“When a person shows you who they are . . .”
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The British Horseracing Authority is not pleased.
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I agree. It’s not a cane or a whip, it’s a branch that most likely is more sound than sting. That horse appeared no more “abused” or anxious by the swats than a horse being flagged forward at a Brannaman clinic.
I’m guessing that the horse is not shy of water, but has a dirty stop if not ridden forward. You can see it’s not worried in the water but possibly has a habit of dumping said rider in it.
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another set of eyes on the incident:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=357063253090867&set=a.216037660526761
A lot of stones & glass houses.
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Then that’s the rider’s problem.
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Once again, this DOESN’T EXCUSE the action. However (as I suspected) – sometimes someone with legit problems winds up in a group that is working a bit beyond their and their horse’s capabilities, and they take over the session w/other riders that have paid $$$$ to work with the clinician. Perhaps this should be a separate topic. Is this response abusive? Yes. Is it poor judgement? Also yes. And this also isn’t comparable – I don’t think – to the show jumpers listed who were trying to tweak their own rides for their own personal glory/$$. Perhaps it is the clinic organizer’s fault who snuck a lower level rider in. Hard to say. I just don’t think this is remotely comparable to many of the other situations that have bubbled to the top recently. It still isn’t right --but it isn’t the same.
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I’ve seen a BNT use a lunge whip teaching a clinic with a ridden horse at a ditch.
and I’ve seen a clinician get on a horse that wouldn’t do a simple drop down into water by calmly walking up to the bank edge and giving the reins so the horse could drop their head, then applying his legs on both sides to hold the horse in place with small steps sideways and while in place, no backward motion was allowed, while also lightly urging it forward. the horse waffled for awhile then quietly slipped down into the water of it’s own accord.
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My sense of this clinic is that grey horse/pony was not terribly compliant for much of the time, and owner was a bit timid. Those situations are often fraught. She had a stick…
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Yep.
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This is sad and the fact that anyone would defend it is sad. It’s sad for the horses, if anyone deems this an acceptable training technique. Don’t we all reference that a horse can feel a fly land in its skin? The horse is beat repeatedly, you can hear the sound, and see the horse’s reaction to the beating. I don’t even think he was beating the horse with emotion, it was simply an acceptable training choice to him at the time. Sadly, in that moment everyone attending that clinic was given “permission” to use abuse in the future as a training tool.
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Quite frankly I don’t care what the circumstances leading up to this situation were. If Dobbin was giving the horse/clinician THAT hard of a time that they felt that beating with a stick was the only thing left to do, maybe they should have called it a day and revisited scary drop another day. Again I don’t care who you are or how much money you spent to be there - the horse and their well-being comes first, always.
And yes, I realize that I am being an armchair internet trainer right now. However I stand by my opinion that I don’t think that MT’s actions here are ever an appropriate response to a training situation unless somebody’s life or safety is at concern. If we can make excuses for this then what else can we make excuses for.
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This type of “training” surrounding water is always baffling to me. What is the goal here?
I know of a mare who had a stop at every drop to water. She was an extremely educated mare, but she would stop, then go in on the second try.
All sorts of crazy (read: not nice, some was abuse) stuff was tried with her to get her over that first stop. She 100% was not scared of water, there was just this weird stop in her for the drop. Some of the more severe techniques I saw with her were with a big name trainer with a big facebook following (we all know who that is…). This included a lunge whip applied with a lot of force right in front of the water, just like what’s in this video…
The mare ended up having to compete at a lower level because no one, not with snacks and not with whips, could get her over that first stop she had. I wonder if there was a vision thing going on where she couldn’t correctly judge what she was seeing on approach.
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Flame suit zipped up.
I think @djones, @libgrrl and I are of a similar opinion.
I think this video shows bad horsemanship.
I’m shocked a rider/trainer at Mark Todd’s level didn’t have a whole box of techniques or tools to help this horse and rider before resorting to this crude and unsophisticated technique.
But I am hesitant to call it abuse, because abuse is a broad and loaded word. I think abuse should be reserved for deliberate, heinous acts with long term harm to the horse on the order of Andy Kocher’s electric spurs, Devin Ryan’s poling a horse with raw legs, starvation… I think rollkur and tying horses heads up or around also deserve the term abuse.
To be clear, I am not condoning what I saw on the video. But I think we’re setting a dangerous precedent when we say that it’s either ideal training or abuse. There’s a big middle area of less than ideal training that I would not call abuse. Unless you really think this is on the same level as the electric spurs or poling a horse with sored legs?
