While we’ve been holidaying over the summer (read: slogging through the heat working horses and trying to make back some of that money we spent competing last year!) a whole load of things have changed in our sport. Most of them are arbitrary changes to things like names of levels which are only going to confuse us for the next 10 years and beyond, but some of them are bigger than that.
 
Try getting your head around this. Four Star used to be the top. That was it. The biggest and the best and there was only a handful of them around the world, one of them down here in the southern hemisphere. Now we’re calling that Five Star. Same heights, same level of difficulty, new name – so your retired Four Star horse just got an upgrade without even having to get out of bed! 
 
However, the World Championships and the Olympics – which are the pinnacle of the sport, right? Well they’re not going to be Five Star but kind of a mix of Five Star and Four Star as far as anyone can decipher. So the crème de la crème, but also not quite.

Spring came early to the valley and the snow started melting. Ancient man leaned against the earth wall of his hut and looked out at the bare patches of ground where he knew that soon the grass would grow. He also knew that soon the wild horses would find their way back to the valley to graze and he was pleased, because even though the winter had been mild he was tired of frozen, salted meat and was looking forward to fresh.
 
Like his father before him he had kept a small number of horses in a wooden corral during the winter. He caught them in the autumn as the leaves were falling, mostly youngsters and mares with foals at foot. During the long, dark days of winter they milked the mares, tying up their deadly hooves with thongs of leather and eventually, when their supply of salted meat ran out, they would eat them. But the past winter had been mild and short and now the snow was melting and there were still four brown horses standing quietly in the yard.  All through the winter he had fed them gathered grains and dried grass until they were used to him, sometimes even calling out as he walked past their enclosure. 

​While the Oliver Townend incident at Badminton Horse Trials 2018 no doubt casts a shadow over him, my attention is on the officials who let it happen with barely a consequence. Through their lack of action, they fail the horses.
 
Social media opens so many doors for our sport. Most of them good. It brings more opportunities for funding and sponsorship support and gives us a chance to showcase the incredibly talented equine and human athletes we have in the sport locally and internationally. What it also brings is a bigger responsibility to uphold horse welfare because the sport is, more than ever before, under a microscope that now belongs to the wider community, not just those within the sport.
 
For those of you who haven’t seen footage of the abovementioned incident you can find a link below to footage of the final part of his Badminton cross-country ride on one of his horses for reference.  His other ride was allegedly treated in the same way with regards to the use of whip and spurs on a tired horse.
 
Here are some key facts regarding the rules that govern our sport…

Whenever we take a clicker and a small bucket of food rewards to a show it seems to generate a certain degree of scepticism and even disdain. We’ve been asked, “What happens when what’s in the bucket runs out?” and “So, I suppose you’ll have to carry that bag of treats around forever.” I’ve really never understood the resistance to positive reinforcement and I think it stems from a lack of understanding. There are several myths surrounding its use and (just like the theory of dominance and submission) those myths need to go the way of the flat earth theory. It’s 2017… We know stuff now!
 
Positive reinforcement is a form of operant conditioning and as such is just one of many tools in the horse trainers tool-kit. Like negative reinforcement, when done well it can be a useful and fundamental part of a horse’s training. When done badly it can cause the horse stress and confusion. Just like negative reinforcement, science can tell us a great deal about the best ways to use positive reinforcement and how to optimise its use.

I feel like half a million people are yelling that eventing is bad, and there are a handful of riders saying it’s not the sport that’s the problem – it’s the individuals in it. But we’re whispering, and we’re not being heard. Every second article you read says we need to change the sport of eventing. We’ve got to make it safer. And I agree wholeheartedly – but I’m not convinced that it is entirely the sport that needs to change, it’s the way the sport is played. You can’t make enough rules to force somebody to think. And no matter how well you train officials – it seems to be impossible to teach them what ACTUALLY constitutes horse welfare, or what produces safer sport. I’m not sure we even have the answers yet.
 
What makes a rider want to pull up when things are not going well, rather than just press on and see what happens? Is it the knowledge of falls before them? Perhaps having experienced a bad fall previously? The knowledge of their horse not being quite fit enough or a lurking injury? Or perhaps they are frightened that an official will accuse them of abuse or dangerous riding. I guarantee you former Event Riders’ Association (ERA) president Francis Whittington’s decision to pull up Easy Target at the huntsman’s close during the cross-country at Badminton Horse Trials in 2014 while in a very competitive position was based on an understanding of his horse and the sport. He was aware that his horse was tiring, and that continuing on a tired horse would increase the risks of falls and injuries. He didn’t do it because he was scared of an official or a rule. He didn’t do it for fun or publicity. He did it through horsemanship and common sense, despite the potential pay cheque, or Olympic berth, had he continued without fault. That was the best piece of horsemanship I’ve seen in a long time.

After several thousand years of domestication it’s inevitable that a certain degree of anthropomorphism has crept in to the relationship that we have with our domesticated animals. And perhaps, like familiarity, anthropomorphism breeds contempt. Or, if not contempt, then at least a certain degree of complacency. After all, when we only ever view animals with our anthropocentric glasses on they seem like lesser versions of ourselves. They can’t talk, they can’t drive cars, they can’t update their Facebook status. But what an anthropocentric perspective fails to acknowledge is that if the boot was on the other foot (or paw) it would be us who were lesser versions of them. How slowly we run. How blind and deaf we are. How badly we fly.

We really like our bitless bridles and use them for many reasons. They can help improve calmness, jumping technique and self carriage. They are great for riders that can’t stop fiddling with the reins and they teach us a great deal about how each individual horse likes to carry his head in order to have the best vision. But mostly we use our bitless bridles because they provide a training task that is different to everyday and because it’s great fun to ride bitless. Read part one of our going bitless articles here. 
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We use our own design of bitless bridle because they are simple, there is no time delay between the release of the aid and the release of the pressure, and it’s very compatible with the aids that we train during groundwork. Basically, our bridle is a cavesson noseband with reins attached to the side. We have always found it to be simple and the transition from bit to bitless is really quite straightforward. You can purchase a Sustainable Equitation Bitless Bridle here.

Lots of people like the idea of riding bitless but are not completely sure where to begin or if it’s worth the time and effort required – not to mention the extra expense of another piece of gear. However, the transition to bitless riding is not only relatively straight forward it is also a great way to enhance your horse’s training and can help develop calmness, improve self carriage and also fine tune jumping technique.
 
We use a bitless bridle on all of our own horses ­– not all of the time, but usually at least once per week. Any training they can do in a traditional bridle; they can also do in a bitless one. So, they will jump, cross country school, do working equitation obstacles, dressage and general fitness work in their bitless bridles.

It’s pretty hard to set out to train an event horse. In reality what you have to do is pick a nice horse and start training. You might end up with an all-rounder, a pony club horse, an event horse, or anything else in between.
 
I believe that regardless of your discipline, you should aim to improve your horse. Improve him physically and nurture him mentally and whether you end up with an Olympian in your chosen discipline or a fabulously safe all-rounder, you’ve done well.

​Karen Pryor’s book, Don’t Shoot the Dog heralded the start of the clicker training revolution. Pryor started out as a trainer of dolphins and whales and her work really drew attention to the possibilities of positive reinforcement. Like most trainers who work with wild or aquatic animals, Pryor is understandably cautious about the use of negative reinforcement – this facet of operant conditioning is rarely appropriate in a zoo or aquarium setting because these trainers work at a distance from their charges. For those of us who have physical contact with the animals that we train (horses, camels, elephants and to a certain extent dogs) negative reinforcement isn’t an option, it’s our bread and butter…