Dressage rules, anti-rules, and magical tools
Paul Blezik, as usual, has his own particular view on the controversial issue of nosebands.
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Every time I go to a horse competition, I feel sorry for the technical delegates and ring officials.
They are expected to be the figures who enforce the changing and often contradictory rules issued by vague committees.
These rules seem more like emotional reactions to various riding problems than precise guidelines.
The necessary accuracy that should inform these rules is often weak.
Moreover, there are rarely follow-up summaries with evidence showing that a rule had a positive or negative effect on its intended purpose.
I want to address a relatively new rule about loosening horses' nosebands.
The officials invented a magic device: a plastic contraption that is supposed to fit between a horse's noseband and its nose and ensure that all horses must be ridden with a loose noseband, or else be eliminated.
Two points immediately came to mind.
One is that if this rule does not change in the next two or three years, you will see a significant increase in tongue and mouth problems.
Second, how many members of this same committee themselves, or someone they know, use a dentist-prescribed mouth guard?
These mouth guards are very effective.
They are often known as stabilization splints.
Some are soft and some are hard, and by keeping the jaw still, they relax the jaw muscles.
They can reduce headaches, treat TMJ disorders, reduce jaw pain, and protect teeth from wear caused by severe bruxism.
They often place the jaw in a more natural and comfortable position.
How could this science not at least have been considered in part of the new noseband rule?
How could this issue not have been raised in the required accuracy for the original proposed rule, and whether this kind of science might have anything to do with horses and their contact?
Some studies have been done on the possible negative effects of tight nosebands, but it is difficult to tell who commissioned these studies.
These studies are explicitly flawed and even freely state that the magic device is based on the myth that there should be two fingers between the noseband and the horse's nose, the source of which none of these studies has been able to find.
As far as I have been able to determine, no one has conducted studies on the positive effects of tighter nosebands, and like human stabilization splints, their relationship to open mouths, tongue problems, or TMJ issues has not been examined.
One of the studies actually showed that loose nosebands can contribute to greater bit friction in a horse's mouth.
I have trained horses for 50 years.
I feel that my opinion is more than just a personal one, because throughout all this time I have used the same system.
Bridles with a cavesson and flash, snaffle bits are placed correctly in the horse's mouth, with a padded lunge cavesson on top, so that the first initial contact is not with the bit at all, but with the rings of the lunge cavesson.
A young horse with full lunging equipment.
Photo: Karl Leck a three-year-old horse in the first days of using lunging equipment.
This horse gradually becomes accustomed to a correctly adjusted, pressure-free bit, and is guided only by the soft lunging headpiece.
Photo: Rose Caslar Belasik Most horses are accustomed to accepting the bridle through a precise program of lunging using side reins.
This method removes the instability of the rider’s hands and weight and gives horses immediate feedback if they place their head and neck in the wrong position.
In this way, the bridle becomes a tool for maintaining balance rather than an instrument of pressure, just as in a dark room we adjust our balance only by touching a chair.
We do not lean on the chair, and we do not intend for the horse to lean on the side reins either.
The ultimate goal is to teach the horse to shift its balance more toward the hindquarters.
A three-year-old horse two weeks after the start of training.
The side reins are now attached and the contact process has begun.
Photo: PA Riding Academy A three-year-old horse six weeks after the start of training.
The side reins have begun to shape the neck.
Here it is very important that the noseband keep the mouth quiet, especially if the horse is more inclined to use its mouth.
The horse learns to accept the contact with a closed mouth.
If the noseband is too loose, it may encourage the horse to open the jaw instead of showing flexibility in the neck area or to use the tongue muscles to push the bridle, which can lead to very difficult problems.
Photo: PA Riding Academy There has always been a small percentage of horses that are more inclined to use their mouths and may grind their teeth or try to move the bridle around too much with their tongues.
In these cases, it was important to tighten the noseband so the jaw would relax, not to the point of applying too much pressure, but enough to stabilize the jaw and actually allow it to relax.
Over time, the horse became accustomed to accepting a correctly adjusted bridle.
There was no problem with the tongue, and the teeth grinding also stopped, sometimes within a few months and sometimes a little longer.
What matters is that the horses showed no signs of stress.
As a side note, I am not sure that teeth grinding was unrelated to the natural teething patterns of young horses, since all these horses were three and four years old.
But in any case, they continued to accept natural contact with the bridle.
I must say in capital letters that riding with wrong hands can render the best preparation ineffective.
Looking back, I am sure that what I was doing was using noseband settings like modern splints to calm excessive activity of the mouth, jaw, and tongue.
In many horses, a snug, well-padded noseband with a quality flash attachment is by no means cruel, just as a night guard for humans is not cruel.
In fact, these rules can be beneficial.
This is where I feel legislators should be careful not to enact laws that are reactions born of emotion or defensive mechanisms against unreasonable political pressures and are not based on good evidence.
That is what I meant by carefulness and thorough research.
Enacting laws that have been hastily invented and need changing not only adds to confusion, but also leads to distrust of lawmakers.
Riders may ask how many rules are the result of baseless prejudice or poor instruction.
In reality, there is no magical length of a whip that, after a certain number of centimeters, becomes a tool for abuse.
or the magical adjustment of a noseband that would remove the hands of abusers.
In my opinion, in most cases, trainers do not intend to abuse horses.
They love horses and riding and try to solve problems, not create them.
We need to focus less on equipment and more on the causes of abuse: lack of education and the wrong incentives that justify or even encourage bad riding.
The next time you are at a horse show and see someone riding well, if coordination or courtesy catches your attention, say something to that rider.
Do not wait for the judge’s approval or disapproval.
Riders will respond to this praise.
This helps encourage riders that the judge’s opinion is not the only thing that matters.
I think people have more power than they know in determining the direction of dressage.
This is the result of the classical lunging program used to introduce contact.
Here is a horse that has been under saddle for a few months and, after the initial start in our lunging program, is ridden in a way that is familiar to him and that he accepts comfortably.
Photo: Paul Belasik Source: The Horse Magazine