I also think we greatly underestimate the pressure for clinicians to get things done AT THE CLINIC, perhaps especially if the clinician is a big name. Can you imagine coming home from this clinic and saying “Well, Mark Todd couldn’t get her to jump into the water?” NOT an excuse for bad training, but acknowledging the reality of clinic expectations.
I attended a clinic with KOC once, and she had a complelety underconfident rider and green horse who were stopping at everything. Not dirty stops, just an an unsure horse and a tentative rider. KOC got on the horse and schooled it. No beatings. Classic training technique. Away from any fences, she worked on upward transitions, making sure the horse moved smartly off her leg. She maybe used the stick once or twice during this phase to make her point. Then she reapproached the fences using the same aids grabbing a big fistful or mane to ensure she stayed with the green horse overjump. Lots of pats and praise for the horse when it jumped. Repeat. Returned the horse to the rider and very carefully set her up for sucess for the rest of the day.
A nice display of horsemanship. Also incredibly reckless. I watched and was thinking “No way would I get on a clinic participant’s horse and school it xc, not even if I was at KOC’s skill level. Too much can go wrong, too much liability.”
There should be ways to deal with this kind of a problem at a clinic that are in between using the branch/lunge whip and having the clinician get on the horse.
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I’m glad this thread shows who I would never ever in a million years let even hold my horse.
The horse was absolute terrified. Does there have to be bloody wounds for you think it’s bad?
Seriously, I can not wait for the old guard to age out and new age of kind horsemanship and positive enforcement based training to become the norm. It’s coming and soon it will be the majority of horse people who understand abuse and violence has no place in training.
Disgusting that any posters think this OK. At all.
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Hitting a horse with a tree branch repeatedly because it wont do what you want is in fact, abusive.
Every clinician faces this. Yet not everyone beats the horses who have come to learn from them.
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I think a swat or two is needed at times, but that was overboard. I highly doubt that was a one-off event either.
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I’m not condoning or defending what I saw on the video.
I would not allow a clinician or anyone, regardless of reputation or title, to stand behind my horse and whip it forward if I was unable to get it to go.
I am saying there’s a range of behavior, and one end of the spectrum is good training with positive reinforcement and the other is outright abuse (electric spurs, poling raw legs) and that there’s a lot of behavior that falls somewhere along the spectrum. Defining everything that isn’t good training with positive reinforcement as abuse is dangerous, because it gives the PETA types some high caliber ammunition to use, saying all riding is cruel and unnatural and all horse competition is cruel.
To put it in simplest terms: the video is bad. Electric spurs, poling raw legs, tying heads up, rollkur, etc. are worse. Conflating them all as “abuse” IMO, is less than accurate.
Robbery is bad. Assualt is worse. While both are crimes, they are not equivelent crimes. We recognize levels and degrees of crimes.
I think we should do the same here.
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@McGurk I agree that it’s important to draw a line between “bad horsemanship” and abuse. Perhaps it was Todd’s ego that got in the way, not wanting to have a horse who couldn’t be “fixed” under his watch. I’ve never seen a clinic where there was at least ONE rider who absolutely shouldn’t have been taking lessons at even the lowest level offered by said clinician.
But again, I think most of the posters here, regardless of where they stand, think that this started as a rider rather than a horse problem.
Even on my very dumb, not-great-rider level, being told by a trainer to use my crop WAY before I think I need to, WAY before I think the horse is slowing down can be helpful. The rider didn’t seem to be riding the horse confidently or forward, but rather than directing her to use more stick (in the longer video, she doesn’t seem to be using her crop at all) he just went into tree branch-rattling mode. On a horsemanship level, fixing the rider would seen to be the first priority, rather than just getting the horse over and through.
Absolutely not abuse, and I’m not proud to say this, but I have taken lessons at barns where, when I horse wasn’t willing to go forward, instead of giving me any instructions on how to ride the horse better, the instructor just ran after the horse with a lunge whip. It was just frustrating because the student and horse don’t learn anything with this approach. Needless to say, I did not continue with those lessons.
I’m still not crazy about the whacking with a tree branch, though, which does have an additional sting, versus a real crop.
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Great post @Impractical_Horsewoman
Yes, I have seen another BNT clinician chase a horse and timid rider over fences with a lunge whip.
Not pretty.
And I’m not sure either the horse or rider learned anything that day other than they didn’t much like the clinician. Or perhaps the sport itself,
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Gotcha, I agree with your points but I also disagree that this isn’t abusive.
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