silly shenanigans that we don’t want to experience under saddle it creates an element of danger that isn’t really there with dogs.

[sportyspicepony]

Yeah I mean obviously there are a lot of fundamental differences between the two but there also aren’t. It’s all just teaching the animal a desired behavior with a cue! Now all of that is easier said than done, but all the more reason why we desperately need pros who are doing this type of training visibly and publicly and more people need to be educated on why ridiculous abusive tactics (like beating a horse with a tree branch) are ineffective.

[candyappy]

Looks like the horse is willing where the bank isn’t so steep. I fault the rider as well for allowing her horse to be beaten while she was mounted.

I was hoping the horse would hit the man double barrel and dump the rider. The fact that the horse reacted fairly sane during the whipping shows that it is more than likely a good minded horse and deserves a better trainer and rider.

Makes me wonder what happens when nobody is watching.

[ltmac]

I was in a clinic recently with an English big name rider who did something similar to another rider’s horse who was hesitantly dropping off the bank into water. He told a story from his youth about cross country schooling with a cowboy who brought a Winchester and a bullwhip to enforce the “full-send” aspect of getting the horse in front of the leg and moving forward through the various cross country elements (water, banks, ditches, etc). “These horses are spoiled by inconsistency,” he said, “my job is to help you learn small but consistent habits.” He used a dressage-length whip and then had the rider carry it afterwards. The horse never had a problem after that one time lesson and the horse & rider had a fantastic remainder of their ride that day, markedly better than how they had started. Everyone laughed at the story he told, no one objected to his actions that day. It could have just as easily turned into a situation like this.

[enjoytheride]

So we have everything from the horse is lame, to the horse is a mare and because it is a mare it will remember this forever, to the rider is a horrible rider, it’s the rider’s fault for not advocating (when it appears it was the rider who posted the video), to all this horse needs is a cookie and it’ll go into the water.

We can’t even determine what’s the problem here or how to fix it!

I do think if this is the worst thing you’ve ever seen anyone do to a horse then you’ve been sheltered and you are lucky.

[meupatdoes]

Yeah, you don’t necessarily want a 1200 lb horse experimenting with every creative idea it gets in its head and seeing if you will feed it a treat for that.

[McGurk]

A couple of points:

1.) I think this is a terrific, important, useful thread. We absolutely NEED to be discussing horse welfare, how training is perceived by the non-riding public and what does and does not constitute good training, training by force and abuse. Please, please, let’s not make it personal and keep to the very important topic .

2.) Anyone on this thread who can truly say they have never resorted to training by force, never over-disciplined out of frustration or acted out of temper handling a horse, please stop following/contributing the thread. Even if you exist, this conversation isn’t really about you.

We are all imperfect horsepeople. Some of us have been on a lifelong journey, doing better once we know better, trying to do better by our horses, trying to learn more. I count myself in that group, BUT (here’s a big, fat, hairy BUT…)

I came up riding school horses at backyardigan kinda lesson barns, and then a kinda fancy show barn, and all I was EVER taught was that if a horse didn’t want to do something, it was your job to MAKE them. So I got good at that.

As a teen, I didn’t even realize that not all horses had been trained to jump, and jump courses, and when I encountered a horse that couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t understand what I was asking, I made the horse more frightened of me than jumping the fences, and when the horse jumped around, counted that as a success. So, sadly, did other people.

I was very fortunate that in my late teens, I met an instructor, trainer and mentor that had a system for training that involved small, incremental steps, not scaring the horse, building on what had been trained previously - and a barn full of happy, willing, obedient horses as proof that the method worked.

But even with that example, there were times I resorted to cruder methods and training by force. I am ashamed of that. (I never stood behind a student and whipped their horse over a fence, thank dog. But I certainly overused a stick on a stopper. Absolutely, I did. I can only be grateful there isn’t video. ) The ONLY thing I can hang my reputation on is that I kept learning and I kept trying to do better. If you were to draw a graph of the amount of force I used in training over the years, it would be a straight downward line ending at very close to zero. Because the more you know, and the more tools you have in your toolbox, the less likely you are to resort to force.

So the big question, the useful, productive question in this thread for me is, how the hell did this happen? How did Mark Todd, who has a bigger riding/training toolbox than I could ever dream of, get so frustrated that he resorted to this? And how do we give other, less famous, less successful riders and trainers enough tools so they don’t get to the bottom of their respective tool boxes?

PS - And if you’re still using the force based techniques you learned as a lesson kid years (decades? generations?) ago, stop. Learn and do better.

[ljm824]

I don’t know why MT’s actions are being attributed to frustration or emotion? The video shows that MT went and got a branch, stripped it, and then laid in wait for the horse to come back around multiple times. First shaking the branch, then using it. It wasn’t a split decision. I don’t know that MT was at the bottom of his tool box. I think the concern is that he felt that beating a horse in this manner was part of the toolbox.

[FitzE]

@Posting_Trot

Horses (most horses, anyway) are very stoic. When I looked at the longer video, what I saw was a gray horse that was trying really hard to do what was being asked of him, even though it obviously scared him at least a little bit. And he kept trying hard even as he was thrashed repeatedly with the branch by MT. The fact that the horse doesn’t just nail MT or buck his rider off in that moment is evidence of both his stoicism and his essentially good temper, both of which MT was taking advantage of.

This is exactly what I saw. That horse seemed like such a willing and forgiving soul. I cannot connect the horse’s behaviour to the reaction by MT. I’m still at a loss on that point.

Another factor we might discuss is changing the attitude of both clinician and student that problems will/must be solved over the duration of a single clinic. If riders think a clinic was a failure b/c a problem was not fixed, they will give the clinician bad reviews and that clinician will lose opportunities. If clinicians approach clinics as though the only metric for success is fixing a problem right then and there in front of their audience, they will be more inclined to use extreme measures.

Lots of alternatives to getting that horse down the bank have been presented in this thread. It would be great to build an atmosphere where learning tools, working on problems, and taking first steps towards fixing them = success at clinic for both student and instructor.

Perhaps the insane prices for BNT/BNR clinics is part of the issue as well. If you spend/demand a lot of money, everyone’s expectations and definition of success/getting your money’s worth, will rise until they are almost unachievable over such a short time, which will also create incentives to take things to an extreme (both riding and instructing) that one wouldn’t otherwise.

[Djones]

As I posted earlier, my backstory is this rider and horse combo doing very little that MT is asking them to do. No idea if I’m even close to accurate on that, btw.

Some of y’all are telling yourselves some version of a backstory wherein MT, apropos of absolutely nothing, fearsomely, ruthlessly, cruelly, heartlessly rips a branch from a tree, strips it with fury, then furiously beats and abuses a now terrified mare who shall never forget…into a pond, and somewhere in the middle of it all… a piece of your heart died.

Given his storied history, which seems more likely?

[Knights_Mom]

He was wrong.

It was unnecessary.

It WAS abuse.

He knows this and so, has apologized.

I’m not sure what would be a just punishment for him. Suspension comes to mind.

[eggbutt]

Mark Todd steps down as World Horse Welfare patron after viral video