The declining state of World Class Dressage in our time
The idea that you can push your horse to perfection has created a frenzy in the Dressage community of our time that is fueling a varying degree of denial in its particpants. Some of us do not see, that what we do to press our horses into molds that we see others doing with ‘success,’ is to some degree, on the spectrum of horse abuse.
We see the rewards of world class recognition and read about how they did it and how they look while doing it and in frustration and much misdirected focus, we strive for the same goals. In that effort we are doing the opposite of what the original and most beautiful harmonious art of Classical Riding is meant to be. Art is beauty. It is not beautiful to force and drill a horse into perfection.
-Elsa Ayala
“Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great fourlegged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite.
“For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten.”
- ALOIS PODHAJSKY
Savior of the Lippizan Stallions in World War II and former Director of the Spanish Riding School
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on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Today, Uncategorized.
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